A Traveler’s Companion to the Mazes of Menace

The Roles

There are thirteen roles available to adventurers. Each comes with different starting equipment, different intrinsic abilities gained at various experience levels, and a different quest to complete in the mid-game.

Archeologist. You start with a bullwhip, a pickaxe, a tinning kit, and a touchstone. The pickaxe is the kit’s workhorse: it lets you dig through walls and create your own escape routes from the very first level. The tinning kit lets you preserve corpses for later, and the touchstone is your gem-identification edge: rub a gem on it and the stone shows whether it’s the real thing or worthless glass. Useful for unicorn negotiation and shop pricing. Archeologists are capable and flexible, though a bit fragile in early combat. Alignment: Lawful or Neutral.

Barbarian. You start strong. Literally. A two-handed sword and good starting strength mean you can hack through early monsters with ease. The downside is that two-handed weapons prevent you from using a shield, and Barbarians are not known for their finesse. You do get poison resistance from the start, which saves you from several common early deaths. A straightforward role for players who like straightforward solutions. Alignment: Neutral or Chaotic.

Cave Dweller. You start primitive but tough, with a club, a sling, and a pile of flint stones for it. You gain speed by mid-game and your hit dice are generous. The Cave Dweller’s simplicity is a virtue: fewer tools, fewer things to manage. Alignment: Lawful or Neutral.

Healer. You begin with a stethoscope, four potions of healing and four of extra healing, a wand of sleep, three blessed spellbooks (healing, extra healing, stone-to-flesh, all guaranteed to read), and poison resistance. The stethoscope lets you check a monster’s hit points and your own internal state; the wand of sleep makes Healers a stronger early-game combatant than the medical kit suggests. You’re also immune to sickness, so unknown potions of sickness become a free quaff-test (dip a unicorn horn into them to convert to fruit juice). Alignment: Neutral.

Knight. You start with a saddled pony pet, a +1 long sword, and a +1 lance among your gear. The pony is a decent combatant early on and the basis of your unique trick: jousting from horseback with the lance is devastating when it connects, though the lance is largely useless on foot. Don’t be in a hurry to mount, though: the starting pony has only about 7 HP, a failed mount attempt costs you 10 to 14 HP, and most Knights keep the pony as a fighting pet until it grows up. As a Lawful character with a starting long sword, you also have the best odds in the game at Excalibur. Dip your long sword in a fountain (#dip) at experience level 5+ and Knights get a 1-in-6 chance per dip, far better than the 1-in-30 every other Lawful role faces. Knights follow a code of conduct that imposes alignment penalties for attacking fleeing or helpless monsters, so pick your fights carefully. Knights also have intrinsic jumping, which lets you reposition without spending an attack. Alignment: Lawful.

Monk. You fight best with bare hands and start with no weapon at all. Monks gain martial arts abilities as they level, eventually becoming formidable unarmed combatants. You start with sleep resistance and see invisible, and you should avoid eating meat if you want to maintain your spiritual discipline. Mind what you wear: body armor costs −20 to-hit, a shield disables your martial-arts hit bonus, and metallic helmets, gloves, or boots each add a casting penalty. The starting robe is a cloak (not body armor) and adds a 20-point spellcasting bonus, larger than the Wizard’s own. Keep wearing it. One of the more unusual roles, rewarding for experienced players. Alignment: Any.

Priest. You start with a mace, four potions of holy water, and the ability to intuitively sense whether items are blessed, cursed, or uncursed, so you know on sight whether that cloak you just found is safe to wear. Competent fighters with access to clerical spells. Your first sacrifice gift is guaranteed: Demonbane (now a silver mace), which aligns with your weapon skill, so sacrifice early and often. Refill the holy water stash by dropping water potions on a co-aligned altar and praying: the entire stack blesses at once, so the supply is effectively unlimited. Alignment: Any (matches your god).

Ranger. You start with a bow, a generous supply of arrows, a dagger, and a +2 cloak of displacement (foes swing at a phantom image a step away from the real you), one of the strongest defensive starts in the game. You’re unmatched as an early-game ranged threat. Rangers gain Searching at experience level 1 (XL 1 for short), Stealth at XL 7, and See Invisible at XL 15. Your elven racial option grants sleep resistance at XL 4. Hoard the +2 stack of arrows; they break at roughly 25% per hit while +0s break around 67%. Mulch the cheap stack on the level-1 newts. Alignment: Neutral or Chaotic.

Rogue. The dungeon’s thief: lockpicking and stealthy assassinations. You start with a short sword, six daggers for throwing, leather armor, a lock pick, a sack, and a potion of sickness (toss it at an enemy, or save it to coat any darts, shuriken, or arrows you find. Only missiles can be poisoned.) Your lock pick makes every locked door, chest, and box openable from turn one. You get stealth from the beginning, which lets you walk up to sleeping enemies without waking them, and your backstab ability deals extra damage (+1 to +your level) when you hit a monster that’s fleeing or helpless. Throw daggers rather than stab with them: Rogues get a multishot bonus on thrown daggers (several leave your hand in a single turn), and the backstab modifier applies to throws against fleeing targets too. Stealth and range are the role. Alignment: Chaotic.

Samurai. You start with a katana, which is one of the better one-handed weapons in the game, plus a wakizashi backup and a yumi bow with arrows. Samurai get speed early and have a strong martial kit overall. The katana’s damage output carries you through the early game with ease. The wakizashi is the wrong off-hand: it’s a short sword, while your katana is a long sword, so the two don’t share skill. Drop it for any long sword (the Mines usually provides one) and fight two-weapon (a blade in each hand) for the matched-skill bonus. Alignment: Lawful.

Tourist. You start with a Hawaiian shirt, a credit card, an expensive camera, a truly absurd number of +2 darts, two potions of extra healing, and four scrolls of magic mapping. Tourists have weak combat and a fragile early game (this is the hardest of the standard roles), but the mapping scrolls take the edge off exploration and the darts train ranged skills fast. Most runs lean on a camera-flash blinding of whatever’s closest, follow-up darts from range, and the pet to finish. A good role for players who have ascended before and want a real challenge. Alignment: Neutral.

Valkyrie. The standard recommendation for a first serious attempt. You start with a spear, a small shield, and cold resistance; strong combat stats and good starting equipment do the rest. Mjollnir (+d5/+d24 war hammer that returns when thrown at Strength 25) drops as your sacrifice gift regardless of alignment, and is what you’ll wield by the late game. Alignment: Lawful or Neutral. Female only.

Wizard. You start with a quarterstaff, a cloak of magic resistance (an endgame-quality item from turn one), a wand, two rings, three potions, three scrolls, the force-bolt spell plus a random spellbook, and a high-enchantment magic marker. Physical combat is a weak point; magic is the Wizard’s calling: fragile early, overwhelming late. Advancing a spell-school skill also identifies spellbooks of that school by appearance, so you get free book-ID just by casting (see Spellcasting). Two warnings: Wizards start with zero food rations and a kitten that won’t share lunch, and force bolt shatters potions on the ground and breaks any mirror a nymph is carrying. Keep the quarterstaff wielded while you cast: any quarterstaff lowers spell-failure rate, a small free bonus on top of the cloak. Alignment: Neutral or Chaotic.

The Races

Your race affects your starting and maximum attributes, and which intrinsics you get. All stats range from 3 and higher; the table below shows the maximum each race can reach for each attribute.

Human. No infravision, no poison resistance, no special talents. On the bright side, every role is open to you and nobody in the dungeon singles you out for being one. Perfectly serviceable.

Dwarf. Sturdy fighters with the best Dex and Con caps and matching human Strength. Infravision from level 1, the best HP gain per level of any race, pick-axe digging at twice the normal speed, and a feel for buried treasure under your feet. Mines residents are mostly peaceful to you. Available for: Archeologist, Cave Dweller, Valkyrie.

Elf. Infravision plus sleep resistance at XL 4. Fragile HP but with the best Int and Wis caps and the best Pw (spell energy) growth per level of any race, plus an innate bow bonus (+1 to-hit with any bow, +2 with an elven bow) that applies even to roles that don’t normally pick one up. Elf Priests and Wizards get a free musical instrument. Available for: Priest, Ranger, Wizard.

Gnome. Infravision from level 1, slightly higher Int cap than a human, and most gnomes and dwarves in the Mines are peaceful to you. The early branch turns from a meat grinder into a friendly shopping trip. Touchstones identify gems for you without needing to be blessed. Gnome Rangers also reach crossbow multishot at Str 16 instead of Str 18. Available for: Archeologist, Cave Dweller, Healer, Ranger, Wizard.

Orc. Poison resistance from level 1 is genuinely useful, and it lets you eat kobold corpses safely (free nutrition in the early dungeon). Don’t eat anything on the o letter (cannibalism). Lower stat caps overall, and humans, elves, and dwarves are race-hostile to orcs (shopkeepers, priests, watchmen included); other orcs aren’t automatically peaceful either. Available for: Barbarian, Ranger, Rogue, Wizard.

Alignment

Your alignment (Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic) determines which gods you worship, which artifacts you can safely use, and how certain actions affect your standing. It’s tempting to think of these as “good,” “balanced,” and “evil,” but it’s more nuanced than that.

The key thing to understand about alignment is that it’s a number. Every action that matches your alignment’s expectations increases it; actions that violate your alignment’s code decrease it. Your alignment record affects your relationship with your god, which in turn affects whether prayer will save you or smite you.

Lawful characters do best when they leave peacefuls alone and keep their hands clean of murder. Sacrifice frequently at co-aligned altars. Lawful has the advantage of access to Excalibur, a top-tier melee weapon obtainable as early as experience level 5.

Neutral characters have the most flexibility. You can get away with more than a Lawful character, but your god still frowns on truly chaotic behavior. Neutral has access to some excellent quest artifacts.

Chaotic characters can kill with relative impunity but should avoid pious behavior that doesn’t match their dark patron’s expectations. Chaotic is often paired with Rogue for thematic consistency.

For your first game: Lawful or Neutral Valkyrie, Human or Dwarf. Strong combat, cold resistance, and Mjollnir waiting at the first co-aligned altar you can sacrifice on. It’s the closest thing to an easy mode the Mazes offer, which is to say it’s still very hard.

The Early Shopping List

A source of nutrition. You will get hungry. It happens faster than you think. But your main food source isn’t going to be the rations in your pack. Unless you’re playing a vegetarian role, most of your food in the early dungeon is the corpses of the things you kill. Eat fresh kills as you go (e, then choose the corpse on your square), and rations become emergency backup rather than the main course. Grab every food ration you see, sure, but two or three is plenty to carry; you don’t need to hoard. Tripe rations are for your pet, not for you.

A way to identify things. In the early game, your primary identification tools are altars (drop items to see if they flash blessed/cursed), your pet (it won’t step on cursed items), and experimentation. A scroll of identify is valuable, but you might not find one for a while. A touchstone (a gray stone that identifies gems) is helpful but not urgent. The full identification playbook is in A Practical Identification Strategy.

Armor improvements. Whatever you’re wearing, you can probably do better. Look for cloaks, helmets, gloves, and boots to fill empty equipment slots. Even basic items like a helmet or pair of gloves provide armor class benefits and can protect against specific attacks.

A ranged attack. Daggers, darts, or a bow with arrows. Fighting from range is almost always safer than melee, and some monsters (like floating eyes) are best handled at range.

Restraint. New adventurers pick up everything they find. Veterans pick up everything they need. The difference is about forty pounds and the ability to outrun a gnome lord. If your status line reads “Burdened,” you’re carrying more than you can use. You are also moving slow enough for some monsters to land two hits per one of yours. When your pile of stuff gets too heavy, drop the non-essentials. Careful about what you leave for monsters, though. Remember that monsters can pick up what you drop, and they can loot containers. You can drop stuff a level up; monsters don’t carry stashes between levels.

A note on rerolling. If you’d like to pick your starting inventory more carefully, you can add OPTIONS=reroll to your NetHack configuration. When enabled, the game lets you reroll your starting attributes and inventory at the start of a run, trading whatever was dealt for another shuffle. This won’t be decisive for your winning strategy, since your decisions later in the run weigh far more than your initial rolls, but the option is there if you’d like to pick out a favorite starting kit before beginning.

The Golden Rules of Early Survival

Rule 1: Don’t fight what you can’t beat. This sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget once a fight is underway. If a monster is too tough for you, walk away. Use corridors as chokepoints. Funnel enemies so you fight them one at a time. If you stumble into a room full of monsters, step back into the corridor and force them to come to you in single file.

  Bad: fighting in the open       Good: corridor chokepoint

  ┌─────·──────┐                  ┌─────·──────┐
  │·Z··Z·······│                  │·Z···Z······│
  │··Z·@·Z·Z···│                  │··Z··Z······│
  │····Z·······│                  │·Z··········+##@
  │··Z·········│                  │··Z·········│
  └────────────┘                  └────────────┘

  You're surrounded.              They come to you one at a time.

Rule 2: Don’t eat things you don’t understand. Monster corpses can grant powerful intrinsics, or they can poison you, give you food poisoning, or worse. Until you know what a corpse does, leave it on the ground. (Kobold k meat, for example, is poisonous and confers nothing.) The exceptions: you can always safely eat food rations, lembas wafers, cram rations, and fruits. Lichen corpses are safe and never rot. Lizard corpses are safe, never rot, and cure petrification. Keep one in open inventory, not buried in a bag: if a cockatrice touches you, you have two turns to chew. Newt corpses are safe, and they sometimes restore 1–3 Pw, which is the first sustainable mana source a spellcaster will see.

Rule 3: Your pet is your friend. Your starting pet is more useful than it appears. It will fight alongside you, pick up items (which tells you they’re not cursed, since pets avoid cursed items on the ground), and can even be trained to steal from shops. Keep it fed by dropping tripe rations or corpses near it. A healthy, well-fed pet is one of your best early assets.

Rule 4: Learn to pray. If you are about to die (hit points critically low, starving, turning to stone) you can pray to your god (#pray) for help. In the early game, with decent alignment, prayer will almost certainly save you. But you can only pray about once every thousand turns or so, and praying at the wrong time (when your god is angry, when you’re in Gehennom, or when you’ve prayed too recently) can make things much worse. Think of prayer as an emergency button with a cooldown. Don’t waste it on minor problems (see Divine Relations for the full mechanics). If you’ve blundered into a peaceful and your alignment tanks, you can grind it back by killing the always-hostile classes (fungi F, fluids and oozes, insects); a clean ledger is worth the detour.

Rule 5: Explore thoroughly but move purposefully. Every turn you spend in the dungeon costs nutrition. If you stand around for hundreds of turns, you’ll starve. But rushing past rooms means missing items you need. The sweet spot is to explore each level fairly completely (check rooms, open doors, look for hidden passages) but don’t grind. When you’ve found what the level has to offer, move on.

Rule 6: Build your defenses. In the first half of the game, your real goal isn’t accumulating treasure. It’s acquiring the resistances and protections that will help you survive the late game. The three most important are magic resistance, reflection, and poison resistance. Poison resistance can be acquired as an intrinsic by eating the right corpse, like a killer bee, a cave spider, a yellow mold, or a black pudding kicked from a sink. Magic resistance and reflection come from special gear: scale mail made from the hide of a slain dragon (gray for MR, silver for reflection), a special cloak (of MR) or amulet (of reflection), a polished silver shield (reflection too), or a one-of-a-kind artifact bestowed by your god, won on the Quest, or granted as a wish. Your adventure will be shaped by the protective items you obtain.

Rule 7: Type deliberately, never autorepeat. Each key you press is a turn. If you hold a movement key down and let it autorepeat, your character marches blindly until something stops them, usually a monster you didn’t intend to engage, a trap that’s just been revealed, or a fountain you didn’t mean to quaff. Press each key once and pause. To cross long corridors without typing one key per square, learn the shift-direction shortcut: capital H J K L Y U B N (or shift+arrow on number-pad layouts) moves continuously in that direction until something interesting appears. G+direction stops at the next item or monster; the _ travel command goes to a clicked or specified target. These commands all yield control the instant something warrants your attention. Autorepeat does not.

Dungeon Hazards (and How to Survive Them)

Here’s a short list of common early deaths and how to prevent them:

Starvation. Eat when you’re Hungry (the status message), not when you’re Weak or Fainting. If you’re Fainting, pray immediately. Pick up every food ration you find.

Floating eyes. They’re the e on the map. Small, blue, and seemingly harmless. If you hit one in melee, you’ll be paralyzed, and every monster in the vicinity will take free shots at your frozen body. Use ranged attacks, or just walk around them. They are very slow.

Rotted corpses. If you eat a corpse that’s been on the ground too long, you’ll get food poisoning, which is lethal without treatment. Eat corpses fresh, within about 30 turns of the kill for a guaranteed-safe meal. Past that, the rot roll turns random; past ~175 turns an uncursed corpse is certainly tainted. If you do get food poisoning, pray immediately.

Falling down stairs while overburdened. If you’re carrying too much, taking the stairs can make you tumble for 1–3 HP. Annoying rather than dangerous, unless you’re carrying a cockatrice corpse: the tumble counts as touching it, and stairs become the most literal instadeath in the game.

Caught in the open by a pack. Jackals bite for only 1d2 each, but packs of four to seven spawn on the upper levels and surround you in open rooms. Killer bees, foxes, soldier ants, dwarves, and gnomes all kill in this same shape. Retreat to a doorway or corridor at the first sign of more than two attackers; they can only approach single-file there.

Pushing too quickly into the Mines. The problem isn’t depth, it’s getting there too early. The deeper Mines below Minetown are crowded with armored dwarves and gnome rulers. If your gear and experience level aren’t ready for armored melee fighters in packs, head back up to the main Dungeons of Doom branch and return to the Mines later.

Supply Containers

New in NetHack 5.0: somebody has been leaving care packages.

Every level above the Oracle has a 2/3 chance of hosting a “supply chest”: usually a chest (sometimes a large box), usually locked, seeded with at least one survivability item. The contents pool: potion of healing (about a 50% chance per chest, sometimes a pair), or otherwise potion of extra healing / speed / gain energy, scroll of enchant weapon, enchant armor, confuse monster, or scare monster, wand of digging, or spellbook of healing. There’s also a 2/3 chance of an extra random item, biased toward low-level spellbooks. The Mines branch level gets a different gift: a guaranteed food ration, cram ration, or lembas wafer.

These look like ordinary containers, no special marking. On your first ten levels, check every chest and large box you find. A locked one will yield to a credit card, a key, a wand of opening, or you can #force the issue with a weapon you don’t mind breaking. An orcish dagger off the first orc you kill is a perfect tool (pet-test it first: could be cursed). The contents aren’t guaranteed to change your run, but finding a stack of healing potions on level 4 before you’ve learned the hard way how much you need them is the dungeon’s act of goodwill.

The Big Picture

When the dungeon was first mapped, every level looked the same: rooms, corridors, a staircase down to more of the same. After decades of exploration and discovery, the Dungeons of Doom are now known to be just the first neighborhood of a much larger world. If you survive long enough, your adventure will lead you through towns, towers, and castles; swamps and islands and fortresses; an underworld of molten halls and four elemental planes that climb back to a temple where angels and demons do battle around the altars to the gods. Each landmark has its own architecture, its own inhabitants, and its own rewards. Every game is different, but the dungeon has a story to tell: an arc through a familiar cast of landmarks, each tougher and stranger than the last.

The dungeon is a branching tree with a main trunk that descends through three main phases. Off the trunk are several optional side branches that you will want to explore along the way. The exact depths and layouts vary from game to game, but the diagram that follows shows the typical shape. Knowing where you are in this tree helps you know what’s coming.

The Dungeons of Doom form the upper half, roughly levels 1 through 27. Side branches lead to the Gnomish Mines (where you can find a luckstone and shops), Sokoban (a puzzle with a prize at the top), your Quest dungeon, and sometimes Fort Ludios (a vault full of gold). The trunk ends at The Castle, the gateway to Gehennom.

Gehennom is the lower half: maze levels and demon lords, with the Amulet of Yendor at the bottom in Moloch’s Sanctum. Once you have it, you climb back up through the Elemental Planes to the Astral Plane, where your god awaits your offering.

Simple enough on paper. Surviving it is another matter.

The Map Symbols

Everything in the dungeon is represented by a symbol on the screen. Learning to read these symbols quickly is important:

Letters represent monsters: d for dogs, D for dragons, Z for zombies. Colors help distinguish within a class: a red D is a red dragon, while a gray D is a gray dragon (see Field Guide to Dungeon Fauna).

Color memo: branch staircases turn yellow. Staircases that lead into a sub-branch (Mines or Sokoban) display in yellow once you’ve used them. Ordinary main-trunk stairs stay default-colored, so on a level with several stairs the yellow one is your way back into the branch.

Item symbols are punctuation marks:

Room Types

Most rooms in the dungeon are ordinary, empty or with a few items and monsters scattered about. But some rooms are special:

   A shop:                 A zoo:                 A throne room:
   ┌───────┐               ┌────────┐             ┌────────┐
   │[?!=/("│               │Z··Z$Z··│             │··Z·Z·Z·│
   │)%*[?!(│               │$Z···$Z·│             │·Z·\··Z·│
   │··@····│               │·Z$Z··Z$│             │··Z·Z···│
   └──+────┘               └───+────┘             └───+────┘
      #                        #                      #
   @ = shopkeeper          Z = sleeping           \ = throne
   Items for sale.         $ = gold piles         Monsters guard.

Shops. Identified by the shopkeeper inside, usually near the door. Shops sell items of a particular type: general stores, armor shops, weapon shops, scroll shops, potion shops, and more. Items on the shop floor belong to the shopkeeper; pick one up and you’ll be quoted a price. You can sell items too. Shopkeepers are extremely powerful in combat, so don’t steal unless you have a plan.

Temples. A room with an altar and a priest or priestess tending it. The altar’s alignment matters: if it matches yours, you can sacrifice here for good effects. If it doesn’t, the resident priest won’t be friendly about your attempts. The priest will also accept gold donations in exchange for clairvoyance or a permanent AC bonus See Donating to Priests.

Throne rooms. A room with a throne (\), a sleeping ruler at the throne, and a full court of monsters filling the rest. Sitting on the throne has random effects, sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible.

Zoos. A room packed with sleeping monsters and gold. They wake not when you enter, but from the noise of you fighting the first few. Fight from the doorway so they wake one or two at a time, not all at once.

Barracks. A room full of soldiers. They’re organized and armed, but they’re also carrying good equipment. Worth clearing if you can handle the fight.

Beehives. A room full of killer bees and royal jelly. The bees are dangerous in numbers, but royal jelly is excellent food.

Themed Rooms. You’ll occasionally walk into rooms that are not from the list above but interesting in other ways. These are Themed Rooms, and there are dozens of them. Some have unusual shapes, and some have unusual contents. Interesting ones to look out for:

• Light source rooms. They reliably contain a lit oil lamp. Free torch.
• Buried treasure. A burned engraving somewhere on the floor reads “Dig 3 east 2 south” (or wherever) and points to a buried chest plus 3–12 random items. A pick-axe earns its weight here.
• Massacre. Floor strewn with adventurer-role corpses (rogue, ranger, valkyrie, etc.). Useful for sacrifice and for eating the safe ones for intrinsics if you know the role.
• Mausoleum. A small interior chamber with one waiting monster (mummy, vampire, lich, or zombie) or a human corpse. Open the door carefully.
• Spider nest, buried zombies, trap room, teleportation hub. These are traps in everything but name. Spider nest and buried zombies scale with level difficulty, so what looks innocuous on Dlvl 4 is rough on Dlvl 18. Trap rooms can be anything from arrow traps to anti-magic to land mines; recognize the pattern, retreat, prepare, return.
• Light-and-frame rooms (pillars, room-in-a-room, blocked center). Tactically excellent for setting up Elbereth squares or anchoring a polearm fight.

Themed rooms are mixed in with ordinary rooms; you can have several on a single level. They make the early dungeon less predictable in a friendly way: more terrain types to fight in, more item discovery, and the occasional educational ambush.

Common Early Encounters

Mid-Dungeon Threats

Things You Don’t Want to Meet

Special Symbols

A few map glyphs aren’t monsters in the conventional sense, but you’ll see them and need to know what they mean.

Fountains {

Ah, fountains. That gentle bubbling sound has lured more adventurers to their doom than any trap, with the promise of a cool refreshing drink.

If you don’t have bad luck, about one in seven is a magic fountain that is indistinguishable from a regular fountain until you take a drink. Quaffing from a magic one says, Wow! This makes you feel great!, restores all your attributes to their maximum values, and raises a random attribute by one, consuming the magic charge; afterwards the fountain behaves like any other. (Pre-placed fountains like those in Minetown or the Oracle, or sink-kicked fountains, are never magic. Also: dipping gets no benefits from magic charge but could consume it.)

Quaffing from an ordinary fountain is a dangerous slot machine with dozens of random effects including:

Most of the time, nothing happens. A demon appears about 1/30; on shallow levels it may grant a wish instead of attacking, working out to roughly 1 wish per 150 quaffs and dropping to zero past Dlvl 20. To take the risk: put your items in a bag (cursing protection), engrave Elbereth (demons keep their distance), and have a charm- or scare-monster effect ready in case a demon appears.

Dipping in a fountain is a different gamble, and one that Lawful characters should know by heart. If you’re at least experience level 5, dipping a long sword may transform it into Excalibur, one of the finest weapons in the dungeon. Knights get a generous 1/6 chance per dip; everyone else gets a meager 1/30. Otherwise, dipping can rust your gear, summon hostile water creatures, or occasionally uncurse the dipped item.

The conventional wisdom: a lawful Knight carrying a long sword, once at experience level 5, should dip in every fountain they pass until Excalibur appears. Every fountain, because each dip carries roughly a 1-in-3 chance of drying the fountain up, so a single one rarely lasts long enough to deliver on its own. Don’t worry about the rust you collect along the way; the instant the sword becomes Excalibur, that rust is wiped clean and the blade turns permanently rustproof. A couple of cautions: leave the Minetown fountains alone, since draining a town fountain brings the Watch down on you, and if you’re not lawful, don’t dip at all, because the Lady of the Lake will only curse the sword. Other lawful roles can try, but at 1-in-30 a dip they should pack patience.

Altars _

An altar is a consecrated stone shrine, marked _ on the map and aligned to one of the three gods. It is also the single most useful piece of furniture in the dungeon: drop your gear on it to learn at a glance what is blessed or cursed, and sacrifice fresh corpses on it to earn your god’s favor. Treat every altar like the treasure it is.

Dropping items on an altar (d for one, D to drop several at once) reveals their BUC status instantly. Amber flash → Blessed. No flash → Uncursed. Black flash → Cursed.

This is free, unlimited, and works on everything. In the early game, your first altar becomes your testing laboratory: haul every suspicious piece of gear there before putting it on. Many promising ascensions have been saved by the simple discipline of altar-testing before wearing. (Drop the whole pile at once; you’ll see one flash per item.)

Sacrificing monster corpses on an altar (#offer, while standing on it) deepens your relationship with your god. The corpse must be fresh (stale sacrifices are an insult) and the bigger the monster, the more your god is impressed. Sacrifice enough and your deity may reward you with an artifact weapon aligned to your cause. Don’t sacrifice your starting pet: the alignment penalty is steep and the residual aggravate-monster intrinsic sticks around for the rest of the run. See Divine Relations for the full theology.

Converting an altar to your alignment is possible by sacrificing ordinary monster corpses on a cross-aligned altar. Each attempt has a chance of flipping the altar to your god, a chance of doing nothing, and a chance of backfiring (the wrong god notices and punishes you, or worse, you get converted). It’s a real gamble, but worth it when the dungeon gives you an altar to the wrong god and you need a co-aligned one for sacrifice and holy water. See Altars and Alignment for the gotchas (same-race sacrifice, unicorns).

Thrones \

A throne is an ornate royal seat, marked \, that turns up now and then in a room of its own. Sitting on one (#sit) is the purest gamble in the Mazes: the list of possible outcomes reads like a wish list shuffled with a hit list:

• A wish (if your luck isn’t negative)
• Genocide of a monster class
• Free identification of one to four items in your pack (or, one time in five, your entire inventory)
• A stat boost or a stat drain
• An electric shock
• Full healing
• A crowd of hostile monsters, summoned for your amusement
• Confusion
• A curse on one of your items
• Magic mapping of the level
• See invisible
• All your gold, vanished

About one time in three, something happens, but you won’t know which column of the ledger it’s going to hit. Sit on a throne when you’re strong enough to survive the worst row of that table. The wish branch needs your luck to be non-negative, so clear any bad luck before you sit if a wish is what you’re after. Even when nothing happens, the throne may vanish in a puff of logic, so you might get several tries or none at all. (Vlad’s throne in the Tower is special: it never vanishes without granting a wish first.) Kicking a throne is a different gamble: at positive Luck it dislodges 201–500 gold and Luck+1 gems (max 6), which doubles as a free Luck-meter if you’ve lost track.

Sinks {

They say a dungeon has everything but the kitchen sink. The Mazes of Menace has the kitchen sink too, the white { on the map, and it is more colorful hazard than convenience. You can kick it, drink from it, or drop things down it: a couple of those tricks pay off, but most fizzle, and several can hurt you.

Kicking a sink is a gamble. It might shake loose a ring, or it might just as easily summon a black pudding (dangerous, though its glob is a triple-resistance snack) or an amorous demon posing as “the dish washer” (the same incubus/succubus as a seduction encounter), or just stub your toe. Each non-stub outcome fires at most once per sink. Worth a try early on only if you can handle whatever climbs out.

Dropping a ring down a sink produces a message unique to the ring type, naming it outright. The catch is that the ring is gone nineteen times out of twenty; only searching and slow digestion survive the drop, identifying themselves for free. So it is a niche trick, not a staple: worth it mainly when you have a duplicate ring to spare, or when you’re starving and gambling that an unknown ring is slow digestion. For anything else, price-ID, an altar, or a scroll of identify tells you as much and keeps the ring.

Quaffing from a sink rolls one of twenty random effects, most of them nothing. The good ones are thin: about a 1-in-20 chance a ring turns up at your feet (once per sink), and a similar chance a random potion pours out to drink, which is a gamble in itself. The bad ones are worse: one sip in twenty polymorphs you uncontrollably, another unleashes a water elemental (a serious fight in the early game), and others scald, gas, or sicken you. On balance it is more hazard than help: an entertaining gamble if that is your idea of fun, but not something to rely on. If you do quaff, keep HP and an escape route in reserve.

Pouring potions down a sink (by dipping) produces telltale effects, a clever way to narrow down potion identities without risking a sip. Five potions print unique sink-only messages:

For most other potions, the sink instead prints “A wisp of vapor rises up…” and then applies the same vapor effect as breathing a broken potion: the side effect normally identifies the potion (sleeping makes you yawn, hallucination starts hallucinating, blindness blinds briefly, healing nudges HP, and so on). Wasted on water, fruit juice, gain level, gain energy, and monster detection: those all just print “nothing seems to happen.”

Vaults

A vault is a tiny walled-off 2×2 room not connected to the rest of the level. Each one holds a pile of gold. You will usually find one by digging through stone or by teleporting in. The engraving “ad aerarium” on a level marks one nearby (see Engravings). A scroll of gold detection (or object detection) will spotlight the gold pile through the walls, and magic mapping reveals the closet directly.

There is no door, and no obvious way out. After about thirty turns inside, a vault guard appears and asks “Who are you?” You have two real answers.

Tell the truth. The guard makes you drop your gold, opens a temporary corridor, leads you out, and re-seals the vault behind him. You lose every coin, but you escape.

Answer Croesus (or Kroisos or Creosote). The guard takes that as the vault owner’s name and politely leaves. Lawful characters lose one alignment point for lying. You keep your gold but stay sealed in alone with your treasure.

If you do not want to starve, follow the guard and leave the gold, unless you can dig or teleport out yourself. (If Croesus is dead because you killed him at Fort Ludios, the Croesus answer angers the guard instead; use the real-name route then.)

Statues

A statue is a stone likeness of a monster, now and then a creature petrified where it stood. Most statues can be broken for any contents inside (with a pickaxe, wand of striking, or force bolt), but some are statue traps that animate the sculpted monster when struck or stepped on. Archeologists see historic statues by name and take a −1 alignment hit for breaking them.

The Gnomish Mines

The entrance appears somewhere around dungeon levels 2 through 4, as a downward staircase. You’ll know you’re in the Mines because the walls become rough stone and the corridors get irregular, as pictured below.

               ··└       ·······?└┘·└─┐
                ··└      ·G···········│
                ···      ┐·····*······└
                 ··└┐    │··`········
            ┌──┐ ┐··│┌─┐┌┘········
          ┌─┘··└┐│··└┘·└┘······┌
         ┌┘·····│┌─·`·······<·┌
         │······└┘·····)······└┐
     └───┘····┌┐····)··········└─┘  └┐
┐·············││·`········@··········│
└─┐······─┐·──┴┼─┐···················└
  └──┐·   │····└─┘···┌┐h··············└
     └┐   └──┐·······│└─┐···┌┐·········│
             └──┐····└  └───┘ ─┐·│····┌┘

The Mines are populated primarily by gnomes and dwarves, with tougher variants (gnome lords, dwarf lords, then gnome and dwarf kings) appearing as you descend. If you’re playing a gnomish character, most of them will be peaceful, which makes the Mines a relatively comfortable detour. Everyone else will need to fight through a steady stream of hostile gnomes and dwarves.

The Mines also have a notorious surprise guest: a mind flayer can spawn on any random Mines level outside Minetown and Mine’s End. “You sense a faint wave of psychic energy” on an unexplored Mines level is the warning. A mind flayer drains Intelligence on every successful tentacle hit. In the early game you may not have the helmet protection or ranged attack power you’ll need to fight one safely. Retreat to prep, or skip the branch.

Minetown appears a few levels into the Mines. Usually it’s a small settlement with shops and a temple, and it’s worth visiting early. The shops let you sell unwanted items for gold and buy useful gear. The temple has an altar (check the alignment) and a resident priest. If the altar matches your alignment, you’ve found a safe place to identify items by dropping them on it. The Minetown priest can also grant permanent AC reductions. Donate at least the amount the priest names and you gain a point of intrinsic protection (a permanent −1 to your AC). The asked amount scales with your experience level, so early visits give you the cheapest points (see Donating to Priests).

Candles spawn often enough that you’ll usually have enough by endgame, but you do need to source seven for the Candelabrum of Invocation later. Izchak’s lighting store in Minetown is the clean answer: buy seven there. If the shop is absent (Orcish Town layout), seven are scattered on that level instead. Wax candles burn longer than tallow but either works, and mixing types is fine.

One in seven times, however, Minetown generates as Orcish Town: an overrun settlement with no shops, no priest, and iron bars blocking the entrances. There’s still an unaligned altar, but you won’t get any shopping done. If you were counting on Minetown for early commerce, this is a rude surprise.

Watch out for the Minetown watch. The guards are peaceful unless you steal from a shop or attack a peaceful creature. If you anger them, they’ll call for reinforcements.

Mine’s End is the bottom of the Mines. All three Mine’s End variants contain a guaranteed (not-cursed) luckstone, so you’ll get one wherever you arrive. A luckstone in your open inventory prevents your luck from timing out toward zero, which affects everything from combat to fountain wishes. Grab it and carry it for the rest of the game. (One layout variant also seeds a fake luckstone mimic disguised as a luckstone. BUC-test what you pick up before relying on it.)

Sokoban

The entrance staircase appears somewhere around dungeon levels 6 through 10 (one level below the Oracle), and it goes up. Sokoban is a set of four puzzle levels where you push boulders onto holes or into place to open a path. Teleport doesn’t work here, and you can’t dig down off the entrance level (its floor is reinforced).

The puzzles are fixed (two variants per level, randomly chosen).

Each level has exactly one correct solution. If you push a boulder into a corner where it blocks your progress there is no way to start over. You’re left with a few ways to cheat, which might or might not help: squeeze past the boulder (drop your stuff to fit), dig the boulder with a wielded pick-axe or mattock, or fracture it with a wand of striking or a scroll of earth (or polymorph the boulder into something else). Each of these costs a point of Luck and breaks the Sokoban conduct. The walls themselves are non-diggable on every Sokoban level, and pit traps are inescapable. Even flying or levitation will not carry you over an open pit; the air currents pull you down anyway. Teleport doesn’t work here: the level forbids it.

The prize at the top is either a bag of holding or an amulet of reflection, both extremely valuable; the Sokoban Solutions appendix documents the per-variant 75/25 weighting. A cursed scroll of scare monster is placed under the prize as bait. A bag of holding lets you carry far more inventory at reduced weight. An amulet of reflection bounces ray attacks back at their casters. Either one is worth the detour.

One important rule: the Sokoban levels penalize you for “cheating.” Breaking or polymorphing boulders, reading scrolls of earth, or squeezing past boulders costs you a point of luck each time. Solve each level honestly if you can. The luck penalty isn’t a sentence, though: it clears the moment you legitimately finish the level above it, and the prize is still available regardless of infractions. One desperate boulder-smash won’t ruin the run.

Strength training side effect. Every legitimate boulder-push exercises Strength. Sokoban is the safest place to grind Str up since the puzzles require dozens of pushes without putting you in combat. Don’t try to train Str by walking around Stressed in the rest of the dungeon: the HP penalty isn’t worth what you’d gain.

For complete solutions to all eight level variants, see Sokoban Solutions in the appendices.

The Oracle

Somewhere in the mid-levels of the Dungeons of Doom (around levels 5 through 9), you’ll find a special room containing the Oracle of Delphi, flanked by centaur statues (empty, don’t bother) and four fountains. Like every oracle since antiquity, she trades in riddles and takes payment up front.

She offers two services:

• Minor consultations are cheap (50 zorkmids) and produce fortune-cookie-style messages, drawn from the same true-rumor pool, mostly atmospheric, occasionally useful.
• Major consultations are expensive (500 + 50 × experience level) but pay back the gold in useful intel: hints about monsters, items, and rules.

The Oracle is peaceful and never attacks. Her room is a safe place to rest for a moment, though the fountains are subject to the usual fountain risks.

The Quest

Sooner or later, your own people call. The Quest is a branch of the dungeon shaped for your role alone: a nemesis has seized your role’s legendary artifact, and your leader summons you to prove yourself, defeat that nemesis, and bring it home. Around dungeon levels 11 through 16, a magic portal drops you onto it.

You’ll know when you’ve reached the right level. The first time you arrive there, a faint telepathic call from your quest leader breaks through:

You receive a faint telepathic message …. Your help is urgently needed …. Look for a …ic transporter. You couldn’t quite make out that last message.

You are now looking for a magic portal, which renders as a bright magenta ^ once you discover it. Like any trap, it stays hidden until you step on it (which also triggers it) or search the square.

To embark on your Quest, you will need experience level 14 and a friendly word with your quest leader on the first floor before they will let you descend. If you are prepared and worthy, your leader will send you to retrieve your role’s quest artifact from a quest nemesis.

Mid-game XP is slow to earn, so the path to XL 14 usually includes eating a few wraith corpses (one experience level each), or a blessed potion of gain level. (Wraith corpses don’t drop on graveyard levels, though! A good strategy is to lead a wraith out of the Valley of the Dead before killing it.)

Each role has a unique Quest with unique maps, a unique nemesis, and a unique artifact reward. The Valkyrie hunts Lord Surtur for the Orb of Fate. A Samurai’s path ends in a duel with Ashikaga Takauji over the Tsurugi of Muramasa. The Wizard descends into the Dark One’s stronghold for the Eye of the Aethiopica. The Artifacts chapter has the full per-role list.

And what a prize it is. Your quest artifact is your role’s signature relic, attuned to you as no other item in the game can be, and it tends to anchor your kit for the rest of the run. Each carries a blend of powers suited to its owner: protection, luck, telepathy, warning, reflection, or stealth. A few ward off magic just by riding in your pack; others raise that shield only once wielded or worn. Claiming yours is a turning point. The late game starts here.

A second important prize waits on the nemesis’s square. The Bell of Opening rides in the nemesis’s pack and drops when you kill them. It is one of the three Invocation items, and you cannot finish the game without it: at the bottom of Gehennom, on the vibrating square just above Moloch’s Sanctum, you ring the Bell, light the Candelabrum, and read the Book of the Dead to open the way down to the Amulet of Yendor (the full ritual is The Heist). Your quest artifact, meanwhile, lies under the nemesis’s feet, placed when the level was generated. Grab both before you go; the Quest is the only place to get either.

A nemesis may have picked up an amulet of life saving along the way, so don’t be shocked if one shrugs off a killing blow and you have to do it twice. The portal back to the main dungeon is on the first Quest level only. If you descend underprepared and have to turn back, you may have a long climb home.

One requirement bears repeating, since it gates everything above: the whole Quest hinges on the blessing of your quest leader. Beyond reaching experience level 14, you must satisfy them on character. If your alignment record is too low, usually from a habit of attacking peaceful creatures, the leader judges you unworthy and will not send you to the nemesis at all. You would then have to climb back out, mend your standing, and return. Keep your hands clean.

The Rogue Level

Somewhere in the middle dungeon you’ll cross a one-level historical district. “You enter what seems to be an older, more primitive world.” The neighborhood is preserved as it was when Rogue was the only dungeon-crawl anyone had heard of, and a few details give the era away:

• All the wildlife is in capital letters: lowercase species hadn’t been invented yet.
• Armor displays as ], food as :, amulets as ,, and gold shares a symbol with gems (in Rogue they were the same thing).
• Doors don’t close. Hinges came later.
• Tile mode switches off in favor of plain ASCII characters.
• No fountains, sinks, altars, shopkeepers, or priests, and no spellbooks, tools, or amulets in the natural item pool, all post-Rogue inventions.

Your modern tricks still work; you can engrave Elbereth here even though that was a Hack-era addition. A small anachronism.

Fort Ludios

Fort Ludios is a treasure fortress, the gold-stuffed stronghold of the fabulously rich Croesus. It is optional and easy to miss entirely: it appears as a magic portal anywhere from Dlvl 11 down to just above Medusa, always inside a sealed vault, so you’ll need to dig in. The portal leads to a fortified military compound: sixteen soldiers and a lieutenant, with more drifting out of the barracks once the alarm trips. Four guard dragons. A stone giant. Four giant eels patrolling the moat. And Croesus on the throne, the vault guardian himself. The level is non-diggable. The level prevents teleportation, so once you’re inside the only way out is back through the portal or a scroll of level teleportation (a plain scroll of teleportation won’t work here). Croesus hits hard in melee, so shoot or zap him from across the moat rather than walking up.

The real prize is the gold. A 60-square treasury holds 36k to 54k gold, with land mines and spiked pits on roughly a third of the tiles. Gem caches in each corner tower (diamonds, emeralds, rubies, amethysts), plus the occasional chest in the barracks. Soldiers carry rations and serviceable weapons. The alarm only quiets once Croesus is dead. Fort Ludios is a good place to visit for gold, identification scrolls, or shop stock, but it’s not essential for victory.

If you can’t find the portal, don’t worry about it. Fort Ludios is a bonus, not a requirement.

Medusa’s Island

Medusa’s level sits near the bottom of the Dungeons of Doom, around level 25. You’ll know it by the large body of water and the statues scattered around (those used to be adventurers).

Arien Malec collected crossing strategies from RGRN posters back in the early 2000s, with input from Pat Rankin, Geoduck, Topi Linkala, and others. This is a condensed version of his guide.

The level stacks three challenges on one island: crossing the water that surrounds it, the giant eels (electric eels on one layout) lurking in that water, and Medusa herself, whose gaze turns you to stone. Each gets its own section below. If you carried the amulet of reflection out of Sokoban, the third problem is already solved.

There is a downward staircase on the island itself that leads toward the Castle. The level has four possible layouts, so don’t rely on memorizing a single map.

The Perseus statue. One of the statues on the island is named Perseus, the mythological hero who killed Medusa with a mirrored shield. #loot him for a (cursed) shield of reflection (75% in three of the four layouts; 25% in the fourth), a blessed +2 scimitar (50%), levitation boots (25% in three layouts; 75% in the fourth, the same layout that is stingy with the shield), and a sack to put them in (50%). The shield is cursed, so plan to uncurse it before swapping it in. The other statues on the level are intentionally empty.

Surviving Medusa’s gaze. You need one of the following before entering her level:

• Reflection (amulet, shield, or silver dragon scale mail). Her gaze bounces back and stones her instead. This is the cleanest solution and the one most players use.
• Blindfold or towel. Wear it before entering line of sight. You’ll need telepathy or monster detection to navigate while blind. Works perfectly but makes the level harder to explore.
• A mirror. Apply it at Medusa to reflect her gaze at close range. More dangerous than passive reflection since you need to be adjacent.
• One-shot kill. If you have a wand of death, the spell finger of death, or a cockatrice corpse, you can kill Medusa before she gets a turn. Combine with speed or stealth for reliability. (A wielded cockatrice corpse, with gloves, is the cheapest of these options and bypasses the reflection requirement entirely.) Whatever you do, don’t eat her corpse: she’s the Gorgon, and the cadaver instantly petrifies whoever sits down for dinner.

Crossing the water. The island is surrounded by deep water. Your options, from safest to most desperate:

• Levitation (ring, boots, potion, or spell). The easiest way to cross. Eels can still grab you from adjacent water (see Drowning in Ways to Die Instantly).
• Water walking boots. You walk on the surface. Eels can still grab you in adjacent water.
• Wand of cold. Zap the water to freeze a path of ice. Ice is safe to walk on. This is reliable and only costs a few charges.
• Scroll of earth. Creates boulders that fall into the water, making a boulder bridge. Slow but works if you have nothing else.
• Polymorph into a flying or swimming creature. Risky if you lack polymorph control.
• Jumping boots or the knight’s jump. Can leap across narrow water gaps, but requires careful positioning.

Surviving the eels. The water contains giant eels (and on one of the four layout variants, a kraken) that can grab and drown you. Critical rules:

• An oilskin cloak or greased armor makes the eel slip off on the grab attempt. Greasing wears off, so it’s not fully reliable; oilskin doesn’t.
• Magical breathing (amulet or polymorph) prevents the drown even after being grabbed.
• Kill eels at range whenever possible. Wands, spells, and thrown weapons all work. Don’t melee eels in the water.
• Levitation and water walking do NOT protect against being grabbed by an eel in adjacent water. The drown check uses the eel’s tile, not yours. Only oilskin/grease, magical breathing, or killing the eel first are reliable.

The Castle

The Castle is the grand finale of the sunlit dungeon and the doorway to everything worse below: a stone fortress ringed by a moat, with a drawbridge for its only entrance. Inside waits an army of defenders: soldiers in the barracks, dragons guarding the storerooms, and a court of high-letter monsters in the throne room. The reward that makes the siege worth it sits in a locked chest in one of the four corner towers, the wand of wishing, the most valuable find in the game.

The Castle also serves as the gateway to Gehennom. For how to open the drawbridge and what to do once you’re inside, see The Castle in Part Five.

Nuisance Traps

Annoying but rarely lethal. The silver lining: arrow and dart traps produce free ammunition, and you can trigger them on purpose to stock up.

Movement Traps

Trapdoors and level teleporters are the most disruptive: one wrong step and you’re separated from your pet, your stash, and your carefully explored map. But with teleport control (from an item or intrinsic), teleport traps become free transportation. Levitation or flying both make you immune to pits, holes, and trapdoors entirely. Except in Sokoban, where the puzzle levels disable the skip and you fall in regardless.

Dangerous Traps

Fire traps are easy to underestimate. The fire itself hurts, but the real catastrophe is your inventory: scrolls burn, potions shatter, and that stack of twenty scrolls of identify you’ve been hoarding is suddenly ash. Fire resistance saves your skin but not your belongings. Items inside a sack or oilskin sack survive the trap; the sack itself absorbs the burn. Gehennom is fire-trap country, so keep your consumables bagged.

Polymorph traps are a double-edged sword. With polymorph control, they’re a free polymorphing booth. Without it, you become something random, possibly a newt that can’t use any of its equipment. Magic resistance and the Unchanging intrinsic both block the polymorph entirely. Polymorph control is the only way to use the trap; magic resistance or Unchanging let you walk through it untouched.

If you do get caught and polymorphed into a handless form, your gear drops to the floor on the spot. Don’t panic and don’t move: random polymorphs wear off in a few hundred turns, and your kit is at the square you’re standing on. Defend the square if you can, pray if a monster has you in a corner, and pick everything up the moment you change back. (If you happen to be carrying a wand of polymorph or know the spell, zapping or casting it on yourself lets you reroll the form, but only if your current form can use a wand or cast.)

Sleeping gas is murder in monster-rich areas. You can’t fight, you can’t run, you can’t even wake up on purpose. Monsters line up to hit you like it’s a buffet. Sleep resistance (elven blood, the right ring) sidesteps it.

Magic traps roll one of about a dozen random effects. The bad outcomes are summoning hostile monsters, cursing one of your items, aggravating monsters, blindness, sleep, stun, vomiting, and an earthquake that pops pits open in the surrounding squares. The good outcomes are an HP restore, a mana refill, a Charisma boost, a magic-mapping flash, and a room-lighting flash. Patient players sometimes camp a known magic trap until their Charisma climbs (about +1.4 average per zap), shop prices and all.

Bear traps clamp on for several turns. Try to step diagonally off the square; the diagonal escape is about five times faster than orthogonal. A wand of opening or spell of knock frees you on the spot.

If you have magic resistance and you want to enter a teleport trap (for vault access, say), MR blocks the trip, unless you press Ctrl+T first, which forces a voluntary trap-use that bypasses the resistance.

Anti-magic fields hit harder if you’re magic-resistant. Counterintuitive enough to mislead returning players. The trap drains spell energy, and having magic resistance also triggers an “anti-magic implosion” that costs you HP. The damage is d4 base, plus another d4 if you have half-physical or half-spell damage, plus d4 for wielding Magicbane, plus d4 for carrying any one magic-resistance artifact (only one counts; the check breaks on first match). At worst that’s 4d4 damage, quartered (rounded up) if you can pass through walls. The defense is finding the trap first (search) and stepping around it. A wand of cancellation aimed at a magical trap does remove the trap, but it triggers a 20 + 3d6 damage blast at the trap’s square in the process; not a silent defuse.

Iron footwear (iron shoes or kicking boots) absorbs a surprising amount of trap punishment in 5.0: no leg damage from a bear trap, no spikes from a spiked pit, no polymorph from a polymorph trap (your shoes shift instead), and a positively- enchanted pair eats an anti-magic field’s drain by losing one enchantment instead. Useful protection to have on if you haven’t found anything better yet.

Searching and Detection

The best defense against traps is finding them before they find you:

• Search (s) repeatedly. Each search has an independent chance to reveal each adjacent trap, and Luck improves the odds. (The artifact/lenses search bonus only speeds up secret-door and secret-corridor discovery, not trap finding.)
• Wand of secret door detection reveals everything hidden in a roughly circular area around you (radius about eight, blocked by line of sight): secret doors, secret corridors, traps, trapped chests, and concealed monsters. It’s not directional.
• Crystal ball can reveal traps across the entire level
• Pets avoid known traps, so watch their pathfinding for clues
• Flying and levitation make you immune to most floor traps (you’ll still trigger magic, teleport, and anti-magic traps)
• A scroll of gold detection read while confused turns the gold-reveal into a trap reveal: every magical trap on the level lights up at once. Confused gold detection is the cheapest pre-Gehennom trap survey.

A good time to search is when the dungeon has already hinted that something is wrong: a stray corpse in the middle of an otherwise empty room, a scatter of arrows or darts on the floor, a square your pet refuses to cross, or a themed room whose gimmick is hidden hazards.

Finding Secret Doors

The Dungeons of Doom were designed by architects who believed that every room should have one emergency exit that requires ten minutes of tapping on walls to locate. Secret doors and corridors are the game’s passive-aggressive way of saying “you haven’t explored thoroughly enough.”

When to search for secrets:

• Dead ends that feel too convenient. If a corridor just stops, and you haven’t found what you came for, there’s probably a door in the surrounding walls
• Suspiciously empty rooms with no obvious exit. The exit exists; it’s just been cunningly disguised as a wall
• After exhausting all visible options. When you’ve explored everything reachable and still haven’t found the downstairs, it’s time to stop wandering and start wall-tapping

The systematic approach:

Type 20s to search twenty times in one spot. For new characters with average Luck, you need 15-22 searches to reliably reveal a secret. Searching once and moving on is essentially announcing your intention to remain lost.

Move three squares along the wall and repeat. Each search reaches one square in every direction, so a stride of three gives complete wall coverage with no gaps and no wasted re-searching. The pattern looks tedious on paper because it is tedious, but tedium is cheaper than being trapped on Dlvl 1 forever.

A Ranger is spared much of this: Rangers have the Searching skill from the start (as does anyone wielding Excalibur), so they check every adjacent square automatically with each step and often turn up secrets just by walking the walls. A stubborn door may still want you to stop and search a few times.

Items that help:

• Ring of searching auto-searches every turn while it’s worn
• Excalibur (or any artifact with the searching aura), wielded, adds its enchantment to your search bonus (a freshly-dipped +0 Excalibur adds nothing)
• Lenses worn (and you not blind) add +2 to the search bonus, but the total bonus from Excalibur + lenses caps at +5, so lenses only help if Excalibur’s enchantment is below +3
• Wand of secret door detection instantly reveals nearby secrets in a radius
• Blessed scroll of magic mapping shows every secret door on the level (only the blessed version)

The wisdom of patience:

Secret doors are the Mazes’ way of teaching you that brute force doesn’t solve every problem. Sometimes you need brute force applied methodically to every wall section in sequence. The downstairs you seek is behind one of these walls. Finding it is a matter of systematic elimination. The only mistake is giving up after three searches and declaring the level “impossible.”

Engravings

You can write on the dungeon floor with the engrave command (E). Engravings serve a few practical purposes: writing Elbereth (covered next), running the engrave-test on an unidentified wand (covered in the wand chapter), or just leaving a note for whoever finds your bones file. The mechanics described here apply to any engraving, not just Elbereth.

Methods, speed, and durability. The tool you write with determines how quickly you can finish, how hard the engraving is to erase, and whether your stylus suffers wear.

The three durability tiers correspond to how the text resists ordinary erosion:

• Fragile (dust). A monster stepping on the square smudges one character. In dust, an Elbereth lasts as long as the floor stays clear.
• Semi-permanent (scratched into the floor). Monster traffic doesn’t smudge it. Random erosion can occasionally chip a character under unusual conditions, but in practice the engraving lasts indefinitely.
• Permanent (burned in). The engraving doesn’t erode at all under normal conditions. Only ice tiles or magical attacks can damage it.

Engraving by hand can be interrupted. Anything written by hand at multi-turn speed (non-athame edged weapon, gem) takes one turn per letter. If something breaks the engraving mid-word (an attack, a monster wandering into view, a passing earthquake), the partial word you leave behind does nothing useful. Instant methods (any wand, finger-in-dust, or an uncursed athame) finish in one action.

Impairment and errors. If you are blind, confused, stunned, or hallucinating, you have a chance of misspelling each letter, and this scrambling applies to every engraving method, including burns from a wand of fire. (Only the dust/blood surface-garble roll is skipped for harder methods.) A misspelled message has no special power; this matters most for Elbereth.

Overwriting and combining. Appending to an existing engraving is possible, but for named-word magic like Elbereth the engraving must read exactly that word and nothing else, so the appended text usually destroys the ward. To refresh, overwrite the square or pick a fresh one.

Two engravings worth recognizing. Most engravings you find are random flavor (graffiti, “elbereth” left by someone else, and the like). Two specific messages, though, are trap markers placed by the dungeon. “Ad aerarium” (Latin: to the treasury) marks a secret closet containing either a vault teleporter or a level teleporter. The vault teleporter is a one-shot trap that drops you into Croesus’s 2×2 gold vault on the same level; pick up the gold and escape ahead of the vault guard. The level teleporter sends you to a random dungeon level, often unwelcome without teleport control. “Vlad was here” marks a secret closet containing a trap door. Both messages are easy to miss in the message log. Investigate them when you see them, and be ready for what is on the other side.

Elbereth

Iron Bars

Iron bars look like a barrier but aren’t solid: light passes through and tiny creatures (grid bugs, bats, rats) can squeeze between, though anything kitten-sized or larger is blocked. Pick-axes bounce off them, wands of digging fizzle, and striking or force bolt pass through harmlessly. Acid breath (yellow dragon polyform) and a wand of lightning (about one zap in ten) are the ways to melt them.

The practical answer is to dig around them. Bars sit in a niche cut into a room wall, so digging diagonally past them or through the back wall reaches the contents without touching the bars. What’s usually behind: a scroll of teleportation (a small joke, since you’d need one already to read it from outside), occasionally a random item or a previous adventurer’s bones.

To-Hit Calculation

Every swing of your weapon is a d20 roll, modified by everything that matters in a sword fight:

• Your experience level (higher means you’ve seen things)
• Your weapon’s enchantment (a +7 Excalibur hits noticeably better)
• Your Luck (the universe takes sides; the to-hit contribution caps around ±5 even though Luck itself ranges further)
• Your Strength and Dexterity bonuses (muscles plus agility, both matter)
• The monster’s AC (the lower their AC, the harder they are to tag)

You need to roll at or above (10 + defender’s AC - your modifiers). Since some late-game monsters have AC of -10 or worse, this formula can feel like trying to hit smoke. Enchant your weapon. Keep your luck up. And maybe don’t try to punch an arch-lich.

Damage

Base damage depends on your weapon and whether the target is small or large. Most weapons favor one shape over the other: short blades for kobolds, two-handers for ogres. Added to base:

• Weapon enchantment (+1 per point)
• Strength bonus (up to +6 for STR 18/xx, or more)
• Weapon skill bonus (depends on skill level)
• Special bonuses (silver damage, artifact bonuses, etc.)
• Two-handed weapons get a 50% bonus to the strength damage component, which makes giving up the shield slot worthwhile

This narrows the gap between two-handed builds and dual-wielding considerably. A Barbarian with a two-handed sword and respectable Strength is not just accepting the trade-off of foregoing a shield: they’re dealing measurably more damage per swing than a comparable one-handed build. If you’ve been avoiding two-handed weapons because the math didn’t add up, run those numbers again.

AC and Defense

Your AC determines how likely monsters are to hit you. AC starts at 10 (no armor) and goes down as you put pieces on; lower is better. The journey from “I die to gnomes” to “nothing can touch me” looks like this:

At AC -20, almost nothing hits you with physical attacks. Feel free to laugh at ogres. But many late-game threats use special attacks (breath weapons, spells, gaze attacks) that ignore AC entirely. You can be wearing impenetrable armor and a disenchanter will still ruin your day. AC is necessary but not sufficient.

Seven slots, four paths down. You can wear seven pieces at once: body suit, cloak, helmet, gloves, boots, shield, and shirt. Filling every slot with ordinary armor gets you from AC 10 to roughly AC 0. From there, the paths into negative AC are enchantment, swapping ordinary pieces for magic ones (many magic pieces carry an intrinsic on top of their AC bonus), and extrinsic Protection bought from priests of your alignment. See the Armory for picks by slot.

BUC-test before you wear. Most armor in the dungeon spawns unidentified, and a cursed body suit, helm, gloves, or boots will not come off until the curse breaks. Drop a new piece on an altar (cursed flashes black) or watch your pet step over it (pets refuse cursed items). See A Practical Identification Strategy for the full procedure.

Changing armor takes turns and layers in order. You wear armor with W and take it off with T. Shirt goes on first, body suit second, cloak last. To put on a shirt, you must first remove your cloak and body suit; to put on a body suit, you must first remove your cloak. A metal body suit takes 5 turns to don or remove; leather 3, mithril 1; cloaks, helmets, gloves, boots, and shields take 1 turn each; the shirt is instant. A full Hawaiian-shirt-to-cloak swap can mean six exposed turns, and you take all incoming attacks during them, so save armor changes for a clear room or a corridor at your back.

Speed

Divide before you engage. The single most useful number in a fight is the monster’s speed divided by your effective speed: that ratio is how many times it acts for every action you take. A base-12 hero against a speed-18 centaur sees a ratio of 1.5, so the centaur lands three hits for every two of yours and wins a melee duel. Slip on speed boots (effective ~20) and the ratio flips to 0.9, and now it’s your fight. Against an air elemental at speed 36, the ratio is 3.0 unboosted and 1.8 even with boots, still hopeless on foot. Ranged or skip. A ratio above 1.0 is a fight you lose to attrition unless you can drop the monster in your opening burst; a ratio below 1.0 is kiteable, so back into a corridor and strike between its steps.

Under the hood. Your base speed is 12, and so is the cost of any action. Each creature builds up a private counter; when nobody can afford to move, every counter advances by that creature’s speed, and that repeats until someone can act. A faster creature’s counter simply fills more often, which is why the ratio above holds. Monster speeds come from the bestiary: zombies at 6, gnomes at 12, centaurs at 18, vampire bats at 20, air elementals at 36.

Intrinsic speed comes in two probabilistic tiers. Fast (from certain corpses) adds a +12 bonus to roughly one allocation in three, averaging effective speed ~16. Very Fast (speed boots, potion of speed, haste self) adds the same bonus to two allocations in three, averaging ~20. The roll is per-allocation, not sustained, so any single tense round may or may not give you the extra; the average is reliable over many actions. Very Fast doesn’t stack with Fast; the better state wins. Speed boots are the cleanest source: a worn passive that costs no inventory slot and no spell-pool drain.

Encumbrance shaves the allocation directly. It reduces the points your allocation gives you, before the intrinsic bonus is applied:

A Stressed character with intrinsic Fast still moves slower than a baseline Unencumbered one. At Stressed, a speed-6 zombie acts more often than you do. Get to Unencumbered, ideally with a bag of holding.

Reference: common monster speeds.

Speed boots earn their slot against the fast monsters. Against a speed-6 zombie your ratio only creeps from 0.5 to 0.3, but against a speed-18 centaur it drops from 1.5 to 0.9, the difference between losing a chase and winning a duel.

Two-Weapon Combat

Some roles can fight with a weapon in each hand, which looks impressive and gives a second swing per turn. The catch: each strike takes a flat to-hit and damage penalty by skill rank (−9/−7/−5/−3 to hit, −3/−1/0/+1 damage from Unskilled through Expert), and the loadout must be melee on both sides. No shield, no launcher, no thrown projectiles. Only Rogue and Samurai reach Expert; Valkyrie and Knight cap at Skilled; Barbarian at Basic; Rangers can’t two-weapon at all.

When the second swing pays off. The extra hit is worth its to-hit penalty only when your hit chance is already high and your damage is healthy. At Expert (−3/+1) with high enchantment against a moderate-AC target, a Samurai’s katana + wakizashi out-damages the katana alone on most rounds. At Skilled (−5/0) the math is roughly a wash. Below Skilled the penalty usually swallows the benefit, so a Knight or Barbarian is better off with one good weapon. The two-handed bonus (3/2 Strength damage on bimanual weapons) is a strong alternative for any role without a two-weapon skill.

Setting it up. There is no separate command for the off-hand; the second weapon lives in a “secondary” slot you fill with the swap command. Wield the off-hand weapon with w, press x to push it into the secondary slot, then w your main weapon, and finally press X (capital, the two-weapon toggle) to fight with both. Press X again to go back to one weapon. The off-hand has to be a one-handed melee weapon, and a cursed weapon in either hand jams the whole arrangement.

Ranged Combat

Hitting at distance is the dungeon’s most underrated advantage. Every turn a monster spends closing the gap is a turn you spend whittling its HP from a safer square. Rangers and Samurai live by their bows; every other role should set a quiver and reach for f more than they probably do. The toolkit:

Fire, throw, and swap commands.

• t is throw: pick an item from inventory and a direction.
• f is fire: throws whatever is in your quiver without re-prompting. Once set, repeated f is the fastest ranged attack you have.
• Q sets the quiver: pick the default thrown stack (arrows for a Ranger, daggers for a Rogue, shuriken or arrows for a Samurai). Set it once at the start of the run.
• x swaps primary and secondary weapons. Wield your bow, set a melee weapon as secondary, and x toggles between them. The common Ranger pattern is: shoot at range, swap to a dagger when the monster closes, swap back to the bow once it’s dead.

Launchers and ammo. Bows (bow, elven bow, orcish bow, yumi) shoot arrows; crossbows shoot bolts (harder per shot but slower, and they need Str 18 for full multishot, or Str 16 for gnomes); slings shoot rocks or gems. Polearms strike at distance 2 with a (apply) instead. You can also throw daggers, darts, shuriken, javelins, and boomerangs without a launcher.

Lining up the shot. Projectiles travel in a straight line and can’t bend around a corner or shoot diagonally through a closed doorway. If a monster is across a zigzag corridor, advance until the line opens. The shot stops at the first solid target along the path: if your pet is between you and the monster, you’ll hit the pet. The same rules apply to wand zaps and spell rays.

Multishot. With the right skill and role, a single f launches multiple projectiles per turn. Rangers get +1 on any non-dagger ranged weapon; Rogues get +1 on thrown daggers; Samurai get +1 on shuriken and bow; Expert bow adds another +1; the Longbow of Diana adds +1 while wielded. At Expert with a matching role, two to four projectiles fly per keystroke. A Ranger spamming f at a closing centaur does the damage of three swings per turn before any enchantment bonus.

Conserving ammo. Each arrow or bolt has a per-hit break chance: roughly 67% for a +0 stack, 25% for a +2 stack. Train multishot on a cheap found stack; save your +2s for fights that need them. A Ranger who walks out of the upper dungeon with thirty unbroken +2 arrows has the best damage budget in the game.

Fighting Smart

The dungeon rewards cowardice, cunning, and property damage. The reliable way to win a fight in the Mazes is to make the fight unfair before it starts, and that means thinking about where you stand, when you swing, and what happens if it goes wrong. Here are the time-tested tactics that keep adventurers breathing.

Common Combat Deaths

Beyond the top ten, certain enemy categories kill more beginners than their depth or appearance would suggest. The shape of the threat is usually pack tactics, surprising speed, or one catastrophic special attack.

The Gnomish Mines are a top killer. This side branch is harder than it looks: Mines rooms are large open caves where four or five armed opponents have plenty of room to swarm around you. Use ranged attacks, or look for natural pinch points where the cave walls narrow. Dwarves hit harder than gnomes, and gnomish wizards (the first spellcasting enemy you meet) can sleep you, confuse you, and worse. Lords and kings appear deeper, with differently colored G and h glyphs. Take a look at the first Mines level, but it is usually wise to come back later after you are at XL 5 or better, have sleep resistance, and have AC at zero or below.

Sleep without resistance is a near-instadeath. A homunculus (i) bite, a gnomish wizard’s sleep spell, or later an orange dragon or Nazgul breath puts you to sleep for several turns. If you are alone in a corridor it costs you a couple of rounds. If you are surrounded by anything else, the surrounding monsters hit you freely while you cannot move. Sleep resistance comes from any elf, elven mummy, or giant corpse, and from several roles’ starting kits (Wizard’s cloak of MR, Ranger’s elven cloak). Eat for it before descending into the Mines or the lower Quest.

Bats and other speedsters (B). Bats and giant bats clock in at speed 22, nearly twice your starting 12. They get two attacks for every one of yours, and a 1d4 bite at double rate chews through low HP fast. Ravens and vampire bats are speed 20 with two attacks each (and the vampire bat’s second bite drains Strength). The defense is positioning, not HP totals: fight from a doorway so they cannot kite around you, or kill them at range. Centaurs (speed 18 to 20) and vortices raise the same problem later on.

Ants and other pack travelers (a). Soldier ants are speed 18 with two attacks (bite plus a Strength-draining sting) and travel in groups. A wandering soldier-ant pack on Dlvl 4 can end a careless run. Killer bees, giant ants, and fire ants are the same shape of problem. Treat any chittering or buzzing on an unexplored level as a reason to back up and find a chokepoint before the pack closes.

Quadrupeds (q). Rothes are three-attack pack hunters at sluggish speed 9: a single one is easy to outrun, but three in a room is several real fights stacked together. Mumakil are solo two-attack bruisers (4d12 butt plus 2d6 bite) that hit harder than anything else in the upper dungeon. Both wander mid-level rooms.

Golems ('). Most are slow but several hit disproportionately hard. The rope golem grapples on a hugs attack and pins you in place for adjacent friends to chew on. Clay and stone golems deliver 3d10 and 3d8 in a single claw. The iron golem is the endgame model: level 18, 4d10 weapon plus a 4d6 poison-gas breath that drains Strength, and resistant to fire, cold, electricity, sleep, and poison. Most golems leave no corpse, so they cannot be eaten for intrinsics. Kill them quickly and at range when you can.

Water demons from fountains (&). Quaffing a fountain summons a water demon roughly 1 quaff in 30. Water demons are major demons (class &, level 8) who attack first and grant a wish only if you survive. Wish odds also drop with depth, so casual quaffing pays worse the deeper you go. Don’t quaff from fountains until you have magic resistance, reflection, or a clear path of retreat.

Floating eyes (e). Hit one in melee and you’re paralyzed for ~70 turns; whatever passes by during the nap kills you. Kill at range, then eat the corpse for telepathy.

Minotaurs (H, in the Castle and maze levels of Gehennom). Three attacks (two 3d10 claws and a 2d8 head-butt) averaging about 42 damage per turn. The hardest hitter short of the Riders themselves (the three near-unkillable horsemen who guard the endgame). Use a wand of sleep, a thrown potion of paralysis (with free action), or just dig down before they reach you.

Major demons gate in more major demons. Every melee hit from a major demon has roughly a 1-in-13 chance of summoning another. A single bad fight in Gehennom can cascade into an arena.

Deadly Mistakes

Routine mistakes kill more adventurers than exotic instadeaths. The list below is sorted roughly by frequency on the public server.

Eating mistakes. Old corpses cause food poisoning, poisonous corpses (deadly poison) drop you fast, and eating while Satiated risks choking. Watch your nutrition before committing to a heavy corpse, and pray immediately if you ate something you shouldn’t have.

Reading unidentified scrolls in a shop. A confused or cursed scroll of teleportation level-teles you out of the shop with the unpaid merchandise still in your pack, turning the shopkeeper hostile when you return. A scroll of fire destroys shop goods you are liable for. Save the price-ID session for outside.

Mount slips and riding accidents. Getting on a steed rolls against your experience level plus the steed’s tameness; a failure costs 10 to 14 HP. The dangerous cases are a cursed or greased saddle (the slip is essentially guaranteed and the fall hurts). The Confused or Fumbling or Glib cases just have worse odds, and a barely-tame pony at experience level 2 is a coin flip.

Pet kills. Kittens, little dogs, housecats, and ponies all appear on the death list, almost always because the player put on a ring of conflict and forgot to take it off. Remove the ring before walking back to your pet.

Boiling and shattering potions. Hot ground in Gehennom shatters any potion you drop on the floor, and the shrapnel is deadly. Keep potions in a bag once you descend below the Castle. Bagging your potion and scroll stash earlier is also wise: a yellow dragon’s lightning bolt shatters every loose potion in your pack, and a fire trap incinerates loose scrolls.

Killed by your own wand. Self-zapped attack wands, rays ricocheting off a wall in a narrow corridor and back into your face. Engrave-test wands before pointing them at yourself.

Killed by a grid bug. The weakest monster in the game gets the last hit on someone who walked away from a real fight at 2 HP, or who decided to read a scroll on the turn one was adjacent. Don’t read scrolls under threat.

Killed by kicking. Kicking sinks summons a black pudding, a foocubus, or worse. Kicking doors can break your toe. Kicking locked chests can electrocute you. Kick what you mean to kick, and only when you can spare the consequence.

Wrath of a god. You prayed when your god wasn’t willing. See Divine Relations for the prayer cooldown and what counts as “trouble” worth a prayer.

Scroll of genocide while confused. Confused genocide removes your role’s own species from the world (Valkyrie, Wizard, Samurai). You become the genocide. Don’t read scrolls under confusion unless you already know what they are.

Scroll of earth on yourself. Buried under a pile of boulders you summoned on your own head.

The median death is a preventable swarm of jackals on Dlvl 3.

A note on dragons

Dragons deserve a full briefing. Each color has its own breath weapon, resistance, scale mail property, and degree of desire to kill you specifically. The summary:

Gray dragon scale mail grants magic resistance, the most important defensive property in the game. Gray dragons are the ones you most want to kill for their skin, and also the ones most likely to make you regret trying.

Silver dragon scale mail grants reflection. The second pillar of not dying to wands.

Black dragons disintegrate everything you’re wearing along with you, including your magic resistance. Carry reflection or eat enough black dragons to grow disintegration resistance before going where they live. Their scale mail grants disintegration resistance plus drain resistance, a rare extrinsic source of the latter.

Yellow dragon scale mail is an underrated pick. Listed power is acid resistance, but it also grants stoning resistance, the same outright immunity acid blob corpses give. If you find a yellow dragon and don’t already have stone-res, killing it is worth the trip. Yellow dragons are rare, though.

Orange dragon scale mail grants sleep resistance and free action (the ring’s effect), bundled into one slot.

White dragon scale mail grants cold resistance and slow digestion, a useful nutritional save on long descents.

Red dragon scale mail grants fire resistance and infravision, the same effect as a ring of infravision or being elven.

Green dragon scale mail grants poison resistance and sickness resistance. A pair of niche defenses in one slot.

Blue dragon scale mail grants shock resistance and intrinsic speed, same tier as speed boots. (Wearing both at once doesn’t make you faster; either alone reaches Very Fast.) One of the most powerful body slots in the game.

Gold dragons breathe fire. Their scale mail has no resistance power but is permanently lit (radius 4 blessed, 3 uncursed, 2 cursed). The only body-slot light source in the game, and it lets you abandon torches and oil. It also confers hallucination resistance.

All scale mails are dragonhide, body-slot, +9 AC worn (the best in the body slot), and resist disenchantment naturally. The choice of which color to chase is usually whichever dragon’s territory you can reach safely; about one in three adult-dragon kills drops a set of scales, which you can wear directly or convert to scale mail by reading a non-cursed scroll of enchant armor while wearing them.

A note on mimics

Mimics are an early-game over-leveled threat: their claws hit hard enough to kill a low-level character outright, and small mimics rank in the top ten causes of death. The reprieve is that all mimics are slow (speed 3, less than half your base speed). If you uncloak one and don’t like the matchup, walk away, heal up, gain a few levels, and come back. The mimic isn’t going anywhere.

You meet them mostly in shops: an average shop has one or two in the aisles masquerading as merchandise, with more as you descend.

The visual tell. A mimic appearing as a generic “strange object” renders on the map as ], a mirror of [, the armor class. No real item ever displays as ]. A ] on a shop floor or anywhere else is always a mimic.

How to uncover one safely. Search the adjacent square (s) reveals concealed mimics like it reveals traps. Throw a cheap item at the suspected square; the mimic uncloaks and the item lands harmlessly. A stethoscope applied to the square also uncloaks. Telepathy, ESP, astral vision, and a wand of secret door detection see through the disguise and show the mimic as m. Your pet won’t step onto a mimic.

Recognizing a large mimic before it grabs you. Once an m is uncloaked you see its color: small mimics are brown, large mimics red, giant mimics magenta. That gives you a free look before committing to melee. Depth also helps: large and giant mimics don’t generally appear until mid-dungeon, so almost every mimic in the upper levels is a (still very dangerous) small one. If your throw uncovers a red or magenta m, do not step into sticking range without a plan.

Sticking. Large and giant mimics glue you in place on a successful claw hit: you can’t move, you can’t go down stairs, you can’t escape down a hole. Magic cancellation (cloak of protection, amulet of guarding, etc.) reduces the sticking chance, one more reason to secure MC before browsing mid-game shops.

Eating the corpse turns you into a pile of gold (or, while hallucinating, an orange) for 20 / 40 / 50 turns depending on size. Anything that tries to pick “you” up snaps the spell.

A note on nymphs

The n class (wood, water, mountain) doesn’t want to kill you. She wants your inventory. Each successful claw hit lifts a random item from your pack, and the nymph then teleports away to a random spot on the same level. Your bag of holding, your amulet of reflection, a freshly-wished cloak of magic resistance: gone, across the map, often into a room you haven’t explored. No dungeon horror story is more universal than “a nymph walked off with my bag of holding.”

The second claw is seduction. Nymphs get two attacks per turn, and the seduction half drains experience levels if the nymph is the opposite gender of your character. A successful seduction can also strip a ring or amulet you’re wearing. A single bump can rob you, drop your XL, and snatch the cloak off your shoulders, all in one round.

Defenses. Kill at range (darts, force bolt, a wand of anything). Engrave Elbereth: nymphs respect it. Or drop your most irreplaceable items on the floor before approaching. Whatever’s not in your pack can’t be stolen.

Already robbed? A satiated nymph stays on the same level unless she later falls through a trapdoor or wanders onto a staircase. Her corpse drops what she stole, so it’s often worth sweeping the level you were on before moving on.

Never engage a nymph while carrying the Amulet of Yendor during the Ascension Run. If she steals it, you abandon your climb to sweep the current level for her corpse, and the mysterious force does not pause while you search.

A note on puddings

Puddings are the dungeon’s signature self-multiplying monsters, and their leftover globs are also among the best food you can find. The class lives in the mid-dungeon and Gehennom. Brown and black puddings split when you hit them with an iron or metal weapon: one becomes two, two becomes four, and your long-sword grinding session turns into a swarm. Black pudding additionally corrodes your wielded weapon on its passive return-hit, so each round of splitting is also a step toward your blade rusting away. Most beginners discover puddings the same way: by feeding them their best weapon and watching the population graph go up.

Defenses. Melee with a silver or wooden weapon (silver dagger, elven dagger, athame, club, quarterstaff). These don’t trigger the split. Mithril also bypasses the check. Wands of cold and fire kill puddings outright with no split, and most spells work too.

Gray ooze doesn’t split, but it rusts armor on a hit; don’t engage in your starting iron suit if you can avoid it.

Eat the globs. A pudding leaves a glob rather than a corpse, and the globs are some of the best food in the game. One difference between a glob and a corpse is that you cannot sacrifice globs at an altar, so puddings can’t be farmed for offerings. The globs are slow to spoil (about 500 turns of edibility, twice a normal corpse) and packed with resistances. A brown-pudding glob grants cold, shock, and poison resistance over repeated eats; a gray-ooze glob grants fire, cold, and poison resistance; a black-pudding glob also grants cold, shock, and poison resistance. Brown pudding and gray ooze are vegetarian-safe; black pudding is not. Globs of the same color stack, and each bite is an independent roll for the resistance. A pile of brown-pudding globs is multiple chances at the one you don’t yet have. Pudding splitting can have a strategic benefit. If you can kill one pudding cleanly, the splitting becomes a feature: very divided pudding is another glob to eat. The full intrinsic table is in Useful Corpse Effects.

A note on trolls

The T class doesn’t stay dead. After you kill a troll, its corpse sits on the floor for a few hidden turns and then stands back up at full HP, fresh and angry. A pile of corpses after a five-troll fight is a timer, not a kill count. Walk away for twenty turns and the same five trolls are coming back. The veteran’s lament “I beat the trolls, I got cocky, the trolls beat me” is one of the most repeated stories on the public boards.

Stopping the revival. The simplest cure is to eat the corpse, since trolls are safe to eat for everyone but vegetarians. You can also tin it with a tin opener, apply a magic whistle to call a pet over to eat it, zap a wand of teleportation at the corpse to send it off-level, or destroy it with a wand of striking. In Gehennom, kicking the corpse onto a lava square works in one move.

Trolls drop their gear when they die. A revived troll re-collects what it was carrying, so a revive-and-recollect cycle leaves piles of mixed troll-gear and dead-troll bodies on the same square. Pick up the gear before they wake up. The loot is yours either way.

Class members. Plain troll, ice troll, rock troll, water troll, and the late-game Olog-hai. All revive, and the corpse behaves the same way regardless of variant. The Olog-hai is the variant to fear, a three-attack hitter at level 13. Fighting the same Olog-hai twice in twenty turns is the experience that turns a careless run into a careful one.

A note on wraiths

The W class has a touch attack that drains an experience level, one of the few permanent character setbacks in the game. You lose stat points, hit points, mana, and the most recent skill slot. There is no easy undo, and the wraith can land the touch again if you let it. The standard advice is to fear the wraith on first sight and plan the kill from across the room.

The corpse, though, is one of the most valuable consumables in the game. Eating a fresh wraith corpse grants you a level, the inverse operation. The recipe is to kill the wraith carefully and then eat the corpse the moment it drops. The touch is melee-range only, so engage at distance or from inside a corridor where you control the spacing. Wraith corpses spoil quickly, so hesitation costs you the trade.

Farming wraiths. Mid-to-late-game players actively hunt wraiths in the upper Quest and throughout Gehennom for free XP. A cursed scroll of genocide naming “wraith” reverse-genocides four to six fresh wraiths at your feet, a ready-made banquet if you can drop each one in the turn it arrives. The classic setup is to stand on stairs (so you can escape if it goes wrong), drop a stack of cursed scrolls, and graze. Some ascending heroes credit a wraith binge for the experience levels that carried them through Gehennom.

A note on Seduction

The amorous demon (&, gray) appears as a succubus to male heroes and an incubus to female ones. A same-sex foocubus just claws at you and never starts the seduction. The encounter is a Cha+Int gamble: five bad outcomes vs. five good ones, plus a payment phase. Handled badly it can drain a level, an attribute, and 6–15 HP; handled well it grants a level, an attribute, full HP, and extra max Pw.

Mechanics. The demon must be adjacent and not on cooldown. It strips off your worn armor one piece at a time (cloak, suit, boots, gloves, shield, helm, shirt). The items are unequipped to your inventory, not taken or dropped on the floor; the only thing the strip costs you is the slot for the rest of the encounter. You get a yes/no prompt before each piece comes off with probability Cha/20 (so Cha 18 prompts about 9 times in 10; Cha 10 about half the time). If you’re still wearing a body armor or cloak when the strip ends, the encounter ends right there and the demon walks away. A hard-to-remove suit is the simplest defense.

If you do get to the act, the outcome rolls against your combined Cha+Int (capped at 32). At the cap the bad-outcome chance is about 6%; at Cha+Int = 20 it’s about 40%; at 10 it’s nearly 70%. Check your stats before you accept.

The demon then charges 500+ zorkmids (high Cha can refuse; peaceful demons charge 1/5). Being asleep or otherwise unresponsive defers the attempt entirely.

Strategic note. At high Cha+Int the encounter is net-positive, and the armor-removal step strips cursed worn pieces too, an amorous demon can be the cheapest curse-removal in the dungeon. Some players keep one alive to farm XP and attributes. Don’t try this at experience level 1, though: the level-drain outcome is fatal.

A note on Light Bursts

Yellow lights (y, level 3) and black lights (y, level 5) attack by exploding the moment you’re adjacent. Yellow lights blind you for 10d20 turns (a blessed potion of healing or any extra/full healing cures, or a unicorn horn); black lights hallucinate you for 10d12 turns (unicorn horn cures, or wait). Both lights die in the explosion, so the after-effect is the real threat. Defenses: kill them at range — wands, thrown daggers, breath weapons. Warning detects them through their invisibility; telepathy does not (mindless).

Attack Wands and the Warning Shot

Being hit by a powerful wand can mean instant death. A wand of death or finger of death kills an unprotected character outright, and ray wands of cold, fire, lightning, or magic missile can roll lethal damage too. But the first time any given monster zaps a beam wand (death, sleep, fire, cold, lightning, magic missile) at you, the shot misses. If you can see the monster, the wand identifies itself in the same moment, so now you know what was just aimed at you and you have a turn to do something about it before the next zap connects.

Choking

If you push past Satiated and keep eating, you can choke and die. The game prints “You’re having a hard time getting all of it down” as a warning; if you have eating-confirmations turned on it’ll also prompt you. Past a hard nutrition threshold the choke check fires and, unless you’re Breathless or pass a 1-in-20 escape, kills you instantly.

The other path to choking is the amulet of strangulation. Worn, it puts a short countdown on your throat and kills you when it runs out. The amulet generates cursed 90% of the time, so you usually can’t just take it off: pray, or uncurse it with holy water or remove curse. Magic resistance doesn’t help; strangulation isn’t an attack, it’s a timer death. Polymorphing into a Breathless form does save you.

Defense: Don’t eat above Satiated. Be paranoid about unidentified amulets.

Starvation

This isn’t technically instant, but it feels like it. If your nutrition drops to zero, you faint. If you don’t eat something while fainted, you die. In the early game before you’ve established a food supply, starvation is a real threat.

Defenses: Eat corpses promptly. Pray when your god is willing and you are Weak or Fainting (prayer cures hunger). Carry food rations, tripe rations, or lembas wafers. Don’t let nutrition management slide.

Famine, one of the three Riders in the endgame, will kill you quickly through starvation by draining 40–80 nutrition per hit, without any extrinsic that blocks it. At the end of the game, be sure to enter the Astral Plane Satiated and carry a stack of food rations through the fight, or you will be Faint soon after Famine hits.

Deadly Poison

A handful of monsters (pit vipers, killer bees, cobras, some spiders) have a poison-damage branch that can deliver 10 to 34 extra HP of damage on top of the normal hit. At full HP you usually survive; at low HP it can outright kill you. The “extra-damage” roll fires about 1 in 240 per qualifying hit. Eating any Rider corpse (Death, Pestilence, or Famine) is genuinely instantly fatal regardless of HP.

Defenses: Poison resistance makes you immune. Most characters can get this early by eating enough appropriate corpses. It’s one of the first intrinsics worth acquiring.

Brainlessness

Mind flayers drain Intelligence with their tentacle attacks. If your Intelligence drops to your racial minimum (3 for humans), the next drain kills you: “brainlessness.” A regular mind flayer has three tentacle attacks per turn; the master mind flayer has five, plus a heavier weapon strike. A single unprepared turn next to a master mind flayer can drop your Int by up to ten. Each hit also has a 1-in-5 chance to trigger spell amnesia: a random number of your spells (up to all of them) drop to zero retention; re-study spellbooks to restore. Independently, each hit has another 1-in-5 chance to drain one or two of your weapon skills — Basic falls back to Unskilled, Expert to Skilled, and so on. Skill loss has to be earned back the slow way at training posts; pack a long fight against a mind flayer carefully.

Defenses: Wear any helmet. Even a plain orcish helm blocks seven of every eight tentacle drains. Greasing the helmet stacks an additional slip-off roll on top, so a greased helmet is the gold standard. Better yet, kill them at range (wands, spells) so the question doesn’t arise. One counterintuitive detail: a mind flayer’s mind blast only fires if you have telepathy. If you’re wearing an amulet of ESP and you can spare the turn, take it off before the fight. To recover drained Intelligence you need a potion of restore ability (uncursed restores one stat; blessed restores all), the spell of restore ability, or prayer when you’re in good standing. In 5.0 the unicorn horn no longer restores lost attributes, so don’t rely on it. Stockpile at least one restore ability before pushing into mind flayer territory.

Engulfment

Two monsters hide in plain sight until you walk into them. The lurker above (t, gray, level 10) hides on the ceiling and drops onto whoever passes underneath; the trapper (t, green, level 12) hides on the floor and engulfs whoever steps onto it. Both look like ordinary terrain until they trigger. Their engulfment wraps and crushes rather than digesting.

Other engulfers don’t hide; they just swallow you in melee. Dragons and purple worms can swallow whole creatures up to their size. Dragons tend to be polite about it (you escape after one or two turns); purple worms are the bigger danger, and the dread fog cloud and air elemental count as engulfers too even though they don’t digest.

Defenses: Searching reveals hidden monsters. Telepathy shows them through the deception. Wearing a ring of warning or a helm of caution tips you off before you step.

Getting out. Once engulfed, attack the host repeatedly; weapons still work from inside. If you have a wand of digging, zap it (no direction needed): it almost always expels you immediately, leaving the engulfer at 1 HP. A wand of opening or the knock spell forces the engulfer to release you on the spot without killing it, useful if a tame purple worm has swallowed you in conflict. Ranged spells and rays will tear into the host from the inside.

Drowning

Giant eels, electric eels, and krakens can grab you with their wrap attack. Once they have you, each of the monster’s turns you can drown. The check uses the monster’s tile (always water for an eel or kraken), not yours, so you can drown even while standing on adjacent dry land. Only Swimming, magical breathing, or amphibious form prevent the drown; encumbrance doesn’t matter here. (Encumbrance only matters if you fall into water and need to crawl out; Stressed or worse forces emergency disrobe.) You’ll meet eels and krakens at Medusa’s level, in moats around the Castle, in swamp rooms, and on the Water Plane.

Defenses: An amulet (or spell) of magical breathing gives you Breathless and ends the grab-drown threat. Levitation keeps you above pools so you can’t walk into them, but does not save you from an eel’s grab once it lands. Kill sea monsters at range whenever possible; their grab attack requires adjacency.

Petrification (Stoning)

Petrification is the dungeon’s most notorious way to instantly kill you, and the reason every experienced player carries a lizard corpse. Touching a cockatrice without gloves, eating a cockatrice corpse, catching Medusa’s gaze, or kicking a cockatrice corpse barefoot will turn you to stone. Stepping on the corpse is safe so long as you don’t have Fumbling (Fumbling can trip you over the corpse for instant death). The process is sometimes immediate; otherwise a five-turn countdown announces itself with “You are slowing down,” “Your limbs are stiffening,” “Your limbs have turned to stone” (at which point you are paralyzed and can no longer act), “You have turned to stone,” and “You are a statue” (death).

Defenses ahead of time: wear gloves around cockatrice corpses, use reflection against Medusa, and pile up timed stoning resistance from acid blob corpses (each one grants a few hundred turns of resistance: useful but not permanent). For something permanent, wear yellow dragon scale mail.

Peril in the new moon. A cockatrice’s hiss has a small chance to start stoning on any landed melee hit (roughly 1 in 30). On the real-world night of a new moon, that jumps to about 1 in 3. Hunt the nest on another night.

Defenses while it’s happening: eat a lizard corpse (this is why you carry one), eat an acidic corpse, drink a potion of acid, pray, or cast stone-to-flesh on yourself. Keep the lizard in your main inventory, not in a bag: pulling it out of a bag takes a turn you can’t spare. Act before the “Your limbs have turned to stone” message; after that you’re paralyzed for three turns and the final messages kill you. Amulet of Unchanging does not interrupt stoning. If you happen to be polymorphed into a non-stone golem, wearing it during the countdown is actively harmful; it blocks the stone-golem auto-poly that would otherwise save you on death.

Out of lizards? Any acidic corpse will do: acid blob, jellies, yellow dragon, black naga, and yes, green slime works (but green slime starts a different countdown that turns you to slime; only reach for it as a last resort). Quaffing a potion of acid has the same curative effect.

The other side of the coin: a wielded cockatrice corpse (with gloves on) is one of the game’s most devastating weapons. anything you hit that lacks stoning resistance turns to stone. The classic offense, known to veterans as the “rubber chicken,” handles demon lords, Medusa, and even a Rider on a good day. The failure modes you must guard against are falling into a pit, hole, or trapdoor while carrying it, and losing the gloves. Thrown cockatrice eggs work the same way and have the same hazard if a monster throws one at you.

Disintegration

A black dragon’s breath is the only monster, spell, or wand that disintegrates you. (A deeply angered god can also call down a wide-angle disintegration beam as a follow-up to lightning; reflection won’t block that one. Only disintegration resistance will. Stay on speaking terms with your god.)

Defenses: Disintegration resistance (from eating a black dragon corpse or wearing black dragon scale mail) gives full immunity. Reflection bounces the breath back, protecting you, but black dragons are themselves disintegration-resistant, so the bounce won’t kill them. Magic resistance does not help.

Without disintegration resistance, your worn armor takes the breath first: the shield destroys first if you have one, then your body armor; only if neither is worn do you die outright (with your cloak and shirt destroyed in the process). So an ordinary shield at least eats one breath for you before being lost. An amulet of life saving still rescues you from the fatal case, though you lose any armor it took.

Level Drain

A recurring theme in the bestiary: certain monsters reduce your experience level on a hit, taking the HP and power gains that came with each lost level. Wraiths, barrow wights, Nazgul, vampires, vampire leaders, and Vlad himself all carry level-drain attacks. Stormbringer in an enemy’s hand does the same. Drained levels do not come back on their own. You re-earn them by killing more monsters, by drinking a potion of restore ability (a blessed one restores all lost levels at once), or by eating a wraith corpse.

(Don’t confuse drain-life with Strength drain: a vampire bat’s poisoned bite drains Str, not levels. Stat drain is a separate problem and Enchantment Drain covers its cousin.)

Defenses: Drain resistance makes you immune. The classic sources are wielding Excalibur (Lawful), Stormbringer (Chaotic), or the Staff of Aesculapius (Healer’s quest artifact). New in 5.0: wearing black dragon scale mail (disintegration resistance plus drain resistance, both in one slot) or a shield of drain resistance (random shop find, no other property).

Eating a fresh wraith corpse restores one experience level and is one of the better reasons to keep one fresh; wraith corpses are weightless and can’t be tinned (no nutrition), so eat them as soon as the fight ends.

Enchantment Drain

Disenchanters (R, blue) appear only in Gehennom. Their claw is the silent ascension-killer it’s reputed to be, but the mechanic is more constrained than common lore suggests.

Their active claw picks one of your worn armor pieces (cloak first, then suit, then shirt, then helm, gloves, boots, or shield by weighted chance) and shaves 1 off its enchantment. If you have no armor at all, it can instead chew a ring, amulet, or blindfold. It can’t reach your wielded weapon with the active attack. The game does print “Your thing seems less effective” each time, so you’ll know when it lands.

Your weapon only takes enchantment damage as a passive counter when you hit them in melee. Three or four melee strikes will take a +7 sword to +3; that passive drain is silent. Range-killing sidesteps both attacks at once.

Defenses. Magic-cancellation armor at MC3 mostly blocks their armor drain but doesn’t stop the melee counter that drains your weapon. Rings of conflict and pets redirect them to other targets. Artifacts resist drain 9 times in 10; ordinary items only 1 in 10. Don’t eat the corpse: it strips a random intrinsic.

The Touch of Death

Some monsters, most notably Death (one of the Riders on the Astral Plane), can kill you with a single touch. The Finger of Death spell and the wand of death work similarly. Do not zap a wand of death or finger of death at Death the Rider. Death absorbs the attack and gains max HP. Magic missile is the recommended answer against all three Riders.

Death the Rider’s touch rolls 1d20 each hit. Rolls 17-19 trigger the full 8d6 + 50 instakill attempt and permadrain half the damage from your max HP. Magic resistance fully blocks this high-damage branch. Rolls 5-16 (the most common 60%) deliver a smaller life-drain that MR does not block. Rolls 0-4 miss entirely. A high-level character with many hit points can survive the high-damage hit; the permadrain still hurts.

The wand of death and Finger of Death spell are gated by magic resistance only when the death ray hits you from outside. If you misfire and self-zap, MR doesn’t save you; only being nonliving (polymorphed into a vampire, lich, skeleton, etc.) or a demon will. The same nonliving/demon immunity also protects against incoming death rays.

An amulet of life saving will revive you once if the touch or zap kills you outright.

Genocide

Reading an uncursed scroll of genocide while confused can genocide your own species. Don’t do this.

Saving Yourself from Imminent Death

Not every fatal threat kills instantly. Several give you a few turns to react.

Sliming. Being hit by a green slime (or eating its glob, or being digested by one as a polyform) starts a ~10-turn transformation into a green slime yourself. Dead. Cures: burn the slime off with fire (a wand of fire zapped at yourself, a scroll of fire read at self, a fire trap, a red dragon’s breath); polymorph into a flame-bodied or slime-immune form; or cast the spell of cure sickness. An amulet of unchanging blocks the contagion entirely and even aborts a transformation already underway. Cancelling the green slime in melee prevents new infections but does nothing to a timer already running. Prayer would cure it, but green slime lives in Gehennom where prayer fails, so don’t plan on it. Fire is the most reliable cure.

Illness (food poisoning). Eating a rotten corpse or certain attacks (giant ant, etc.) gives you food poisoning, which kills in 10–19 turns (“You feel deathly sick.”). Cures: a unicorn horn (apply it), pray, eat a eucalyptus leaf, or vomit (by being satiated and eating more). Vomiting from other causes also cures food poisoning. Poison resistance does NOT protect against food poisoning. That is sickness resistance, a separate intrinsic.

Pestilence’s terminal illness is the harder cousin: vomiting won’t clear it, and the timer is Constitution-dependent (~20+Con turns). The cures that do work: unicorn horn, prayer, eucalyptus leaf.

Sinking in lava. Falling into lava without levitation or fire resistance gives you a few turns to escape before you sink and die. Your inventory is also at risk. Cures: prayer, levitation (put on levitation boots or a ring), teleport, or just step out if you can. Fire resistance prevents the damage but doesn’t prevent sinking. Lava immersion also destroys most of your inventory.

Drowning (being held). When grabbed by an eel or kraken in water, you have a few turns to escape before drowning. The drown check uses the eel’s tile, so levitation, water walking, and encumbrance status are irrelevant once the grab lands. Cures: magical breathing (amulet or spell), kill or teleport the eel before it pulls you under, or avoid water entirely. See Drowning above for the full picture.

Strangulation. A cursed amulet of strangulation slowly kills you. Cure: uncurse it first (scroll of remove curse, holy water, or prayer), then remove it.

Prayer

Praying (#pray) calls on your god for help. When conditions are right, prayer is the single most powerful emergency tool in the game. When conditions are wrong, it can kill you.

The mechanics below were inspired by Matthew Lahut’s Praying Spoiler, the long-running RGRN reference for the prayer system.

What prayer fixes (in priority order). Your god addresses your problems in a specific order, fixing the most urgent first:

1. Petrification in progress (stoning)
2. Sliming in progress
3. Strangulation
4. Sinking in lava
5. Illness (food poisoning, sickness)
6. Severe hunger (Weak or Fainting)
7. Standing in a stinking cloud
8. Critically low HP (≤5, or below a fraction of maxHP that scales with your experience level: 1/5 at XL 1–5, 1/6 at 6–13, 1/7 at 14–21, 1/8 at 22–29, 1/9 at XL 30+)
9. Lycanthropy
10. Stuck in a wall, collapsing under load, cursed levitation boots, unusable hands (cursed glove + cursed wielded weapon), cursed blindfold

After resolving the major troubles above, your god may also grant additional blessings: clearing minor afflictions (plain hunger, blindness, confusion, stunning, hallucination, ordinary punishment with iron ball and chain), improving your alignment, or even gifting intrinsics like telepathy or speed.

The requirements for a safe prayer. All of the following must be true:

• Your alignment must be non-negative. Killing peacefuls, robbing shops, and other misdeeds reduce alignment. Sacrifice and virtuous behavior raise it.
• Your luck must be non-negative. Luck is affected by many things (see Luck and Fortune).
• Your god must not be angry. God anger is separate from alignment and accumulates from specific offenses (breaking conduct with your god, desecrating altars).
• The prayer timeout must have expired. After a successful prayer, you must wait before praying again. The timeout averages around 450 turns but can range from under 200 to over 700 due to the random formula used. In a genuine emergency (HP critical, starving), there is some forgiveness if your timeout is close to expiring.
• You must not be polymorphed into a demon or undead while worshipping a non-chaotic god.
• You must not be in Gehennom (unless you worship Moloch, which no standard role does). Your god cannot hear you there. This is one of the things that makes Gehennom so dangerous.
• If you’re on an altar, it should be co-aligned. Praying on a cross-aligned altar directs your prayer to the wrong god.

When prayer goes wrong. If any requirement is unmet, your god responds with punishment instead of help: loss of alignment, loss of luck, increased timeout, cursing of worn items, or summoning of hostile minions. Severe transgressions (praying to a very angry god) can trigger lightning or disintegration, both potentially fatal.

Practical guidance. Pray when you’re about to die and have no other option. Starvation, stoning, illness, and critically low HP are all valid emergencies. Don’t waste prayers on minor inconveniences. Before you pray, make a mental check: is my alignment positive? Have enough turns passed? Am I on a co-aligned altar or no altar at all? If you can’t answer yes to these, find another solution.

Prayer timeout tracking. The game doesn’t show your timeout directly, but you can estimate it. Count roughly 500 turns from your last prayer (more if it went badly). In the early game, when turns are slow and you’re fighting one creature at a time, 500 turns pass quickly. In the late game, when you might take 100 actions per level, it takes longer to feel.

Sacrifice

Sacrifice is a trade: a corpse you could eat, given up to your god in exchange for divine help. Drop a fresh corpse on an altar that matches your alignment (#offer) and your god takes notice. Over time that notice pays out as artifact weapons, holy water, restored alignment, and eventually a crown.

The rules:

• The corpse must be fresh, killed within the last 50 turns. A corpse older than that has zero sacrifice value (the gods simply ignore it). Acid blob corpses are the one exception and never spoil for this purpose.
• Bigger monsters make more valuable sacrifices, and your god expects more impressive offerings as you advance. If the altar gives back “You have a feeling of inadequacy,” the corpse fell short of what your god was hoping for this time.
• The altar must match your alignment, or you’re praying to someone else’s god (which has its own consequences).
• Same-race sacrifice is forbidden and severely punished. On a lawful or neutral altar it turns the altar chaotic, which is no use unless you are chaotic yourself; on a chaotic altar it summons a demon.
• Two requirements before any gift can fire: you must be experience level 3 or higher, and your Luck must not be negative.

With enough sacrifice credit, your god may gift you an artifact weapon. The chance per qualifying sacrifice is roughly 1 in 6 for the first gift, then drops sharply for each subsequent gift. The drop depends on two things: how many gifts you have already received and how many artifacts exist in the game (yours, randomly generated, and from any bones files you have inherited). The second gift is more like 1 in 16 to 1 in 26 per sacrifice, and the third is in the dozens to hundreds. Don’t be surprised if you get one artifact and then nothing more for thousands of turns.

The first gift is biased toward an artifact that matches your alignment and a weapon skill you can use, which in practice usually means your role’s signature artifact (Magicbane for Wizards, Mjollnir for Valkyries, and so on). Sacrifice early to lock in that bias before the random pool dilutes it. Gift artifacts are always aligned to your god and always match a weapon skill you can use.

Worthiness floor: the gods filter the artifact pool by the sacrifice’s value, so a kobold corpse can roll for a gift but nothing interesting will come of it. Fresh corpses of appropriately challenging monsters are what advances your standing.

Donating to Priests

A peaceful priest in their own temple accepts donations. #chat to them and a prompt appears: How much will you offer (suggested: X or Y)? The two numbers are the priest’s suggested thresholds for the two reward tiers.

What you get:

• Clairvoyance. A few hundred turns of automatic short-range map awareness (you “see” the immediate area around you every few turns without moving). Granted if you offer in the lower tier.
• Protection. An intrinsic AC bonus that stacks across visits. Granted if you offer in the upper tier. Your first donation grants 2–4 points; subsequent donations add 1 each up to 9; past 9, the chance to get another point drops to 1-in-N. The bonus persists for life, unlike clairvoyance.

The cost. Pay enough and the benefit is yours. The priest’s prompt always shows you the exact ask, which scales with your experience level and how much gold you’re carrying:

• Clairvoyance: a randomized 150–250 zorkmids × experience level as the base ask
• Protection: twice that, 300 to 500 zorkmids × experience level

If you walk in carrying far more gold than the baseline, the priest scales the ask up to match, roughly a third of your purse for clairvoyance, two-thirds for protection. A rich hero who hands over only the baseline amount will be politely thanked but not blessed. The prompt always tells you the exact figure, so trust it over any rule of thumb.

The cheapskate penalty. If you offer noticeably less than what’s expected while clearly able to afford more, the priest calls you a Cheapskate and will hold a grudge: the next time you chat with that same priest, the cost will be higher. The penalty stacks if you keep doing it, and it sticks for the rest of the game. Other priests in other temples aren’t affected. Refusing to donate anything at all also costs you alignment with your god.

Practical guidance:

• Donate early, donate often. Protection stacks, so 500 zm at XL 1 buys the same AC reduction as 15000 zm at XL 30. Visiting the Minetown temple every time you climb back up from the Mines is a classic stacking ritual.
• Count gold before chatting. The priest’s roll is sensitive to what’s in your inventory; drop excess gold on the floor outside the temple before asking, then pick it back up.
• Cross-aligned priests still accept donations and still grant the AC and clairvoyance. You miss the alignment bonus and you can’t sacrifice on their altar, but the AC ramp still works.
• Walk away rather than lowball. Once the cheapskate flag is set on a priest, it doesn’t come off. If the suggested amount is more than you want to part with, decline the prompt entirely rather than offering a token sum.

Altars and Alignment

To convert a cross-aligned altar, sacrifice ordinary fresh corpses on it. Each attempt either flips the altar to your god (success), costs you Luck (failure), or, if your god is already angry, converts you to the altar’s alignment instead. Better odds at higher experience level. Worth the risk when you need a co-aligned altar for sacrifice gifts, holy water, or BUC testing.

Two complications worth knowing. A successful conversion can still summon a pair of hostile minions from the displaced god, arriving just as you exhale; have an exit plan in case the “victory” comes with company. And if you try this with a negative alignment record, the result inverts: instead of the altar flipping to your god, your god disowns you and you become a follower of the altar’s god permanently.

Two things to never sacrifice on any altar:

• A same-race corpse (humans for most roles; also elves if you’re elven). Punished on every altar; on a Chaotic one it summons a demon.
• A unicorn whose alignment matches the altar. Counts as an insult to that god.

Crowning

If your alignment record reaches 20 and your Luck reaches 10, your god may crown you on a successful prayer. Crowning grants:

• A special title (e.g., “Hand of Elbereth” for lawful characters).
• An artifact weapon appropriate to your alignment, if one is available that you can use. A Lawful crowning transforms whatever long sword you happen to be wielding into Excalibur in place, so having a +7 long sword in hand at the moment of crowning gives you a +7 Excalibur.
• Intrinsic fire resistance, cold resistance, shock resistance, sleep resistance, poison resistance, and see invisible.
• Permanent skill-unrestriction on your alignment’s sword slot, and permanent knowledge of your role’s special spell.
• A class-specific bonus: Wizards get the finger of death spell; Monks get restore ability.

The catch is that crowning adds about ~1000 turns of prayer timeout on top of the usual post-prayer wait, turning prayer into an unreliable emergency tool. If you’re sacrificing to fish for an artifact gift, watch your piousness so you don’t trigger a crowning by accident. Applying a stethoscope to yourself reports it in words, and piously is the highest band, the one in which the next sacrifice could crown you.

Starting Pets

Most roles begin with a faithful pet: a little dog or a kitten, depending on your role. This small creature is more useful than it looks. It follows you between levels (if adjacent when you take stairs), fights alongside you, picks up items, and eats food it finds on the floor. Think of it as a self-propelled, self-feeding trap detector with teeth.

A pet that eats well and fights often will grow. A little dog becomes a dog, then a large dog. A kitten becomes a housecat, then a large cat. A grown large dog or large cat is a genuine combat asset, capable of taking on mid-dungeon threats that would give you trouble.

One more thing: your pet usually avoids cursed items when there’s an uncursed alternative, which makes it a probabilistic curse-detector. Drop items on the ground and watch what your pet walks past versus what it walks around. If it has no choice, it will still cross the cursed square, but consistent avoidance across many turns is a strong tell. Even when it does step onto a cursed pile (chasing food, or pulled by a magic whistle), the game prints “[pet] moves reluctantly onto …”. That message is a giveaway.

Feeding and Loyalty

Pets have an invisible tameness score that decreases when they go hungry past the threshold, when you leave them behind on another level for too many turns, or when you hit them. (Combat damage from other monsters doesn’t reduce tameness.) When tameness hits zero, the pet either goes untame-but-peaceful or turns fully hostile. Feeding is the antidote:

• Dogs and cats love tripe rations and most meat
• Horses prefer apples, carrots, and other vegetarian fare

Tripe rations are ideal for dogs and cats. You’ll find them scattered through the dungeon. Always pick them up, even though they’re revolting food for humans. Your pet will adore you for it.

Taming New Creatures

If your starting pet perishes (or you want an army), several methods of taming exist:

• Throwing food at a suitable creature: meat for dogs and cats, produce for horses
• Scroll of taming or spell of charm monster both route through the same handler and tame all eligible creatures within a 3×3 radius. Reading the scroll while confused widens that to 11×11 (but you can’t cast the spell while confused).
• Magic trap effects occasionally produce taming

Taming isn’t limited to small animals: with a scroll of taming or the charm monster spell, you can recruit a purple worm to swallow your enemies whole (its growing tail will sprawl across the room and get in the way of your shots), a dragon to breathe fire at them, a titan to crush them underfoot. The exclusion list is substantial, though: no humans (priests, shopkeepers, watchmen, soldiers, kings), no covetous monsters (the Wizard, liches, masters), no demons (unless you are one), no vault guards, quest leaders, nor minions can be tamed. Unique monsters (Medusa, etc.) also resist.

What Pets Do for You

A well-fed pet earns its keep in several ways:

• Combat muscle. A strong pet clears rooms and softens up dangerous monsters before you engage
• Curse detection. The old drop-and-watch trick, described above: free, reliable, and available from turn one
• Shoplifting. If your pet picks up an item inside a shop and carries it out the door, the shopkeeper blames the animal, not you. This takes patience (the pet must wander onto the item, then wander back out) but it’s the cheapest way to acquire a wand of wishing from a shop
• Sacrifice fodder. Monsters your pet kills leave corpses you can sacrifice on altars, exactly as if you’d killed them yourself

Training apport (fetching). Hand-feeding your pet builds a score called apport. A pet with high apport will pick up nearby items and bring them to you. This is what makes pet-shoplifting practical: once your pet returns dropped items reliably, you can drop something at the shop counter, walk out, and trust the pet to follow with the goods. Pair it with a magic whistle (below) to yank a loaded pet to your side from anywhere on the level.

Upgrading your pet. Three moves matter most.

• A magic whistle teleports every tame creature on the level to a spot next to you each time you blow it. Distance doesn’t matter; trapped pets get freed in the process.
• Tame a warhorse early (throw apples or carrots) and you have a fast, hard-hitting mount before mid-game.
• Late in the run, polymorph your pet into a stronger form. Titan is a popular target: level 16, speed 18, flies, throws boulders, and casts spells. Faster than anything else this strong, so it keeps up with a speed-boosted hero, and the spell-cast attack threatens at range. Balrog hits harder but is speed 5, slow enough that anything that runs gets away. Gray dragon is an alternative when you specifically want the magic-resistance intrinsic and a body that won’t accidentally re-polymorph.
• If you can tame an Archon directly (via a scroll of taming on a hostile, magic-whistle recall of one you tamed earlier, or a conflict-ring accident), do it. The Archon is the ultimate pet: level 19, speed 16, AC −6, magic resistance, sees invisible, flies, regenerates, and a multi- attack that includes a blinding gaze and a spell-cast. You cannot polymorph a pet into an Archon: you must encounter one and tame it.

Keeping Your Pet Alive

Pets die from the same things you do: traps, poison, powerful monsters, drowning in water. Keep an eye on your companion’s health (; to farlook) and don’t lead it into fights it can’t win. A dead pet is not just a loss of utility; it’s a cold feeling in the pit of your stomach.

If you change levels and your pet isn’t adjacent, it won’t follow. Your pet is still alive on the previous level. Its loyalty is ticking down, though, so go back for it before it forgets you were friends. A magic whistle is the recommended fix: applying one warps every pet on your level to a square next to you, even on no-teleport floors. Sokoban also doesn’t let pet loyalty decay; leaving a pet there while you do the Quest or the Mines is the dungeon’s safest kennel.

If you see “You have a sad feeling for a moment”, that’s different. That message means a pet of yours just died offscreen on another level, usually one you left behind that got into a fight it couldn’t win.

Current editions have added two things that veteran pet-owners should know.

First: your pet eats for a reason beyond loyalty. The same corpse mechanics that grant you resistances apply to pets as well. A pet that dines on the right monsters will gain resistances: fire resistance, cold resistance, whatever the dungeon’s terrible buffet was offering. A well-fed pet is also a better-armored one. This is not something you can reliably engineer, but it’s a reason to let your pet eat rather than scooping up every corpse yourself.

Second: pets can now be revived. If your companion falls in battle, stand on its corpse at a co-aligned altar and pray. The gods, in their occasional mercy, may return it to you. This is a last-resort miracle, not a renewable strategy: your prayer timeout, your alignment, and a certain amount of luck all factor in. A pet you’ve carried since the early game is worth a detour to the nearest temple before you write it off.

Blessed, Uncursed, Cursed (BUC)

Before you can worry about what an item is, you need to know what condition it’s in. Every item in the Mazes is blessed, uncursed, or cursed (BUC for short), and the difference matters far more than you’d think. The gods have opinions about your equipment, and those opinions have consequences:

• A blessed scroll of identify reveals at least 2 items in your pack (more with positive Luck), and one time in five reveals the whole pack. An uncursed scroll IDs one or two items; a cursed scroll IDs only the scroll itself the first time you read one of that type, and one item per subsequent cursed read.
• A cursed piece of armor bonds to your skin like it has abandonment issues. You cannot remove it until you lift the curse.
• A cursed potion of gain level interprets “gain a level” in the most literal architectural sense: you rocket through the ceiling to the floor above, instead of gaining an experience level.

Blessed items are helpful beyond their description, uncursed items work as advertised, and cursed items find creative ways to ruin your day. A blessed luckstone passively improves your luck; a cursed one drags it down. A cursed scroll of teleportation sends you to a random level instead of teleporting within the current one. You get the idea.

You don’t see BUC status by default (Priests are the exception: they sense it naturally, which tells you something about clerical paranoia). But there are several reliable ways to check:

Altar testing. Drop an item on an altar:

• An amber flash means blessed.
• A black flash means cursed.
• No flash means uncursed.

This is free, fast, and unlimited. If you find an altar early, use it heavily.

Pet testing. Your pet won’t step on cursed items. If you drop something and your dog walks around it, it’s cursed. If the dog walks over it (or picks it up), it’s safe. Not as precise as an altar, but works anywhere. Two ways the test can lie: a hungry pet will march straight over a cursed pile if there’s food in the same stack, and items that autocurse on wear (helm of opposite alignment, gauntlets of fumbling, dunce cap, levitation boots) read as uncursed on both pet and altar tests, then curse themselves the instant you put them on.

Holy water. Dipping an item in blessed water (holy water) will uncurse a cursed item or bless an uncursed one. Dipping in cursed water (unholy water) curses an uncursed item or unblesses a blessed one. You make holy water by praying on a co-aligned altar while carrying potions of water; it’s precious in the early game, so save it for items you’ve already identified.

Scroll of identify. A blessed scroll identifies at least 2 items in your pack, more with positive Luck, with a 1-in-5 chance to ID the whole pack outright. An uncursed scroll IDs one or two items per read. A cursed scroll IDs only itself the first time you read one of that type, then one item per cursed read after. Pick every unidentified item into your inventory before reading a blessed scroll: the jackpot reads everything in your pack.

The Price Is Right

Shopkeepers are your most important identification tool. Every unidentified item has a fixed base price that depends on what it actually is. When you pick up an item in a shop, the shopkeeper quotes you a price derived from that base price, modified by your Charisma and the shopkeeper’s markup.

Shopkeeper pricing was first documented in detail by Gregory Bond’s Shopping Spoiler, HTML-formatted by Kate Nepveu and hosted on steelypips.org. David Damerell’s Object Identification Spoiler expanded the price-based identification techniques. The mechanics below draw from both.

Two ways to get a quote without committing to the buy: throw the item into the shop from outside (you forfeit ownership but the shopkeeper still quotes the buy price as they pick it up), or #chat with the shopkeeper while standing on the item to hear the same quote. The chat trick is the polite way to price-ID a heavy item, or to price-test under teleportitis.

A note on the markup: three things give you “sucker” sell prices (1/3 base instead of 1/2). Wearing a dunce cap, being a Tourist under XL 15, or letting a T-shirt or Hawaiian shirt show (no body armor and no cloak) all flip the divisor. Cover the shirt before you sell, and don’t browse in your cone hat. Charisma doesn’t touch sell prices at all; the Charisma bands in the table above only move buy prices.

The key insight: items in the same category that share a base price are in the same price group. If you know the price, you can narrow down the possibilities enormously, sometimes to just two or three candidates.

Pick up an item and note the quoted price. With average Charisma (11-15), buy price equals base and sell is half base. Low Charisma pushes buy up (×2 at Cha ≤ 5); high Charisma pulls it down (×½ at Cha ≥ 19). A sucker (see above) also pays 4/3 to buy on top of the worse sell price. The rest of this guide refers to that sucker condition collectively as Tourist. You don’t need to memorize the formulas; what matters is grouping by price tier.

Two further wrinkles affect unidentified items. About a quarter of unID’d items carry an extra ×4/3 buy surcharge, rolled independently for each item when it’s created. Two stacks of the same scroll in one shop can have different prices, but each stack’s surcharge follows it for life: once you’ve paid the surcharged price on a particular scroll, the next shop you take it to charges the same. And about a quarter of shopkeepers are “unfamiliar” with unID’d merchandise and offer only 3/4 of normal on sell, fixed per shopkeeper, so once you’ve tested one unID item you know the rule for all unID sales at that shop. Either wrinkle can shift a quoted price into an adjacent tier, so when in doubt check the surrounding tiers too.

Angry. A shopkeeper you’ve previously angered (fired a wand from a doorway, attacked them, picked up an unpaid item while broke) and then made amends (paid the bill, fled and let them calm down) becomes peaceful again but keeps a permanent +33% buy surcharge on every item. Paying the bill clears the bill but not the surcharge; that flag sticks for the rest of your visits to that shopkeeper. Sell prices are unaffected.

The price tables for each item class follow. These are your field reference for shopping trips.

The Engrave Test (Wands)

The single most useful wand-identification trick costs only one charge and preserves the rest.

Procedure adapted from Kieron Dunbar’s “Identifying Wands by Zapping” spoiler, originally posted to RGRN.

1. BUC-test the wand first. A cursed wand used to engrave may explode. Drop the wand on an aligned altar, hand it to a priest, or otherwise determine its BUC before testing.
2. Write a short message on the floor with your finger. Engrave anything in the dust first (command E, then select “-” for fingers, then type a word or two). This matters because a few wands act on the existing engraving rather than producing a visible effect on bare floor: polymorph rewrites the message as a random new one, and cancellation, make-invisible, and teleportation each make it “vanish”. Without a pre-written message you won’t see those behaviors.
3. Engrave again with the wand. Use E and select the wand. Observe the result. The Wand Table lists the engrave-test result for each wand; most wands reveal themselves here. A few share results; see Resolving Ambiguous Engrave Results.

Don’t be afraid of the suspected wand of wishing. Engraving with it grants the wish: if a $500 candidate prompts you with “For what do you wish?”, take the wish; that is the identification and the reward in one step.

The Sink Test (Rings)

If you find a sink, you can drop a ring down it. Each ring type produces a characteristic message, identifying the ring. But only searching and slow digestion come back to you; every other ring is destroyed in the process, so this is a spare-ring or last-resort trick, not a routine one. See Sinks under Points of Interest for the full message-to-ring table.

Use-Testing (The Careful Way)

When you don’t have access to a shop or a sink, you can sometimes figure out what an item is by using it carefully. Here’s the approach for each category:

Potions. The safest test is to throw a potion at a monster and observe the effect. Throwing avoids the risk of drinking something lethal. If a potion heals the monster, it’s some kind of healing potion. If the monster speeds up, it’s speed. If the monster becomes invisible, well, you’ve learned something (and now have an invisible monster to deal with).

You can also dip items into potions. Dipping a stack of poisonable ammunition (arrows, crossbow bolts, darts, shuriken, or sling stones) into a potion of sickness will poison it, confirming the potion’s identity (it won’t poison a sword or any non-missile weapon). Dipping a unicorn horn into a potion of confusion, hallucination, or blindness turns it into water; dipping into a potion of sickness turns it into fruit juice.

Testing a $200 potion. The $200 group (enlightenment, full healing, levitation, polymorph, speed) has the best payouts but two hidden traps. Quaff levitation and you’re stuck off the floor for a few hundred turns. Quaff polymorph and you may turn into a form that destroys or sheds your body armor. Strip down to a shirt before you test, and quaff somewhere nothing is hunting you.

Scrolls. Reading is risky. Some scrolls (destroy armor, amnesia, punishment) are outright harmful. The safest approach is to price-ID first, then read scrolls from safe price groups. If you must test blind: take off your armor before reading a scroll that might be destroy armor. Read from a position where teleportation won’t be disastrous.

Confused reading produces different effects for many scrolls and is sometimes useful. A confused scroll of remove curse randomizes the BUC of your uncursed items (about a quarter end up blessed, a quarter end up cursed, and half stay uncursed) and leaves already-cursed items cursed. A non-blessed confused scroll only touches your worn and wielded gear (plus loadstones and active leashes); a blessed confused scroll touches your whole inventory. So it’s a way to get a few cheap blessings on worn items, not a curse-removal tool. Don’t read it confused if you need to uncurse something.

Rings. First, confirm the ring is not cursed (altar or pet test). Then put it on. Many rings produce an immediate message or visible effect: you start levitating, you become invisible, you feel stronger. If nothing obvious happens, check your stats and inventory for subtle changes (protection, searching). Take it off quickly if you feel hungry faster than normal (hunger ring) or if monsters seem newly aggressive (aggravate monster).

Amulets. Most amulets are safe to wear briefly. Put it on, wait a few turns, take it off. The dangerous ones (strangulation, restful sleep) are usually cursed, so check BUC first. An amulet of ESP reveals itself if you go blind while wearing it (you’ll see monsters as brain-shapes). Amulet of reflection is trickier to detect, but you’ll notice it when a ray bounces off you.

Armor. Magical armor reveals itself when worn: speed boots make you faster, a cloak of invisibility makes you invisible. But trying on unknown armor in a shop is dangerous: if it’s cursed it welds itself on, you can’t drop it, and the shopkeeper still expects payment. Worse, the auto-cursed types (fumble boots, levitation boots, gauntlets of fumbling, helm of opposite alignment) masquerade as the desirable ones. Verify BUC before wearing unknown armor in a shop. Without an altar, your options are the pet-step test, Priest intrinsic BUC sense, or a scroll of identify from your own inventory.

Each type of special armor has a randomized appearance, so the same “snow boots” that were safe levitation in your last game might be jumping or fumble boots this time. The four shuffled pools are:

• 4 magical helms share 4 appearances: plumed / etched / crested / visored helmet → one of helmet, helm of caution, helm of opposite alignment, helm of telepathy. (Helm of brilliance is always “crystal helmet”; dunce cap and cornuthaum both look like “conical hat”; that pair is a fixed pun.)
• 4 magical cloaks share 4 appearances: tattered cape / opera cloak / ornamental cope / piece of cloth → one of cloak of protection, invisibility, magic resistance, or displacement.
• 4 gloves share 4 appearances: old / padded / riding / fencing gloves → leather gloves or one of the three gauntlet types (fumbling, power, dexterity).
• 7 magical boots share 7 appearances: combat / jungle / hiking / mud / buckled / riding / snow boots → one of speed, water walking, jumping, elven, kicking, fumble, or levitation boots.

The good news: prices don’t shuffle, and prices within each pool fall into informative tiers.

Gray Stones: Four Stones, One Lucky

Gray stones deserve their own section because they look identical but have wildly different value. There are four types:

The problem: all four look like “a gray stone” until identified. Here’s how to tell them apart:

The kick test. Kick an unidentified gray stone on the floor. If it scoots away normally, it’s not a loadstone. A loadstone is abnormally heavy and resists being kicked. Take off gauntlets of power and kicking boots first, or you may overpower a real loadstone and fool yourself.

The weight-menu test. Drop any junk item onto the gray stone to force a pickup menu the next time you walk over it. The menu shows weight; a loadstone is 500, everything else is 10. The menu test gives a clean read without committing to picking the stone up.

The pick-up test. Loadstones are cursed when they generate, and a cursed loadstone refuses to be dropped at all. The game prints “For some reason, you cannot drop the stone!” and the stone stays in your pack. If you pick up a gray stone and it weighs you down suspiciously, try to drop it. If you can’t, you are stuck with a cursed loadstone until you uncurse it (holy water, scroll of remove curse, prayer). Then you can drop it.

The #tip escape. Or, more elegantly: stow the cursed loadstone in any container you carry (a 2z sack is enough), then apply #tip to the container. The contents spill onto your square, loadstone included, because #tip extracts items directly and bypasses the cursed-drop check. Step off and walk away. The trick has worked through every edition of the dungeon, including 5.0.

The price test. If you can reach a shop: a $60 gray stone is a luckstone. A $45 gray stone is a touchstone. A $1 gray stone is flint or a loadstone.

The rub test. Apply (a) a gray stone to a gem in your pack. A touchstone produces a colored-streak message. If the touchstone is blessed (or you’re an Archeologist or Gnome holding an uncursed one), the streak also identifies the gem. Other gray stones produce similar streak messages, so a streak alone doesn’t prove touchstone; an identification result does. A cursed touchstone can shatter the gem.

Location clue. The luckstone at the bottom of the Gnomish Mines is guaranteed. If you find a gray stone at Mine’s End, it’s almost certainly the luckstone. Bless-test it at an altar to confirm (the guaranteed one is always uncursed).

The rule of thumb: if you find a gray stone, don’t pick it up until you’ve tested it. A loadstone can ruin your encumbrance, and if it’s cursed, you’re stuck with it until you find a way to uncurse. Kick it first. Check BUC second. Then pick it up.

Naming What You’ve Learned

As you gather clues, use the #name command to track what you know. You can call an entire item class by a name you choose. For example, if you’ve determined that “fizzy potions” are in the $200 price group, call them “fizzy=$200” so you don’t forget. If you later throw one at a monster and it speeds up, you can rename the class to “speed.”

This habit of annotating your discoveries is what separates adventurers who die on level 8 from adventurers who reach the Castle. The dungeon doesn’t keep notes for you. You have to do it yourself.

Identification by stacking. When you pick up an item, the game merges it into an existing slot only if the two are identical: same type, same enchantment, same BUC, same erodeproofing. So whether a new item stacks with one you already understand leaks information for free. When a merge actually teaches you something the game says so explicitly: “You learn more about your items by comparing them.” That message is your cue that the merge propagated a known property (BUC, enchantment, erosion) to the previously unknown side. Two same-appearance items that don’t merge are a different potion, a different BUC, or one side has been diluted or eroded.

A Practical Strategy

All of these techniques combine into a workflow. Here’s what a seasoned traveler does on a typical descent:

At an altar (priority one). Ferry everything you’ve found to the altar. Drop each item. Sort your pack into blessed, uncursed, and cursed piles. Wield or wear the blessed stuff. Stash or discard the cursed stuff.

At a shop (priority two). Pick up and put down unidentified items to get price quotes. Group them by price. Cross-reference with the tables above. Suddenly half your inventory is narrowed to two or three possibilities.

Engrave-test your wands as soon as you find them. It’s fast, it costs only one charge, and it immediately sorts wands into categories. A wand that digs the floor is digging. A wand that drops ice cubes is cold. Simple.

Experiment cautiously with the rest. Wear non-cursed rings one at a time. Throw potions at monsters. Read scrolls from safe price groups after removing your armor.

Save your scrolls of identify for the items that resist other methods, in roughly this order: spellbooks first (reading an unknown high-level book is the most lethal mistake on the identification table), amulets next (all the same price), then the resistance/utility rings in the $200 group, then any wands that engrave-tested ambiguously.

The system is about reducing uncertainty with the cheapest, safest method first: altars and shops are free, engrave-testing costs one charge, use-testing costs more and carries risk, and scrolls of identify are the precious last resort.

How Hunger Works

Your nutrition starts at 900 and ticks down steadily. The rate depends on what you’re doing:

• Base consumption costs 1 point per turn (less while sleeping).
• Regeneration (from a ring or intrinsic) costs extra on odd turns.
• Encumbrance costs extra on odd turns if you’re stressed or worse (burdened alone is free).
• Rings cause additional hunger while worn. Two rings drain faster.

When nutrition drops below certain thresholds, you get warnings:

Eat when you get the “Hungry” message; don’t wait for “Weak.” If you hit Fainting and have no food, pray to your god (see Divine Relations); a willing god cures hunger.

What to Eat

Eat the things you kill. The single most important food fact for new players: unless you’re playing a vegetarian role (Monk, or any role pursuing a vegan/vegetarian conduct), the bulk of your nutrition comes from monster corpses you leave on the floor. Every fresh kill is a meal. Don’t burn food rations while there’s a freshly dead rat at your feet. A few rules:

• Eat corpses within 30 to 50 turns of the kill. Past that they risk being tainted, which means food poisoning (lethal without treatment).
• Never eat old corpses. If in doubt, don’t eat it.
• Some corpses grant intrinsic resistances (poison resistance from killer bees, fire resistance from fire giants, etc.). Eat these deliberately, even when you are not hungry. See the table below.
• Some corpses are harmful (cockatrice corpses petrify you, green slimes turn you into slime, kobold meat is poisonous). Know which corpses are safe before eating.

Food rations (or gunyoki, for Samurai) are the emergency backup. 800 nutrition, weight 20, common in shops. Carry two or three for the times you don’t have a fresh kill in front of you. You don’t need to hoard them.

Lembas wafers are the gold standard: 800 nutrition at only 5 weight, the best ratio in the game. Elven characters find these more often.

Tripe rations aren’t pleasant eating (your character retches) but pets love them. Save tripe for your pet.

Tins are preserved food that never spoils, but they are also a trap if you’re sloppy about where you open them. Opening a tin is an occupation: you cannot act while you work, and a monster can wander up and attack you mid-open. A tin opener finishes in zero or one turn, a dagger in three, an axe in six, and bare hands in as many as fifty turns of helpless effort. Don’t pop a tin in a corridor next to a sleeping room. Blessed tins are the one exception: they open in zero or one turn no matter the tool (instantly with a blessed tin opener). A tin of spinach increases your Strength.

Vegetarian characters have to live on rations, lembas, fruits, and the small set of non-meat corpses (fungi, molds, lichens, jellies, plus eggs). Vegans lose the eggs, so they’re stricter still: rations, lembas, fruits, and plant corpses only. Plan ahead. The corpse-pile strategy doesn’t work for either, so rations and fruit are the budget items to hoard.

Dangerous Foods

Cockatrice corpse: instant death by stoning. Never eat this.

Acidic corpses (acid blob, etc.): damage unless acid resistant.

Poisonous corpses: damage and stat drain unless poison resistant.

Rotten corpses: food poisoning. Pray immediately if affected.

Cannibalism (eating your own race): costs 2 to 5 luck and gives the aggravate monster intrinsic. Cavemen and orcs are exempt.

Useful Corpse Effects

Eating for intrinsics is the highest-leverage habit in the early and mid game. Each resistance is a chance per eat, not a guarantee, so eat every one of these you find, not just the first. Two tables follow: meat corpses and vegetarian-safe corpses, each ordered roughly by when you’ll first meet the creature on a typical descent.

Meat corpses:

Vegetarian-safe corpses (those marked † are also vegan):

A gelatinous cube is the highest-density source of ascension-kit intrinsics in the game; poison resistance off any of the early corpses is the most important single intrinsic to bank.

Sprig of wolfsbane. Not a corpse but the same shelf. Eating one cures lycanthropy outright. If you’re heading anywhere were-things roam (the Mines, the Quest for some roles), carry a sprig or two. It weighs almost nothing.

Eat the puddings, cubes, molds, and blobs. They look like inedible terrain, but every one of them yields an intrinsic when eaten. Puddings and acid blobs leave globs rather than corpses (a 5.0 food-handling detail that doesn’t change the strategy), and the globs of one color stack and shrink slowly, so a pile of brown-pudding globs is a re-rollable chance at shock resistance.

Food Strategy

1. Eat fresh corpses as your primary food source.
2. Save food rations and lembas wafers for emergencies.
3. Eat intrinsic-granting corpses deliberately (even if not hungry).
4. Pray when Weak or Fainting if you have nothing to eat.
5. Buy food from shops when you can afford it.
6. Don’t carry more food than you need. It’s heavy.

The Potion Table

As with all randomized items, price is your best friend. A shop visit narrows a mysterious bottle from “could be anything” to a short list of candidates:

Water is the oddity in the $100 group: it always appears as “clear potion,” identifiable on sight. Don’t underestimate it; water is the raw material for holy water, which is the foundation of everything.

Key Potions

Healing, extra healing, full healing. The healing chain, and your lifeline in combat. Extra healing is the workhorse: it always cures blindness and (non-cursed) also cures sickness in addition to restoring HP. Non-cursed extra and full healing raise your maximum HP if the heal would otherwise overflow; blessed versions give the biggest boost. You can never have too many of these.

Gain ability. When blessed, raises all your stats by 1. Uncursed raises a random stat. This is liquid gold: save every one until you can bless it.

Speed. One non-cursed quaff and you’re permanently faster for the rest of the game; blessing only stretches the temporary timer that overlays the intrinsic. Speed is one of the most important buffs in the Mazes; the difference between moving at normal speed and fast speed is the difference between trading blows and hitting twice before they swing once. The wand of speed monster does not grant permanent speed when self-zapped, only a temporary burst of 50–74 turns. The potion is the real prize.

Holy water. Not a potion you find: a potion you make. Drop uncursed water on a co-aligned altar, pray, and the gods bless it for you (pile every water you own on the same square and a single prayer blesses the whole stack). Holy water then blesses any item you dip into it. A holy water can even bless more water by dipping into it. Keep one to make more.

Gain level. Raises your experience level by 1. Useful for reaching quest eligibility quickly, or converting into something better through alchemy.

Identifying a polymorph potion. A clean test: dip a single arrow or dart into an unknown potion. If the arrow turns into a different item, the potion was polymorph and identifies itself. You spend one arrow and one potion; you save the gamble of quaffing it.

Alchemy

Here’s where potions get interesting. Dip one potion into another and you might create something better, or you might cause an explosion. Most combinations are duds, but the useful recipes are worth memorizing:

The chain from healing → extra healing → full healing → gain ability via gain energy or gain level is the core alchemy sequence, and it’s extraordinarily powerful. A handful of common healing potions and a gain energy or two can be transmuted into the rarest potions in the game. Treat every gain energy potion like the catalyst it is.

A side-loop worth knowing: Levitation + Enlightenment → Gain level (2/3 chance, or nothing 1/3). Both inputs are reasonably common and individually low-value, but the output is one of the catalysts that feeds the main healing chain. If you find a stack of each, this is a way to manufacture gain-level potions rather than wait for the dungeon to drop them.

A note on the current state of dungeon chemistry. The old alchemy trick (dilute a large stack of potions by dipping them in water, then convert the whole diluted stack at once) no longer works. Current editions cap diluted dips at two potions per operation. The chain from healing up to gain ability is still there; you just do it in small batches with undiluted inputs. Think of it as artisanal alchemy rather than industrial production.

Alchemy carries an explosion risk: roughly 10% on any non-water combination. An alchemy smock (if you find one) reduces this to about 1 in 30, which is the difference between “risky hobby” and “acceptable profession.” Do your chemistry in an isolated room, away from your stash, and never dip a cursed potion into another. The dipping potion (not the one it goes into) is the one that breaks, and a cursed dip detonates every time. The dungeon is consistent about this if nothing else.

Unicorn Horn Interactions

A unicorn horn dipped into certain potions purifies them:

• Blindness, confusion, hallucination → uncursed water
• Sickness → fruit juice

This turns dangerous potions into useful raw materials. The water can be blessed into holy water; the fruit juice can be alchemized into see invisible. Nothing is wasted in a well-run dungeon pharmacy.

The Scroll Table

Price-identification is especially powerful for scrolls, because the cheapest scroll (base 20) is always identify, the one you need most:

The $60 group is treasure (enchant weapon lurks there alongside innocent blank paper). The $80 group is equally good: enchant armor and remove curse, two scrolls you’ll always want more of. The $100 group is the danger zone, a grab-bag mixing magic mapping and teleportation with destroy armor. At $300, you’ll find both genocide (the nuclear option) and punishment (a ball and chain attached to your ankle). Choose wisely.

Key Scrolls

Identify. The bread and butter of dungeon life. The scroll only inspects your main inventory: items inside a bag or sitting on the floor are invisible to it. Pull everything out of your bag, pick up nearby unknowns, and consolidate them in your pack before reading. Blessed identify with positive Luck names at least two items, and on a 1-in-5 roll it names your whole inventory at once. You will never have enough of these.

Enchant weapon / enchant armor. The path to endgame power. Uncursed enchant weapon raises by +1. Blessed raises by up to 3, less the more the weapon is already enchanted (no more than +1 once the weapon is +6 or higher). And there’s a catch: at +6 or higher, each read has a 2/3 chance of destroying the weapon outright. Safe ceiling: +5. Enchant armor raises by a small random amount that’s larger when armor is unenchanted, larger again for elven or non-magic armor, and +1 extra when blessed. Once worn armor exceeds +3 (or +5 for elven / Wizard’s Cornuthaum), each further enchant attempt can destroy the armor; the scroll “evaporates” your gear. Blessed scrolls don’t bypass this cap.

Remove curse. Frees you from cursed equipment. Uncursed version works on worn and wielded items only; blessed version uncurses your entire inventory. Every adventurer has a “put on a cursed ring” story. This scroll is the happy ending.

Charging. Recharges wands and rechargeable tools. Save these for your wand of wishing: one charge means one more wish. Blessed charging restores more charges. Each recharge has an n³/7³ chance of the wand exploding (where n is the count of previous recharges): 0% on first, 0.3% on second, 2% on third, 8% on fourth, 19% on fifth, 36% on sixth, 63% on seventh, and on the eighth, always. Wand of wishing is the exception: it explodes 100% of the time on the second recharge, so recharge it exactly once and no more.

Genocide. The nuclear option. Uncursed eliminates a single species; blessed wipes an entire monster class from the game forever. Liches (L) are the usual blessed target. Never blessed-genocide a class that contains your own race or role. Dwarves are h, Gnomes are G, Elves and Humans are @, Orcs are o; a blessed scroll targeting one of those ends the game with “killed by a scroll of genocide”. (That makes the popular “wipe mind flayers” pick a Dwarf trap, since mind flayers are also h.) Read one while confused and you genocide your own role’s species the same way. Read carefully.

Reverse genocide. A cursed scroll of genocide doesn’t remove its target; it spawns 4 to 6 of the named species at your feet. The named species must be one that can ordinarily be created. Naming wraiths gives you a corpse pile for level recovery; naming mind flayers buys an Int-fed feast if you’re polymorphed into one; naming an easy-to-tame creature gives you instant pet candidates. Don’t try unique monsters (the gods refuse).

Magic mapping. Reveals the entire level layout; blessed also shows secret doors. Invaluable in Gehennom’s maddening mazes, where mapping by hand could take a lifetime you don’t have.

Scare monster. The trick: don’t read it. Drop it on the floor and stand on it. It works like a permanent Elbereth, frightening most monsters away. The first time you pick up an uncursed scroll, it survives but gets “stamped”; the next pickup ends with “The scroll turns to dust as you pick it up,” and the scroll is gone. A cursed scroll dusts on the first pickup. Drop where you want the safe spot, not where you will need to relocate.

Teleportation. Uncursed teleports you randomly on the level. Cursed or confused reading sends you to a random dungeon level. With teleport control, you choose where you land. The game’s most flexible escape hatch.

Stinking cloud. Reading places a poison-gas fog at any square you can see (about fifteen squares of coverage uncursed, twenty-five if blessed) that blinds anything inside and deals roughly 6–13 HP per turn to anything not poison-resistant. A clean way to clear a throne room or the Wizard’s Tower from a safe corridor, as long as you are poison-resistant or unbreathing: the gas doesn’t pick sides. Kills inside the cloud still count as yours for XP and alignment.

Confused Reading

Here’s a trick the dungeon doesn’t advertise: many scrolls do something completely different when read while confused. Some of these alternate effects are better than the normal ones:

Confused destroy armor, if cursed, doesn’t destroy anything: it erodeproofs a piece of armor. (Uncursed or blessed strips erodeproofing instead.) One of the best tricks in the game.

Confused enchant armor / enchant weapon, if uncursed or blessed, erodeproofs the item instead of enchanting. Useful when you need protection from rust more than another +1.

Confused remove curse has a 25% chance of blessing or cursing each uncursed item. Risky, but it’s a clever way to create holy water if you confuse-read while carrying uncursed potions of water.

Confused taming widens the scroll’s reach from a 3×3 area around you to 11×11. The trick is scroll-only; confused charm monster just fizzles.

Confused teleportation sends you to a random dungeon level instead of a random spot on this floor. Useful as a panic button, dangerous if you’re shallow and want to keep exploring.

Confused gold detection detects every trap on this level instead of gold. Far faster than searching tile by tile.

Confused charging restores Pw, and if you’re already at full, raises your max Pw by 4–16 (6–24 blessed). A spellcaster’s permanent buff if you can spare the scroll. Cursed reading zeroes your Pw instead.

The cleanest way to confuse yourself on purpose is a potion of confusion: drink one and the timer runs about 25–80 turns. A non-blessed potion of booze (Samurai: sake) will also confuse you for a few turns.

The Wand Table

Unlike scroll and potion prices, wand prices alone rarely pin down a specific wand. A $150 wand is one of thirteen possibilities. The engrave-test result in the rightmost column is far more useful: most wands reveal themselves in one zap. See The Engrave Test (Wands) for the procedure and Resolving Ambiguous Engrave Results for the few shared results.

¹ Shared by cancellation, make-invisible, and teleportation. ² Shared by sleep and death.

Key Wands

Wishing. The most valuable item in the game. Each zap grants one wish. Wands of wishing generate with only 1 charge, though you can wrest a second wish from the empty wand and add a third with a single scroll of charging. This means the Castle wand of wishing yields two wishes on its own and three with a scroll of charging, a significant reduction from older versions where it could provide 5 to 7. Plan your wishes carefully before you find one.

Death. Fires a death ray that instantly kills most things it hits. Reflected by reflection. Blocked by magic resistance. One of the best offensive tools in the late game.

Digging. Essential utility. Dig through walls to create shortcuts, dig down to escape dangerous situations, dig through rock to reach vaults and hidden areas. Every ascension kit should include a wand of digging. It also doubles as the universal “I’m leaving” button: a downward zap drops you straight onto the next floor, the same direction you wanted to go anyway. One quirk: a cursed wand of digging zaps downward no matter which direction you point it.

Teleportation. Zap monsters to send them somewhere else on the level. Zap yourself to teleport. Enormously useful for escaping trouble or removing a dangerous monster from your path.

Fire, cold, lightning. Offensive ray wands that bounce off walls. Fire burns scrolls and spellbooks on the floor. Cold freezes water (useful for creating paths). Lightning blinds monsters.

Cancellation. Removes special properties from items and monsters. A cancelled monster loses most of its special attacks: a cancelled cockatrice can’t petrify, a cancelled mind flayer can’t suck brains, and a cancelled clay golem dissolves on the spot. Do NOT put this wand in a bag of holding (it will explode the bag). Pointed at a pile of unidentified scrolls and potions, it converts them into blank scrolls and water, which feed the magic-marker and holy-water production lines. Keep it separate in your main inventory.

Polymorph. Transforms monsters into random other monsters and items into random other items of the same class. Can be used creatively (polymorph a pile of junk armor hoping for dragon scale mail, polymorph a weak monster hoping for a useful corpse). Risky but powerful.

Make invisible. Turns a target (or yourself, if you zap it reflexively) invisible for 31–45 turns. Useful for slipping through a dangerous area or turning a fight in your favor. For lasting invisibility, use a ring of invisibility or a cloak of invisibility.

Stasis. Zap it and nothing seems to happen: no ray, no aim, no message. What it really does is seal the level against teleportation for 10–30 turns. While the seal holds, nobody can teleport: not you, not your foes, not even the covetous monsters that normally blink across the level to reach you. The magic whistle falls silent too. Despite the name, it freezes no one in place; the monsters around you keep moving and swinging. Its use is narrow: pin a teleport-reliant enemy so it cannot flee to heal or harry you from afar, at the cost of sealing away your own escape teleport along with theirs.

Probing. A diagnostic wand: zap at a monster to learn its HP, max HP, level, and what it’s carrying. Useful on shopkeepers, soldiers, and named adventurers whose inventory might be worth the trouble. A stethoscope reports HP and status but not gear; if you want to know what’s in the pack, probing is the tool.

Resolving Ambiguous Engrave Results

A few engrave-test results are shared by more than one wand.

“The engraving vanishes!” belongs to cancellation, make-invisible, or teleportation. Drop a known item and zap each candidate: make-invisible hides it, teleportation sends it elsewhere on the level, cancellation dulls its magic.

“The bugs on the floor stop moving!” belongs to sleep or death. Death is the only $500 ray wand.

No engrave message at all narrows to one of six: nothing, opening, locking, probing, undead turning, or stasis. Test each at a safe target:

• Opening unlocks a chest or door. Locking locks one.
• Probing reveals a nearby monster’s stats.
• Undead turning revives a fresh corpse to its original species (and animates any corpses the target was carrying).
• Stasis seals the level against teleportation and gives no outward sign at all, so it is the hardest of the six to pin down; if a later teleport mysteriously fails, that was the wand.
• Nothing does nothing.

For non-ambiguous wands, a follow-up zap at a safe target confirms what the engrave-test already suggested: slow monster / speed monster at a tame or weak monster, striking at a closed door, polymorph at a pile of junk gear. Avoid zapping unidentified wands at yourself.

Recharging

Wands can be recharged with a scroll of charging. The most prized use is on a wand of wishing, where one recharge safely turns a single wish into two. Each successive recharge raises the risk of the wand exploding. The formula is (recharges cubed) / 343, so:

• First recharge: 0.3% explosion chance.
• Second: 2.3%.
• Third: 7.9%.
• Seventh: 100%.

Use blessed charging for the best results, except on a wand of wishing, which follows its own rules. A fresh wand of wishing is always generated with exactly one charge. When that charge is spent you can wrest one final charge from the empty wand for a second wish (it takes a few tries but eventually works). A scroll of charging adds one more wish whether blessed or uncursed (blessing doesn’t help here, and a cursed scroll strips the wand to zero); you can recharge once safely, but a second recharge is a guaranteed explosion. So a wand of wishing gives two wishes on its own (its charge plus the wrested one), or three if you spend a scroll of charging on it.

Rings are chargeable too, but with a practical ceiling. The explosion chance scales with the ring’s current enchantment: roughly 1/7 per point. A +0 or +1 ring of protection is virtually free to charge; a +3 ring explodes about 43% of the time; +7 is a guaranteed bang. The popular cap is around +5.

Wresting

When a wand has 0 charges, you can still try to zap it. There is a 1/121 chance of “wresting” one final charge from the wand before it turns to dust. This is a last resort, but it works on wands of wishing too.

Polymorph as a Tool

Self-polymorph is one of the most interesting tools in the game. A wand of polymorph zapped at yourself, a potion of polymorph, the polymorph self spell, or stepping on a polytrap all do the same thing: roll a new form for you. With polymorph control (the ring or intrinsic) the game lets you choose the form, which is where the real fun begins.

• Travel where your legs can’t. A xorn phases through walls. An eel breathes underwater. A vampire becomes a bat or a fog cloud and slips under doors. A floating eye drifts past traps you can’t disarm.
• Bring your own resistances and attacks. A red dragon form gives you fire breath. A brown mold form burns anything that hits you in melee. A purple worm swallows your problems whole. Most monster powers are yours when you wear their shape.
• Grow a bigger body. A stronger form rolls a new max HP and your current HP scales with the ratio. A dying Wizard at 50/100 wakes up at 200/400 as a fresh titan.
• Escape cursed body armor. A bigger form breaks out and destroys the suit. A smaller form drops it intact into your inventory, where you can holy-water it back to neutral.
• Eat what you can’t. A metallivore form eats iron bars. A green dragon shrugs off poisonous corpses.

Caveat: cursed polymorph items strip control, and rough transformations can hit you with system shock. Don’t be at 5 HP when you reach for the wand.

A wand of polymorph zapped at a pile of junk items reshuffles each one into a random item of the same class. This trick is called “polypiling,” because it can turn a pile of dross into a selection of stuff you need. Drop the fodder on a square far from your real pack: a misaimed zap that catches your bag of holding rolls the bag too. Max your Luck first. When polypile fails, one of the zapped items can turn into a hostile golem made from its material, and every point of Luck lowers the chance of that going wrong.

The Ring Table

Rings marked “auto-curse” generate cursed 90% of the time. If you slip on a ring and can’t remove it, you’ve just learned what auto-curse means the hard way.

Ring of aggravate monster deserves a footnote in the “niche uses of terrible things” category. In 5.0, wearing it roughly doubles the effective dungeon level for purposes of monster generation, so creatures well above your current depth start appearing. This is catastrophic if you forget you’re wearing it. But for a chaotic player who needs high-difficulty sacrifice fodder for the next artifact gift, deliberately wearing the ring to force harder spawns (then removing it) is a calculated risk with an actual payoff. The key word is “deliberately.” The ring is auto-cursed 90% of the time. If it goes on and won’t come off, the fact that you’re now generating liches on dungeon level 8 is no longer a feature.

The rings that matter most: Free action is one of the best rings in the game: paralysis is death in the late game, and this ring makes you immune. Teleport control turns random teleportation from a nuisance into on-demand transportation. Conflict makes monsters attack each other instead of you, which is devastating on crowded levels (though it also turns your pets hostile). Slow digestion lets you go indefinitely between meals.

A blessed potion of polymorph grants you polymorph control for that specific transformation: you choose the form, no ring required. This makes the ring of polymorph control less of a critical acquisition: you no longer need to find it or wish for it just to do a single controlled polymorph. The ring remains useful if you want ongoing control for repeated transformations, but it’s no longer a hard prerequisite for the opening act of any polymorph strategy. Save that wish for something else.

The hidden cost: Every ring you wear increases your hunger rate. Two rings drain food noticeably faster. The veteran habit is to keep rings in inventory and slip them on only when needed: free action before fighting mind flayers, conflict before entering a throne room. Economy of fingers is an art. (One curiosity for the ring-of-slow-digestion holder: the two hands tick hunger on different turns, so wearing two slow-digestion rings doesn’t double the saving, and swapping a hungry ring onto the other hand briefly skips the tick entirely.)

Amulets

Amulets are simpler in theory but harder to identify: they all cost $150, so price is no help. You’ll need to wear-test or use a scroll of identify. The stakes are high, because the range runs from “saves your life” to “slowly strangles you to death”:

Life saving is the crown jewel. When you die (any kind of death) it triggers, revives you at full HP, and crumbles to dust. Wear it whenever you’re going somewhere dangerous. Take it off when you’re safe. You only get the one miracle.

Reflection is excellent if you didn’t get a shield of reflection from Perseus’s statue or elsewhere. Wearing it as an amulet frees up your shield slot for a small shield or two-weapon fighting.

Guarding provides +2 AC and +2 magic cancellation (MC). This is a new addition in 5.0 that neatly solves the MC puzzle: pair it with a cloak of magic resistance (MC1) and you reach MC3, freeing you from needing the less versatile cloak of protection.

Magical breathing prevents drowning, which sounds niche until you reach Medusa’s level (surrounded by water) or the Plane of Water (entirely underwater). Then it’s existential.

Flying is the late-addition cousin of levitation: you stay in the air the same way, but you can still pick things up and choose to drop down on your turn. The under-appreciated bonus is that your steed flies with you. A flying warhorse skips over moats, pools, and the Castle’s drawbridge, and crosses Medusa’s island edge to edge. Stack with speed boots on the mount for a terrifying cavalry unit.

Restful sleep puts you to sleep randomly and is usually cursed, which should tell you everything you need to know about putting it on unexamined. Wearing it while asleep grants +1 HP per turn via accelerated regeneration. In a fully secured room with the door spiked shut, this turns a near-useless item into a slow field hospital.

Containers

Sooner or later every adventurer runs out of carrying capacity. The bag of holding is the dungeon’s most coveted answer to the problem, and the other containers below have their places too.

Note the weights. Sacks are 15 (carry one). Boxes and chests are furniture, not luggage: a large box weighs 350, a chest 600, an ice box 900, comparable to your entire carrying capacity. Use them as floor stash, not as something to drag from level to level.

The bag of holding deserves special mention because it transforms how you play. A blessed bag reduces the weight of everything inside to roughly one quarter, meaning you can carry your entire potion supply, your backup armor, your scroll library, and still have room for loot. Almost every ascending player carries one. Sokoban’s prize is a bag of holding half the time; otherwise wish for one when you can.

A warning: never put a wand of cancellation, another bag of holding, or a charged bag of tricks inside a bag of holding. The explosion scatters your inventory across the floor.

If you find a cursed bag of holding (in a bones pile, perhaps), don’t open it. Drop it on the floor and zap a wand of cancellation at it. The explosion rule only fires on insertion, not on a zap, so the bag uncurses safely.

The identically-named bag of tricks is a different beast, and it punishes the obvious move: try to loot it like a container and it grows a huge set of teeth and bites you (painful, but at least a free identification). To use it, apply it (a) instead. Each charge summons a random hostile monster onto your square (rarely a small swarm). It carries nothing, but standing beside an altar it makes a tidy sacrifice-and-experience engine. Don’t apply it when you’re weak or cornered, since deeper down it can disgorge something dangerous.

Unlocking Tools

The dungeon is full of locked things, and brute force is noisy and slow. A skeleton key is the gold standard (70%+ success on doors, 75%+ on boxes). A lock pick (Samurai: osaku) is respectable. A credit card is the worst but still better than kicking. Always carry one of these. The weight is negligible and the utility is constant.

Skeleton keys and lock picks can also lock what they can unlock, so they double as your way to relock a chest after stashing loot. Credit cards are unlock-only.

Light Sources

Oil lamps and candles light dark corridors, which is pleasant but not essential. The real prize is the magic lamp: rub it and there’s a 1-in-3 chance the djinni emerges, then a chance it grants you a wish (80% if the lamp is blessed, so ~27% wish per rub overall), less if it isn’t. Try again on the same lamp until the djinni shows. Never, ever use a magic lamp for light. That’s like using a winning lottery ticket as a bookmark.

The Candelabrum of Invocation is a unique candelabra found in Vlad’s Tower. It’s one of three items needed for the invocation ritual to enter Moloch’s Sanctum. You’ll need seven candles to fill it, so start hoarding candles when you find them.

Musical Instruments

Music has power in the Mazes. Any tonal instrument (wooden flute, magic flute, tooled horn, frost or fire horn, bugle, or harp) can play the passtune at the Castle drawbridge. You will find the notes nearby, so listen carefully. A magic harp (Samurai: magic koto) charms monsters into tameness; a wooden harp is just a koto. A magic flute puts them to sleep. A drum of earthquake creates pits around you, which is as chaotic as it sounds.

Non-magical instruments (wooden flute, leather drum) produce noise but no special effects, useful only for confusing the issue.

Other Notable Tools

The unicorn horn is the dungeon’s all-purpose first-aid kit. Apply it to cure confusion, blindness, sickness, hallucination, stunning, vomiting, and deafness: most of the status ailments that matter. Carry one at all times. If you don’t have one, getting one should be near the top of your priority list.

Bless your horn. A blessed horn can fix up to seven ailments in a single application; an uncursed horn maxes out at three, with a 35% chance of doing nothing even when you have troubles to fix. A cursed horn will inflict a random ailment from the same list (including the new deafness one), so be sure of bless status before applying. Horns don’t get used up, so a non-emergency test apply is free.

A 5.0 caveat: the unicorn horn no longer restores lost ability scores the way it used to. Drained Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and so on now require a potion of restore ability (or its spell) to bring back. The horn remains the universal cure for status problems, but not for attribute drain. Earlier guides that described it as a complete cure-all are out of date; budget for restore ability separately.

The magic marker is a printing press for scrolls (and, more expensively, spellbooks). A fresh marker has 30-99 charges; one non-cursed scroll of charging restores it to at least 50 (more if the scroll is blessed), but only once. The second recharge attempt always fails. Each write costs roughly half to all of the target scroll’s basecost: magic mapping 4-7 charges, identify 7-13, enchant weapon / enchant armor / charging 8-15, teleportation 10-19, and genocide 15-29. Spellbooks cost about 10 × spell level: a level-3 book averages ~22 charges, a level-7 ~52.

To write a scroll intentionally you must have identified it first. Writing by appearance gives a random scroll of that appearance, which is usually wasted charges. If charges run out mid-write, scrolls disappear entirely (paper + charges wasted); a spellbook’s paper survives but the writing fades.

The big-ticket writes for an ascension kit are scrolls of genocide (three of these wipe the worst monster letters L, &, and h out of the game, though uniquely-named demon lords survive any class genocide; see Genocide for the race-trap warning), charging (a blessed one restores one additional wish to an empty wand of wishing for 8-15 charges very well spent, though a second charging attempt always explodes the wand), and enchant weapon / enchant armor for the +7 ascension kit. A well-used marker can produce a meaningful share of your ascension kit.

The marker also feeds the wraith feast: a cursed scroll of genocide on a non-graveyard level summons four to six wraiths at your feet (see Farming wraiths).

The tinning kit turns a fresh corpse (apply, then select the corpse) into a tin: 450 nutrition of preserved food that keeps indefinitely. Tin-eating skips the raw-corpse poison and acid damage checks, so a tinned killer bee or acid blob is safe to eat with no resistance, and the intrinsic-grant still applies. The kit doubles as a way to grind poison or acid resistance without taking the per-corpse hits. Don’t tin a cockatrice without gloves; you petrify on the spot.

The pickaxe and the heavier dwarvish mattock dig through most walls and floors. Apply (a) and pick a direction for a sideways tunnel, or apply downward to chip through the floor for the straight-shaft escape that ends many ascension runs. Wand of digging is faster in a straight line but burns charges. Sokoban walls and most of Gehennom are non-diggable. Applied to a statue, a pickaxe also breaks it (dropping any contents, or animating the sculpted monster if it is a statue trap).

The crystal ball is a one-question oracle when applied (a): pick a glyph class (monsters, items, traps, doors, and so on), point at a square or . for the whole level, and the ball reveals what’s there. Each use consumes one charge; a scroll of charging restores a few. A spent ball still applies but shows nothing useful, just colored haze.

Intelligence determines whether each reading lands or backfires. The Int check is rolled against an “oops” threshold of 8 for a quest artifact, 16 for a blessed ball, or 20 for uncursed; rolling over the threshold triggers a misfire. Misfires range from harmless (“too much to comprehend”) through confusion, blindness, and hallucination to (one outcome in five on a non-artifact ball) an explosion that hits you for about 1d30. A cursed ball misfires every time while charged. Drop a fresh ball on an altar to bless it before first use, then aim it at the most baffling level you’ve ever mapped.

The can of grease is the cheapest hardening upgrade in the dungeon. Applied to worn armor, the slick coat makes the wearer harder to grab and steal from: nymphs slide off, Riders’ grab attacks miss, weapon-snatch attempts fail. Applied to a bag of holding, it waterproofs the contents like an oilskin sack. The coat wears off after a few hits, so it’s per-fight protection.

Armor and AC

Armor Class is what decides how often you get hit, and it’s the most important defensive number in the game. Each point you push down means more monster swings whiff past you. AC starts at 10 and drops as you add protection; lower is better. At AC −10 or below you’re quite difficult to damage with physical attacks; the practical target for an ascension kit is AC −20, with diminishing returns past −25.

Try armor before you wear it. A cursed body suit, helm, gloves, or boots will not come off until the curse breaks. BUC-test (altar or pet) before donning. Knowing the type matters too: a cloak of displacement carries a strong intrinsic that a plain cloak doesn’t. See A Practical Identification Strategy.

Weapons

Your weapon picks your combat style for you: how far away you strike, whether you can also throw, how fast you swing per turn, which artifacts you can ever hold. The sections that follow group the classes by how they’re used. For per-skill stat tables, see Weapons Tables in the appendix.

A handful of commands run through everything below: w wields a weapon in your primary hand; x swaps primary and secondary on demand; t throws any item; f fires whatever stack you’ve set in your quiver; Q sets that quiver. Polearms, whips, pick-axes, and grappling hooks are also used through a (apply), the same key used for most tools.

Enchantment

Weapons and armor can be enchanted using scrolls of enchant weapon and enchant armor. Each scroll adds +1 (uncursed) or potentially more (blessed). For weapons there’s no destruction limit at all: above +9 the scroll just becomes less likely to add a point, but the weapon is never lost. Armor is different: above +3 each new scroll has a chance to destroy the item (above +5 for “special” armor like elven pieces, or the Wizard’s cornuthaum). Blessed scrolls give more points per read but don’t change the destruction threshold; cursed scrolls can subtract enchantment and shouldn’t be used for enchanting at all.

Erosion and Proofing

Weapons and armor can be damaged by rust (iron items), fire (organic items), and corrosion (copper items). A badly damaged item provides less AC or damage.

To fix erosion, read a confused scroll of enchant weapon (for your weapon) or confused scroll of enchant armor (for a random worn armor piece). This erodeproofs the item permanently without changing its enchantment. It also repairs any existing damage.

You can also slow erosion without magic. Coat an armor piece with grease (apply a can of grease). The grease layer also makes the piece slippery to monster steal and to grab attacks, but it wears off after a few hits.

Dragon Scale Mail

Dragon scales are prized for their toughness and their magical protections, and mail forged from those scales is among the best body armor in the game.

Dragons don’t always drop scales, and they never drop the mail itself. A fresh kill yields scales about one time in three, and a revived dragon only one time in twenty. Scales can be worn as body armor just like mail and carry the color’s full intrinsic property (gray gives magic resistance, silver reflection, and so on, identical to the mail). But the AC of scales is only +3 whereas fully formed scale mail is +9. Same weight.

To upgrade scales into scale mail: wear the scales and read a non-cursed scroll of enchant armor. The scales merge and harden into the corresponding dragon scale mail at +0 (or higher if blessed; a blessed scroll also blesses the result). A cursed scroll just gives the usual bad enchant effect; no merge.

How Items Get Cursed

• Born that way. Some items generate cursed most of the time (rings of teleportation, rings of polymorph, amulets of strangulation; anything the dungeon thinks is funny)
• Bones inheritance. Items on a bones level have an 80% chance of being cursed. That tempting armor on the dead adventurer’s corpse? Probably trapped
• Monster interference. Certain monsters can curse items in your inventory
• Confused remove curse. Reading it confused has a chance of cursing items instead of uncursing them
• Unholy water. The evil twin of holy water

Effects of Cursed Items

• Cursed armor and rings bond to you and can’t be removed: a cursed ring of teleportation means random teleports you can’t stop, and a cursed pair of levitation boots means you can never touch the ground again
• Cursed weapons can’t be unwielded. Hope you like that -3 orcish dagger
• Cursed potions and scrolls often do the opposite of what you want, or a weakened version of the normal effect
• Cursed tools malfunction spectacularly. A cursed bag of holding doubles the weight of its contents instead of reducing it
• Cursed food is unpleasant but rarely fatal. Small mercies

Detecting Curses

Prevention is better than cure. Test items before wearing them:

• Altar test. Drop an item on an altar. A black flash means cursed. This is free, instant, and should become instinct
• Pet test. Your pet refuses to step on cursed items. Drop and observe
• Scroll of identify. Always reveals the full status
• Formal price-ID via shop appraisal. Shopkeepers don’t reveal BUC directly, but the sell-back offer they make narrows the item to a few possibilities; combined with the altar test you can often pin it down

(Temple donation does not reveal BUC; that’s a common spoiler myth. Donating to a priest grants temporary clairvoyance and a Protection bonus, but inventory BUC stays hidden.)

Removing Curses

When prevention fails, you have three remedies:

• Scroll of remove curse. Uncursed removes curses from worn and wielded items. Blessed uncurses your entire inventory, a real relief when the curse problem has gotten out of hand
• Holy water. Dip a cursed item in holy water and it becomes uncursed. Simple, reliable, and reason enough to stockpile holy water
• Prayer. A pleased god uncurses your worn items as a side benefit of answering prayer. Don’t waste a prayer solely on this, but it’s a nice bonus

Stuck in cursed body armor? Polymorphing into a form too small for the suit drops it off into your inventory (curse and all), even though it would normally refuse to come off. From there, dip in holy water and re-wear. See Polymorph as a Tool.

Most veterans carry holy water and a scroll of remove curse at all times. The first time you find yourself stuck in cursed levitation boots over a moat is the moment you’ll see why.

Archeologist

Indiana Jones, basically. You start with a bullwhip, a pickaxe, a tinning kit, a touchstone, and a sack: a kit built for exploration rather than combat. Your starting Strength and HP are modest, so your first ten levels lean on stealth and footwork rather than firepower. Survive that stretch and you become one of the better mid-game spellcasters in the game.

Intrinsics: Searching at XL 1, Stealth at XL 5, intrinsic speed at XL 10.

Skill caps: Pick-axe and saber both reach Expert, which makes a silver saber your endgame weapon and the pickaxe your mid-game one. Divination Spell hits Expert too, and your special spell is magic mapping, one of the most valuable spells in the game.

Your pickaxe gives you mobility no other role has. It skips locked doors, chips a diagonal exit from a surrounded room, escapes upward when you’re cornered, and digs the straight downward shaft that finishes most ascension runs in a handful of turns. Train Pick-axe to Skilled early by chopping at zombies and ogres; the slot cost pays back many times over by the Castle.

Your touchstone identifies gems. An Archeologist applies an uncursed touchstone as if it were blessed, so any gem you find can be tested for whether it’s real or worthless glass. Rub gems before you offer them to a unicorn, before you sell, and on a co-aligned altar for full ID.

Scrolls auto-identify when you pick them up (except blank paper, and assuming you can see).

Pivot: by mid-game your Wisdom and Intelligence are within reach of Wizard-tier casting. Once you’ve read magic missile, identify, and cone of cold, you are a caster who happens to swing a saber, not a fighter who happens to read books.

Avoid: breaking historic statues (a −1 alignment hit per offense, and the Archeologist is the only role that automatically recognizes which statues are historic). Getting Burdened collecting too many items; the role has a mediocre Str cap.

Barbarian

A Barbarian’s plan is mostly: hit the thing in front of you. You start with poison resistance, good Strength, a two-handed sword or battle-axe, and an off-hand short sword. Your skill list reads like a weapon shop’s inventory; the early dungeon is much easier when you can carve a path through it without thinking too hard.

Intrinsics: Poison resistance at XL 1, intrinsic speed at XL 7, Stealth at XL 15.

Skill caps: Two-handed sword Expert (or Axe Expert if you took the axe start), Short Sword Expert, Hammer Expert. Bare-handed combat reaches Master, so if you ever lose your weapon to a polymorph trap or a wand of disarming you remain a real melee threat with your fists.

Twoweapon early. The starting twin pair (two-handed sword plus short sword, or battle-axe plus short sword) is positioned for a two-weapon transition. Once you find a long sword, drop the short sword for it and twoweapon for mauling damage.

Pivot: around XL 12 to 15 most Barbarians want magic resistance and discover that without spell skill they have only artifact and armor options. Aim for gray dragon scale mail in the Castle, or crown for Stormbringer if you are Chaotic; the Magicbane option is gated behind a sacrifice gift that may not roll.

Avoid: picking fights you cannot escape. Barbarians have no escape spells and no intrinsic teleport, so once surrounded you fight your way out or pray. Skipping early quaff-tests; with poison resistance handed to you from turn 1, blind quaffs are unusually safe.

Cave Dweller

Primitive but tough. You start with a club, a sling, a pile of flint stones, and good HP growth. Cave Dwellers are the other role (with Barbarian) that pushes bare-handed combat to Master, so even unarmed you do real damage. The simplest role in the game: few tools, no starting spellbooks, no language quirks.

Intrinsics: Speed at XL 7, Warning at XL 15. No early resistances at all; this is the role that earns those resistances one corpse at a time.

Skill caps: Club, mace, quarterstaff, and spear all Expert, plus the sling Expert (Cave Dwellers train sling as easily as anyone). Bare-handed combat reaches Master.

Pivot: the Cave Dweller’s mid-game is built from the corpses they eat. Without role-granted resistances, you climb the resistance ladder by eating fire ants, killer bees, giants, and the right molds. Plan to eat every safe intrinsic-granting corpse you can; an amulet of life saving is more valuable here than for almost any other role.

Avoid: putting too much weight on Intelligence. Cave Dwellers have the lowest Int cap of any role and the weakest spell access; aside from identify or detect-X scrolls you will mostly be reading rather than casting. The gnome racial option leans toward casting, so pick dwarf or human if you want the heaviest melee.

Healer

The dungeon’s doctor. You start with a stethoscope, four potions of healing, four of extra healing, a wand of sleep, three pre-blessed spellbooks (healing, extra healing, stone-to-flesh), poison resistance, and immunity to sickness. The stethoscope shows monster HP and your own internal state; the wand of sleep makes early combat much easier than the medical kit suggests.

Intrinsics: Poison resistance at XL 1, Warning at XL 15.

Skill caps: Knife Expert, Quarterstaff Expert, Dart Expert, Unicorn Horn Expert (a permanent dividend on every horn you find), Healing Spell Expert. Healing pre-blessed books guarantee successful reads from turn 1.

The wand of sleep is your survival. A handful of charges that put even serious monsters down for several turns, and most of the early dungeon has no sleep resistance. Spend one charge per dangerous encounter, never on an easy kill, and you’ll bridge to XL 6 before running out. Recharge it later with scrolls of charging or a magic marker.

Sickness immunity is a free quaff-test. Healers cannot be made ill by potions of sickness, so unknown clear-colored potions can be tested safely. Dip a unicorn horn into the leftover sickness potion to convert it to fruit juice.

Pivot: around XL 10, Healers move from “survive on potions and sleep” to casting extra healing as a Pw battery. At Skilled in the healing school, your healing casts behave like blessed potions.

Avoid: spending sleep charges on small monsters. Selling the stethoscope.

Knight

Chivalry on horseback. You start with a saddled pony, a +1 long sword, and a +1 lance. The pony is a credible early-game ally, and the basis of your unique attack: a jousting blow from horseback does heavy damage, and Knights are the only role with Lance at Expert. Two catches: chivalry imposes alignment penalties for attacking helpless or fleeing monsters, so pick your fights; and the lance is useless on foot.

Intrinsics: Speed at XL 7. That is the entire ladder.

Skill caps: Long Sword Expert (set up for Excalibur), Lance Expert, Riding Expert, Bare-handed Combat Expert. Several blunt and edged weapons reach Skilled for fallback options.

Mount strategically. You can #ride from turn 1, but a failed mount costs 10 to 14 HP (“slipped while mounting a saddled pony” is a noted scoreboard death), and at XL 1 the failure rate is around 45%. Two unlucky tries kill a starting Knight. Most Knights stay on foot until the pony grows up into a horse and then a warhorse: by then you have intrinsic speed, more XL behind the mount roll, and a steed worth riding.

Excalibur is almost guaranteed. A Lawful Knight dipping a long sword into a fountain at XL 5 or higher has a 1-in-6 chance per dip, five times better than other Lawful roles. Most runs find Excalibur before the Mines luckstone.

Pivot: with Excalibur and a warhorse, mounted fighting pays off: long-sword swings with the Riding bonus plus jousting against fleeing targets you can position. A late-game Knight on a polymorphed dragon mount is one of the strongest melee builds.

Avoid: jousting a fleeing, sleeping, or paralyzed monster (a chivalry alignment hit and an alignment record you cannot recover quickly). Retrying a failed mount when you’re already low on HP.

Monk

Bare-handed combat is the Monk’s identity. The intrinsic ladder is the broadest in the game and your Martial Arts caps at Grand Master, hitting +7 to-hit and +9 damage with no weapon. The trade-off is a steep set of armor restrictions: a body suit costs −20 to-hit, a shield kills your martial-arts bonus, and metallic helms, gloves, and boots all add a casting penalty. The default Monk fights through the dungeon in a robe with no body armor.

Intrinsics: see invisible, sleep resistance, and intrinsic speed all at XL 1; poison at 3; stealth at 5; warning at 7; searching at 9; fire 11; cold 13; shock 15; teleport control 17. Eating the matching corpses just accelerates a schedule you’d mostly reach anyway.

Skill caps: Martial Arts Grand Master, Healing Spell Expert, Cleric and Escape Spells Skilled. The four allowed weapon skills (quarterstaff, spear, crossbow, shuriken) cap at Basic, so weapon training is for the Staff of Aesculapius or the silver spear endgame and not much else.

Gear by slot: starting robe (+20 spellcasting), elven leather helm, gauntlets of dexterity, speed boots, no shield, no body armor. The robe is irreplaceable; protect it from polymorph traps from D7 onward with a ring of polymorph control or an amulet of unchanging.

Pivot: the Eyes of the Overworld quest artifact grants magic resistance and astral vision, which frees your cloak slot for the robe instead of cloak of magic resistance. Most clean Monk runs postpone the Quest until after the Castle, then complete the Quest for the Eyes.

Avoid: eating meat (−1 alignment per offense; vegetarian is essentially free for Monks). Wearing iron skull cap, iron shoes, or gauntlets of power (all metallic, all penalize casting). Picking up a shield for the AC.

Priest

Sacrifice-gift specialists. Priests sense the blessed, cursed, and uncursed status of every item on sight, so you walk through the dungeon knowing which gear is safe to wear. Your first sacrifice gift is guaranteed to be Demonbane (in 5.0, a silver mace), and your stack of four holy waters lets you re-bless gear at will.

Intrinsics: Warning at XL 15, Fire resistance at XL 20. Almost nothing innately. Priests trade intrinsics for divine favor.

Skill caps: six blunt weapons all reach Expert (club, mace, morning star, flail, hammer, quarterstaff), which means whatever blunt weapon drops first becomes your trainable kit. Healing, Divination, and Cleric Spells all Expert.

You can refill holy water at will. Stack potions of water on a co-aligned altar and pray; the entire stack becomes holy water (each dip elsewhere consumes one holy water but blesses one plain water, a 1:1 exchange not a multiplier). The supply scales with how much water you find. Save at least one for the trail.

Pivot: around XL 14 Priests transition from “Demonbane bops things” to a clerical-spell cycle: protection prayer, healing, remove curse, and the heavy clerical attack spells. High Wis means high prayer success, so #pray during low-HP fights against tough foes.

Avoid: abusing your luck (breaking mirrors, angering shopkeepers, eating your own race) before sacrificing on a co-aligned altar; your god may visit with a wand of death. Selling holy water for shop credit; it’s worth far more in your pack than as gold.

Ranger

The ranged role. You start with a bow, a generous supply of arrows, a dagger, a +2 cloak of displacement, and Searching from XL 1. Multishot is your engine: a Ranger at Expert bow fires two or three arrows per turn at high Str, and your elven racial option also gains sleep resistance at XL 4.

Intrinsics: Searching at XL 1, Stealth at XL 7, See invisible at XL 15. Searching is automatic every step you take, so hidden corridors and traps reveal themselves without pressing s.

Skill caps: Bow, Sling, Crossbow, Dart, Spear, Dagger, and Boomerang all Expert. Almost every ranged weapon in the game is at your top tier, plus Divination Spell Expert for utility casting.

Guard your cloak of displacement. +2 enchanted from turn 1 is an endgame-quality defensive item. If you find a cloak of magic resistance, carry both and swap based on threat (magic resistance for monster spells, displacement for melee crowds).

Pivot: mid-game Rangers wish for or polypile a stack of silver arrows to enchant. Highly enchanted silver arrows on a Ranger at Expert bow are one of the highest damage-per-turn options in the game.

Avoid: mulching your +2 arrow stack. Keep the cheaper found arrows as your training stack and reserve the +2s for hard fights. Engaging in melee on the front line; your role is ranged.

Rogue

The dungeon’s thief: daggers, stealth, and backstab. You start with a short sword, six daggers, leather armor, a lock pick, a sack, and a potion of sickness. The lock pick opens every locked door, chest, and box from turn 1. Stealth at XL 1 lets you walk past sleeping monsters, and backstab adds +1 to +XL bonus damage against fleeing or helpless targets.

Intrinsics: Stealth at XL 1, Searching at XL 10.

Skill caps: Dagger Expert, Knife Expert, Short Sword Expert, Two-Weapon Combat Expert, Bare-handed Combat Expert. The two-weapon synergy with daggers is unique to the role.

Throw daggers; do not stab. Rogues get a multishot bonus on thrown daggers, and the backstab modifier applies to throws against fleeing targets too. A high-enchantment dagger stack carries you through Gehennom.

Pivot: around XL 8 you can poison your darts and daggers with the starting sickness potion or any poison potion you find. Coated daggers double or triple damage against non-poison-resistant targets.

Avoid: noisy actions that waste your stealth advantage (kicking, casting some spells, attacking unsleeping crowds). Selling the lock pick: Rogues get a +25 to +30 bonus on lock-picking that doesn’t apply to regular keys.

Samurai

The disciplined warrior. Katana, off-hand wakizashi, yumi bow with arrows. Samurai start with intrinsic speed and a strong opening melee kit. The katana is a long sword underneath, so it shares long sword skill: with Long Sword and Two-Handed Sword both at Expert, Two-Weapon Combat at Expert, and a guaranteed katana start, the role is set up for a katana plus long sword two-weapon combination.

Intrinsics: Speed at XL 1, Stealth at XL 15.

Skill caps: Long Sword, Two-Handed Sword, Short Sword, Bow, Shuriken, and Two-Weapon Combat all Expert; Martial Arts Master (the only role besides Monk with Martial Arts at all).

The wakizashi is the wrong off-hand. It’s a short sword, while your katana is a long sword, so the two don’t share skill. Drop it for any long sword (the Mines usually provides one) and twoweapon for the matched-skill bonus.

Pivot: mid-game Samurai who invested in bow can pivot to a multishot ranged build. Yumi at Expert with high Str gives 2 or 3 arrows per turn, comparable to a Ranger build on a role that already starts strong in melee.

Avoid: keeping the wakizashi for sentimental reasons. Forgetting the yumi: Bow at Expert plus speed puts two or three arrows on a target per turn.

Tourist

The hardest role. Low HP, no melee weapon, a Hawaiian shirt with zero base AC. You start with four scrolls of magic mapping, an expensive camera, 21 to 40 +2 darts, a credit card, two potions of extra healing, ten random food items, and a 1-in-5 chance of a magic marker. Most Tourists die in the first thousand turns; those that survive become disproportionately powerful in the late game.

Intrinsics: Searching at XL 10, Poison resistance at XL 20. Both late.

Skill caps: Dart Expert, Dagger Expert, Short Sword Expert. Knife, saber, unicorn horn, and Escape spells reach Skilled; everything else caps at Basic.

Your camera is the early-game survival tool. Apply it at any monster to blind it (and often to scare it). Camera-flash, dart from range, let the pet finish, and repeat. Save scrolls of magic mapping for levels that look genuinely nasty.

The Tourist tax. Shopkeepers charge Tourists below XL 15 a +33% markup and offer 1/3 base on sales. Below XL 15 you are priced as a sucker. Most ascending Tourists do their shopping after Quest completion.

Pivot: the Tourist quest artifact, the Platinum Yendorian Express Card, is one of the best in the game: magic resistance, telepathy, and half spell damage all while carried, plus charge items by invocation. Tourists who reach the Quest become caster- heavy mid-game on a role nobody expects to cast.

Avoid: rushing to Minetown without an upgrade weapon. Shopping below XL 15. Wearing the Hawaiian shirt if you plan to enchant it up; before you protect it with magic resistance it’s likely to be destroyed (a polymorph trap or the destroy-armor monster spell).

Valkyrie

Recommended for first serious attempt. You start with a long sword (or spear), a small shield, intrinsic cold resistance, and good combat stats. Mjollnir, a +d5/+d24 war hammer that returns when thrown at Strength 25, drops as your guaranteed sacrifice gift regardless of alignment, so the late-game weapon question is solved early.

Intrinsics: Cold resistance at XL 1, Stealth at XL 3, intrinsic speed at XL 7.

Skill caps: Long Sword Expert, Two-Handed Sword Expert, Axe Expert, Hammer Expert (Mjollnir’s skill), Spear Expert, Dagger Expert. The widest practical weapon-skill range in the game.

Excalibur is also possible. Lawful Valkyries dipping a long sword into a fountain at XL 5+ get the standard 1-in-30 per dip. Fountain-dip until it appears, then transition to Mjollnir at the altar.

Pivot: Valkyries already have most of the combat they need; mid-game focus shifts to magic resistance (gray dragon scale mail) and reflection (shield of reflection or amulet of reflection from Sokoban). The Castle wand of wishing usually settles the magic resistance question with one wish.

Avoid: coasting through the early game without preparing for Gehennom. Magic attacks bypass your HP and AC, so line up magic resistance and reflection before things get hard.

Wizard

The undisputed caster. You start with a quarterstaff, a +2 cloak of magic resistance, a wand, two rings, three potions, three scrolls, force bolt plus a random spellbook, and a magic marker.

Intrinsics: Warning at XL 15, Teleport control at XL 17.

Skill caps: Four spell schools at Expert (Attack, Divination, Escape, Matter); Healing, Enchantment, Cleric Skilled. Quarterstaff and Dagger Expert. Wielding a quarterstaff lowers spell-failure.

Spell-school advancement IDs spellbooks. Training a spell school auto-reveals book appearances at higher levels. Wizards start knowing every level-1 plus level-3 attack and enchantment.

Pivot: by XL 10 the Wizard mid-game is “get every spellbook.”

Avoid: force-bolting glass: a nymph’s mirror is −2 Luck and shattered potions are wasted. Going hungry: you start with no food and casting drains nutrition fast.

Learning Spells

Read a spellbook (r, the same key that reads scrolls) to learn the spell it contains. Reading takes several turns and can fail. A failed reading can teleport you, take your gold, blind, confuse, or poison you, blow up in your face for HP damage, or randomly curse one of your items. A book that survives failures can be retried.

The book’s level decides which effects are on the table. A level-1 book can teleport you somewhere random when you fail to read it. A level-2 book might aggravate nearby monsters instead. Misread a level-3 book and it can blind you for 250 to 350 turns. A level-4 book can take all your gold, and level 5 can leave you confused for 16 to 22 turns. Misread a level-6 book and you may be contact-poisoned: gloves take corrosion damage, bare hands take 1 or 2 points of Strength plus 1d10 HP (1d6 with poison resistance). And a level-7 book can have an exploding rune. Magic resistance blocks the explosion; without it, you take 2d10+5 damage. Practical rule: don’t read books you can’t afford to fail.

The chance of successfully reading a spellbook depends on the spell level, your Intelligence, and your experience level. The exact formula is Int + 4 + XL/2 − 2·level versus a roll of 1d20, so read 20 or more always succeeds, 10 is a coin flip, and anything below that is dicey. Reading a level-7 spell at Int 15, XL 2 gives a read score of 6: only a 30% chance of success. Lenses add +2. A blessed spellbook bypasses the check entirely and always succeeds. A cursed spellbook fails automatically and applies one of the failure effects above.

In the table below, the “Minimum Int + XL needed” column means the sum of your Intelligence and your experience level. With 18 Intelligence at level 14, your sum is 32, so you can reliably read up to level 6 spells.

A blessed book skips the difficulty check entirely and always succeeds, no matter what your Int and level are, which is one reason to save holy water for your hardest unread spellbooks.

Wizards are the undisputed masters of magic: they learn faster, fail less, and have the widest range of useful spells. A well-built Wizard can eventually learn every spell in the game, which is the closest the Mazes come to letting you cheat. Monks are the surprising second. They have access to all seven spell schools too, and their no-body-armor restriction actually helps casting because body armor adds a failure penalty; the monk-favored robe grants another bonus on top. Priests and Healers cast meaningfully in their own schools. Other roles can manage the occasional spell with help. A Valkyrie can sometimes read identify (level 3) if her Intelligence is boosted by gain-ability potions, but non-spellcasters are usually better off with scrolls. Tourists, Barbarians, and Cavemen should probably stick to hitting things.

Wizards identify books by training. Advancing a spell school skill to each rank automatically reveals the appearances of spellbooks in that school: unskilled unlocks level-1 appearances, basic level-3, skilled level-5, expert level-7. A Wizard starts knowing all level-1 appearances and level-3 in attack and enchantment, which means they begin the game with a meaningful identification advantage in their core schools.

Each spell stays in memory for about 20,000 turns, then fades and must be relearned. The spell list (+) shows time-remaining. You can also apply a spellbook to check how worn it is: each successful read counts toward a fixed total of four before the book fades to blank paper. Failed reads don’t add to that counter, but each failure has its own 1-in-3 chance to destroy the book outright. Carry important spellbooks with you if you plan to rely on their spells in the late game.

Paperbacks. A spellbook that appears as a paperback is a novel rather than a real spellbook. Read it: the first novel you pick up in a game grants 20 XP, which is exactly enough to lift a fresh character from experience level 1 to 2. (The 20 XP only fires once; subsequent paperbacks just display a quote.) Each paperback is a Terry Pratchett Discworld title, and reading it opens a passage from the novel.

Key Spells

The other 34 spells, along with their schools, types, and rank-gated upgrades, are in the Spell Tables appendix.

For Wizards, learning identify and magic mapping as spells dramatically reduces your need for scrolls: it’s like having infinite scrolls, except they cost mana instead of inventory space. Finger of death is the ultimate argument-ender. Charm monster turns your enemies into your friends, which is even better than killing them because friends carry things and absorb hits.

Chain lightning is a fine room-clearer. At level 2 it’s within reach of any character who can cast at all. The spell auto-fires in all eight directions without a target prompt, deals 2d6 per hit, and stops dead at any peaceful or tame monster, so you can clear a hostile room without lighting up your pet or a shopkeeper down the hall. Shock-resistant hostiles eat one hit, then end that beam.

Mana Management

Your power (Pw) pool determines how many spells you can cast before you need to sit in a corner and regenerate like a phone battery. Casting a spell costs 5 Pw per spell level (so finger of death is 35 Pw). A failed cast still spends half.

Pw regenerates on a periodic tick that gets shorter as you level up. At XL 1 you tick about every 24 turns (18 for a Wizard); by XL 10 it’s every 18 turns (14 Wizard); at XL 20 about every 12 (9 Wizard); at XL 30 just 5 (4 Wizard). Each tick gives 1 to ((Wis + Int) / 15) + 1 Pw, so typically 1-3 at decent stats and 1-4 with very high Wis and Int. Magical breathing adds 2 to that ceiling. The energy regeneration intrinsic (from the Eye of the Aethiopica among other sources) bypasses the period entirely so you regen every turn. Stressed or worse encumbrance shuts regen off; Burdened is fine.

High-level spells cost serious power. Plan your casting and carry backup wands and scrolls: a Wizard out of Pw is just a person in a bathrobe holding a stick.

How Luck Works

Luck ranges from -13 to +13. It starts at 0, the universe’s way of saying “prove yourself.” Left alone, luck drifts back toward zero over time; the Mazes don’t give anything for free.

Luck timeout. Every 600 turns, your luck moves one point toward 0. If you have +5 luck, it will drop to +4 after 600 turns, then +3 after 1200, eventually reaching 0. Your good deeds are forgotten. Your sins, alas, are also forgiven.

Luckstone. Carrying a luckstone in your open inventory (not inside a container) freezes the timer. Your luck stays wherever it is until something changes it. For this reason, getting the luckstone from Mine’s End early is recommended. It’s a small gray stone that makes the universe remember you fondly.

Bless state matters. Any non-cursed luckstone (blessed or uncursed) freezes drift toward your baseline and adds +3 to your effective Luck on most rolls. A cursed luckstone is dangerous: it subtracts 3 from your effective Luck and holds negative Luck in place (preventing the usual drift back toward zero from below). Always BUC-check a luckstone before carrying it, and bless it on an altar if you can. The curse doesn’t speed positive Luck’s decay, but it locks bad Luck in.

The Heart of Ahriman, Tsurugi of Muramasa, and Orb of Fate all count as luckstones. Barbarian, Samurai, and Valkyrie quest artifacts confer the same drift-freeze and bless-state bonus, so those three roles get a “free luckstone” from their quest reward. Carrying both a blessed luckstone and one of these artifacts doesn’t stack the +3 bonus (the bonus is binary, not additive), but it does add an extra unit of “blessed” to the count if you somehow end up with a cursed luckstone, partially offsetting it.

Calendar Luck. The drift target isn’t always 0:

• On a full moon night, baseline Luck is +1: Luck drifts toward +1 instead of 0. If you started the session on a full moon, you have +1 Luck for free.
• On Friday the 13th, baseline Luck is −1. Avoid stair-up runs on this day if you can; your accumulated good Luck will sap toward −1 even if you’ve been virtuous.

(NetHack uses your computer’s real date for this; set your clock back if you’ve planned an ascension on the 13th and don’t want the penalty, though most players just embrace the theme.)

Gaining and Losing Luck

Be virtuous and the numbers smile on you. Be a monster and they frown. The Mazes have a moral compass, and it’s embedded in the math.

Unicorn gem-throwing is the strongest active Luck source in the game. Throw a properly-identified real gem (not glass) at a unicorn whose alignment matches yours and you gain +5 Luck immediately. The unicorn turns peaceful, accepts the gift, and teleports away, and will accept another later if you find it again. Identify your gems first (touchstone or scroll of identify); the bonus drops from +5 to +1 if you don’t actually know what you’re throwing. Glass gems are harmless but yield nothing; throwing them is a safe way to pacify an unwanted unicorn without spending real gems. Avoid throwing real gems at cross-aligned unicorns: the result is a random Luck change between -3 and +3 and is rarely worth the gamble. Archeologists start with a touchstone, which lets them verify whether a gem is real before throwing it at a unicorn.

There is a ceiling on the luck you can obtain from any given kind of offering. If your current luck score already exceeds the difficulty rating of the monster you just sacrificed, you gain nothing. The altar accepts your offering politely and gives you nothing in return, because the gods have standards.

Before 5.0, players used to be able to sit at a co-aligned altar with a pile of kobold corpses and grind luck to maximum. That no longer works once your luck is already above modest levels. To raise luck via sacrifice in the mid-to-late game, you need fresh corpses of monsters whose difficulty exceeds your current luck value. A luckstone, occasional mid-tier sacrifices, and care to avoid killing peacefuls is the standard path to high luck.

Why Luck Matters

At Luck +5 (or higher, with a luckstone), life is noticeably better:

• You hit more often in combat. Swings that would have missed connect instead.
• Your prayers are more likely to be answered. Your god likes lucky people. (Gods are fickle that way.)
• Scrolls of enchant weapon/armor succeed more often at high enchantment levels.
• Wands of wishing are more likely to work perfectly on wresting.
• Fountain wishes become slightly more likely.

At negative luck, all of these go wrong. Even one point of negative Luck causes prayer to backfire. Instead of helping, your god responds with punishment: a stat loss with a “thou hast strayed from the path” sermon, a black glow that curses your gear, or in the worst case bolts of damage. You’ll miss attacks you should have hit. Scrolls will backfire. The dungeon becomes a place that is trying to kill you even harder than usual, which is saying something.

The practical advice: get a luckstone early, sacrifice occasionally to keep luck positive, and don’t kill peacefuls. Treat the universe well and it will return the favor, in the form of slightly better random numbers, which in the Mazes is the closest thing to love.

How Exercise Works

The counter is invisible. A long enough streak of exercising behavior, plus a passing random roll (with diminishing returns once you’ve already gained), gives you the message “You feel agile! You must have been working on your reflexes!”, or the matching one for the other stats. The reverse, “You haven’t been working on reflexes lately,” fires when the abuse counter wins instead.

Exercise can lift a stat up to 18 (your innate maximum isn’t bypassed; potions of gain ability still rule the top end). Abuse can drop it down to your racial minimum.

Actions That Exercise and Abuse

Two Monk-specific quirks: a Monk who is Weak from fasting exercises Wis, and a Satiated Monk abuses it. The vow of restraint pays in wisdom.

Why Exercise Matters

Stats matter for almost everything: Str for damage and carrying capacity, Dex for hit chance, Con for HP per level, Wis for prayer success and Pw regeneration. Drifting one of them up over the course of a run is a small but real upgrade. Drifting one down because you’ve spent five hundred turns Satiated and Fumbling is a small but real loss. Your habits matter more than single actions.

The Skill Ladder

Practice with a weapon improves how often you hit and how hard. The game tracks this as a skill rank: more practice, higher rank, more deadly swings. Most skills run Unskilled → Basic → Skilled → Expert. Bare hands and martial arts alone reach Master and Grand Master. Each rank-up costs both practice (uses of the skill) and skill slots (a finite budget tied to your experience level).

Non-weapon skills (spell schools, riding, bare hands, martial arts) cost roughly half as many slots as melee weapons, the dungeon’s quiet subsidy for magic. (Two-weapon uses the weapon column despite the name.) You start with 2 slots, gain one per experience level (29 more by XL 30), and one more if you are crowned, so the absolute ceiling is 32 slots for an XL-30 crowned hero. Lose an experience level and you lose a slot, which can demote your most recent advancement.

Each role has a per-skill cap beyond which no amount of training will help. A Wizard caps at Basic with a mace and is restricted from long swords. Restricted skills don’t appear on #enhance and stay Unskilled, except for god-given artifact weapons, which unrestrict the skill to Basic. The full role caps appear in Per-Role Skill Caps below.

Training a Skill

Practice accumulates through use:

• Weapon skills tick on every melee or thrown hit that does more than 1 damage. A pillow-soft punch for 1 point doesn’t count. Spears, javelins, knives, daggers, and aklys train the same skill whether you stab with them or throw them.
• Bare hands counts 50% of your hits; martial arts counts 75%. The rank still applies on every hit; this just slows the climb.
• Riding earns one tick every 100 squares ridden.
• Spell schools earn N practice per successful cast of a level-N spell. Every school has a level-1 option to grind. See the schools table below.

Skills your role starts at Basic come pre-credited with 20 practice uses, so you’re already a quarter of the way to Skilled before the first turn.

When you’ve earned enough practice you see “You feel more confident in your skills.” That’s your cue to type #enhance. If more advancements remain after you pick one, you’ll see “You feel you could be more dangerous!” Keep going.

What a Rank Buys You

For weapons and fighting styles, each rank shifts your to-hit and damage bonuses by a flat amount (the values replace each other, not stack):

(Each cell is to-hit / damage.) Two-weapon penalties apply to each of the two strikes. A Basic two-weaponer hits twice but at −7 each, which is much worse than one solid swing. Bare hands and martial arts bonuses apply on every hit; only the practice counter is gated by the dmg>1 roll. The Expert weapon line (+3 / +2) is why dedicating to a single weapon matters: that’s the difference between killing the monster and watching it shrug.

The Seven Spell Schools

Every spellbook belongs to one of seven schools, and your rank in that school determines how reliably you can cast spells from it. Higher rank also unlocks some spell upgrades. Cone of cold becomes a cluster of 3×3 explosions at Skilled, identify IDs the whole stack, haste self lasts longer, and so on.

Per-Role Skill Caps

Three tables of fixed maxima follow: weapons, fighting styles, and spell schools. Skills not listed for a role are restricted: the rank is locked at Unskilled, with one exception (a god-given artifact weapon unrestricts you to Basic in its skill). Key: B=Basic, S=Skilled, E=Expert, M=Master, GM=Grand Master, (blank)=restricted.

A blank cell doesn’t mean the skill is unusable, just locked at Unskilled forever. A Healer can still read a spellbook of force bolt and try to cast it. A Wizard can still swing a long sword. They’ll just always pay the Unskilled penalty from the Skill Ladder (−4/−2 for a weapon, −9/−3 per strike for two-weapon, the Unskilled cast-failure rate for a spell school), with no path to improvement. Role abbreviations: Arc=Archeologist, Bar=Barbarian, Cav=Caveman, Hea=Healer, Kni=Knight, Mon=Monk, Pri=Priest, Rog=Rogue, Ran=Ranger, Sam=Samurai, Tou=Tourist, Val=Valkyrie, Wiz=Wizard.

Spending Slots Wisely

Thirty slots sounds like plenty until you start counting. Expert in a single weapon costs 6 slots (1+2+3) by itself. A Valkyrie aiming for Expert long sword, Expert two-weapon, and Skilled riding is fourteen slots deep before any spell school.

A few principles:

• Don’t enhance reflexively. Slots are spent permanently (short of losing experience). If you’re not committed to a weapon, hold the slot until you are.
• Cap-aware investment. Pushing a skill to its role cap is fine: the menu just stops offering further advances. You can’t waste enhancements past the cap because the option never appears.
• Wizards get two benefits from spell schools. Each rank-up improves casting success and reveals more spellbook appearances in that school (the identification payoff covered in the Spellcasting chapter). Schools containing your unidentified books deserve priority. This double benefit is Wizard-only; other roles only get the casting-success benefit.
• Wizards: daggers before schools. A common opening pushes Dagger to Expert (six slots) before serious investment in spell schools. Thrown daggers carry the early game while Pw is scarce, and school ranks then come online to upgrade the late game without leaving the early game starving.
• Riding is a skill. Without Basic riding you can’t pick up items, loot, dip, set or disarm traps, or engrave on the floor while mounted. Knights start at Basic. Pushing to Skilled erases the −1 to-hit penalty in the saddle and adds +1 damage.
• Bare hands and martial arts are the domain of Monks. Grand Master needs 9 cumulative non-weapon slots, which Monks reach naturally. Anyone else dabbling in unarmed combat should plan to stop at Basic.

A few spells get sharper at Skilled. Cone of cold and fireball become a cluster of 3×3 explosions you can place at range. Identify, remove curse, haste self, detect monsters, and several others gain the blessed-scroll effect.

Sources of Wishes

The Mazes are stingy, but there are more wish sources than most travelers realize:

• Wand of wishing: found in the Castle treasure room (see Key Wands for the charge mechanics). The Castle chest also contains a potion of gain level, because the Mazes occasionally feel generous.
• Vlad’s throne: A special throne that grants a guaranteed wish if you keep sitting. Four of thirteen outcomes are a wish (which destroys the throne); the other nine are painful but the throne survives, so persistence pays off.
• The Amulet of Yendor: Grants a wish when you first pick it up. A reward for reaching the bottom of the dungeon. You can decline this wish if your kit is already complete; some minimalist ascenders skip it entirely on principle.
• Magic lamp: Rubbing a blessed lamp summons the djinni 1-in-3 times; if it appears, it grants a wish 80% of the time, so roughly 27% wish per rub. Keep rubbing. Either a magic lamp or a magic marker is guaranteed in Orcus Town.
• Fountain: roughly 1 in 30 quaffs summons a water demon, and that demon grants a wish only about 1-in-5 times on shallow floors (less on deeper ones), so a true wish chance closer to 1 in 150 per quaff. Far more likely to produce snakes, nymphs, curses, or vomiting.
• Throne: Very rare chance of a wish when sitting. Also a very real chance of everything going wrong.
• Djinni from smoky potion: Rare (1 in 13 base probability), and even then only 20% wish chance (80% if blessed). But when it works, you feel like a genius.

In practice, the number of wishes a run produces varies widely. A sensible budget if you take each guaranteed source once is about four (Castle wand, Vlad’s throne, Amulet pickup, one magic lamp). Anything beyond that is luck (extra lamps, fountain demons, recharge chains) or commitment. Don’t waste any of them on food.

What to Wish For

Generations of adventurers have argued about optimal wish order. Here’s the conventional wisdom, battle-tested by thousands of ascensions:

1. Gray dragon scale mail (magic resistance + AC; magic resistance is the most important protection in the game, so this is highly recommended). Type blessed greased fixed +2 gray dragon scale mail.
2. Silver dragon scale mail (reflection + AC, the second pillar of not dying to wands). Type blessed greased fixed +2 silver dragon scale mail.
3. Speed boots (being fast gives you more actions per turn, excellent for both offense and escape). Type blessed greased fixed +2 speed boots.
4. Gauntlets of power (STR 25 if your role benefits; most roles benefit from punching harder). Type blessed greased fixed +2 gauntlets of power.
5. Amulet of life saving (insurance for the endgame, when overconfidence kills more adventurers than monsters do). Type blessed amulet of life saving (amulets take no enchantment or erosion).
6. A specific artifact (Grayswandir is a common target for the silver damage against everything in Gehennom). Type blessed greased fixed +2 Grayswandir.

Don’t wish for consumables (scrolls, potions) unless you’re in dire straits. Items you can find through normal play aren’t worth a wish. A wish is for things that change the fundamental equation of your survival.

Wish Syntax

When the prompt asks “For what do you wish?”, be specific. This is not the time for ambiguity. The strings above are written out in full for exactly this reason; here is what each word buys you:

• “blessed greased fixed +2 gray dragon scale mail” is the veteran’s incantation. blessed because BUC defaults to random, greased deflects nymph theft and Rider grabs, fixed (or rustproof or erodeproof) locks erosion, and +2 is the enchantment. Don’t reach higher than you have to: when you name a plus on armor or a weapon, the wish secretly rolls a number from 1 to 5, and if your plus is greater than that roll the enchantment collapses to +0. So +1 always lands, +2 lands four times in five, +3 only three in five, and anything past +5 never lands at all. A +3 wish has the higher average if it lands, but ask for +2 anyway: the plus is steadier, and once you top it off with enchant scrolls it ends up a hair ahead of where a +3 wish would have left you.
• Mind your Luck before you wish. Non-negative Luck is all you need, and piling up more buys you nothing extra at the prompt. Negative Luck, though, poisons the whole wish: blessed comes out cursed, fixed fails to hold, and any plus above +2 flips to a minus. If your Luck has soured, mend it before you spend a wish on gear.
• “gray dragon scale mail” alone lets the dice pick the BUC and the enchantment, so a bare wish can land cursed. You had one wish; spell out the BUC and the plus. And don’t forget “scale”: “gray dragon mail” alone hands you a scroll of mail instead.
• Artifact wishes get harder as artifacts accumulate. The denial roll scales with the total artifacts in the world (yours, generated, even bones-file ones), and your artifact-wish counter ticks whether or not the artifact actually appears. Quest artifacts are absolutely blocked.
• A few targets are silently nerfed into mundane substitutes. The Amulet of Yendor becomes a fake amulet, the Bell of Opening a plain bell, the Book of the Dead blank paper, and the Candelabrum a tallow candle. A wish for a magic lamp also fails, handing you an ordinary oil lamp. Cruel, after all that lamp-rubbing.

Alignment and Blasting

Each artifact has an alignment. If you try to handle an artifact that doesn’t match your alignment:

• Intelligent artifacts (most quest artifacts and certain alignment-restricted artifacts): 4d10 damage (or 2d10 with magic resistance) and the item evades your grasp. You cannot wield these.
• Other misaligned artifacts: 4d4 damage on first touch (2d4 with magic resistance), 1/4 chance of being blasted on each subsequent touch.

Wishable / random artifacts

These are the artifacts you can find, get from a sacrifice gift, fountain-dip up (Excalibur), or wish for. Bonus damage is rolled fresh on each hit (e.g. +d10 means roll 1d10). The “extra” column is the damage rolled on top of the base weapon’s own damage. A weapon listed as “×2 vs X” rolls its base damage twice against any member of that monster class.

Not every entry is equally desirable. Grayswandir and Magicbane are the artifacts most players try to wish for first; Mjollnir is the Valkyrie’s archetypal wish; Excalibur is usually fountain-dipped rather than wished. Frost Brand, Vorpal Blade, and Stormbringer are common second wishes. Snickersnee and Sunsword were historically considered flavour pieces, but their 5.0 effects (free reach attack per turn; on-demand camera-style blind) have moved them into the “worth wishing for, role permitting” tier. The remaining entries (the bane weapons, Fire Brand, Cleaver) are usually accepted as sacrifice gifts rather than spent wishes on.

Excalibur is the go-to weapon for Lawful characters; the drain resistance alone is worth carrying it, even after you have a stronger weapon. Knights start aligned to it and have unique 1-in-6 fountain-dip odds; every other Lawful role faces 1-in-30.

Grayswandir is wishable and one of the strongest melee weapons in the dungeon. It’s silver (extra damage to many monsters), doubles its physical damage on every hit, adds +d5 to-hit, and grants hallucination resistance.

Mjollnir is the Valkyrie’s signature throw-and-return weapon: only Valkyries catch it back 99% of the time. Other roles can wield it in melee, but throwing it is risky because the return often misses. Needs Strength 25 to wield in either case (gauntlets of power or rings of gain strength get you there); +d24 shock damage is brutal against anything not shock-resistant.

Magicbane is the Wizard’s go-to athame. Its stun damage, curse protection, and magic resistance all require it to be wielded, not just carried. Often the first gift from a Neutral sacrifice. One nuance for two-weapon Wizards: the curse protection only applies while Magicbane is the primary wielded weapon. If you stash Magicbane in the off-hand to swing a heavier blade, you’ve also turned off its anti-curse aura.

Stormbringer is dangerous because it attacks peaceful monsters automatically, which can wreck your alignment. But each hit drains a level from the target and gives it to you, huge in the early-to-mid game. Stormbringer is also intelligent: a Lawful or Neutral wielder takes 4d10 blast damage on touch, not the 4d4 that ordinary cross-aligned artifacts deal.

Cleaver is the Barbarian quest artifact. When wielded one-handed, every swing strikes the primary target and the two squares flanking it: three monsters per attack at a corridor mouth or against a diagonal pair. The side-strikes don’t fire when two-weaponing, so most Barbarians keep Cleaver as the primary and a shield in the off slot.

Frost Brand and Fire Brand each have an #invoke power the wishable table doesn’t capture: Frost Brand summons a snowstorm around you (cold damage to nearby squares), Fire Brand summons a firestorm. Either one clears the room around you when you’re cornered.

Snickersnee got a major buff in 5.0: once per turn you can a (apply) it for a reach attack at a target up to two squares away, without using your turn — you still get a normal melee swing on top. The free hit is announced by a distinctive “Shkinng!” That combined output (one reach + one melee per turn) makes Snickersnee a contender for best Samurai weapon, not the flavor piece it used to be.

Sunsword is the Lawful long sword that wants to be a tool. Wielded, it lights its current radius (handy in caves and the Mines without costing an oil lamp). #invoke it for a directed blinding ray, mechanically a Camera flash in any direction (not limited to undead). It costs 50 Pw per invocation, so save it for the fights that demand it: Riders, mind flayers, the Wizard of Yendor. Invoking up or down lights the room; invoking at yourself self-blinds you.

Bane weapons (Sunsword, Demonbane, Sting, Orcrist, Grimtooth, Dragonbane, Werebane, Giantslayer, Ogresmasher, Trollsbane) deal double base damage against their target class. Most are disappointing as a primary weapon, but the defensive riders are often the real reason to swap one in: Trollsbane regenerates while wielded (genuinely useful for an early character holding the line), Dragonbane reflects, Werebane neutralizes lycanthropy, Grimtooth defends against poison.

Quest artifacts

Each role has exactly one quest artifact, awarded for completing the role’s quest. They are intelligent: only the rightful owner can safely wield them; anyone else gets blasted. Most of the non-weapon ones grant magic resistance just by sitting in your inventory, so roles whose quest artifact is a passive object still benefit from carrying it.

A wishing quirk to know about. The wish system blocks your own role’s quest artifact (you have to earn it the hard way), but it doesn’t block other roles’ quest artifacts. A neutral character can wish for any neutral quest artifact, a lawful one for any lawful quest artifact, and so on. The alignment-blast rule still applies if you actually wield or wear a misaligned one, but carry bonuses (MR, drain resistance, regeneration, half spell damage, energy regeneration, etc.) work for anyone. A neutral Monk can wish for the Healer’s Staff of Aesculapius for the drain-life-on-hit and drain-resistance carry bonus, or the Wizard’s Eye of the Aethiopica for MR + half-spell-damage + energy regen, even though those quests are closed to the Monk. Wishes for artifacts of all kinds also have an increasing fizzle chance as more artifacts already exist in the game.

#invoke (default ^A) activates each artifact’s special power for an energy cost, and the power has a cooldown before you can use it again.

The Orb of Detection (Archeologist): a crystal ball that grants ESP and magic resistance just by being carried. #invoke toggles invisibility. Archeologists are already exceptional at stealth, and this turns them into a ghost.

The Heart of Ahriman (Barbarian): a true luckstone (so it raises the Luck cap to +13 and counts everywhere a luckstone does), plus stealth and a +1 luck bonus. Barbarians can also throw it for double damage and pick it back up. #invoke is levitation.

The Sceptre of Might (Caveman): mace base, +d5 to-hit, double damage against any monster whose alignment differs from the artifact’s (the Sceptre itself is Lawful, so it deals doubled damage against chaotic, neutral, and unaligned monsters: most of the dungeon’s hostiles once you reach Gehennom). It also grants magic resistance while wielded. #invoke casts conflict (monsters fight each other) at a steep energy cost.

The Staff of Aesculapius (Healer): the Healer’s salvation. Each hit drains life (one of only three drain-life weapons; the others are Stormbringer and the rider Death) and gives you regeneration plus drain resistance just by carrying it. #invoke heals fully and cures nearly every bad status. Few artifacts change a role’s late game as much as this one.

The Magic Mirror of Merlin (Knight): grants ESP and magic resistance, and now and then the old wizard’s voice murmurs a hint from inside the glass. Knights already have Excalibur for combat, so the Mirror rides along as a talking insurance policy.

The Eyes of the Overworld (Monk): lenses that, when worn, give astral vision (see invisible, see through walls, spot secret doors) and magic resistance. Both effects require them to be worn; carrying them in inventory does nothing. #invoke enlightens you. For a Monk who can’t safely wear body armor, a powerful passive on a slot they can use.

The Mitre of Holiness (Priest): a helm of brilliance with the usual brilliance bonus to intelligence and wisdom (so spell-cast more reliably), plus fire resistance while carried, plus a free -1 to AC. #invoke for an energy boost, useful for spell-heavy Priests. Note: despite what older spoilers say, the Mitre does not deal bonus damage against undead (the artifact has no melee attack to carry the bonus), and it does not grant drain resistance.

The Longbow of Diana (Ranger): a real artifact bow with +d5 to hit plus reflection while wielded, ESP while carried. #invoke conjures free arrows out of thin air. Combined with the Ranger’s ranged specialization this is the role’s centerpiece.

The Master Key of Thievery (Rogue): just carrying it grants warning, teleport control, and half physical damage taken. #invoke disarms a nearby trap. The Key also opens any lock without effort and detects traps on doors and chests as it unlocks them — for a Rogue this works on any non-cursed Key, but everyone else needs it blessed.

The Tsurugi of Muramasa (Samurai): a katana-grade two-handed sword with +d8 damage and a behead chance (like Vorpal Blade) and a +1 protection bonus, and it acts as a luckstone. Note that Tsurugi does not grant magic resistance, despite the weapon’s reputation. One of the strongest artifacts in the game, the Samurai’s reward for a hard quest.

The Platinum Yendorian Express Card (Tourist): the Tourist’s get-out-of-jail card. Carrying it grants ESP, magic resistance, and half spell damage; #invoke charges an item (a wand, ring, or marker), which in the Tourist’s hands is roughly “a free wish per ~1000 turns.” Pairs especially well with marker-stockpiling strategies.

The Orb of Fate (Valkyrie): the most generous carried passive in the game — counts as a luckstone, grants warning, halves both spell and physical damage taken. #invoke is levitate-or-teleport (a toggle, very useful in the Sanctum).

The Eye of the Aethiopica (Wizard): grants magic resistance when worn; carrying also gives half spell damage taken and extra energy regeneration, a Wizard’s most precious resource. #invoke opens a portal that drops you in Vlad’s Tower (one-way; useful for shortcutting the Castle → Vlad’s traversal). For a spell-caster this is irreplaceable.

The Castle

If you’ve reached the Castle, congratulations: you’ve survived the easy part. Everything below is worse.

The Castle sits at the bottom of the Dungeons of Doom, guarded by a drawbridge and whatever the dungeon decided to stuff inside this time.

The drawbridge is the first puzzle. You can lower it four ways:

• Play the passtune. A five-note musical sequence played on any tonal instrument (wooden flute, magic flute, tooled horn, frost or fire horn, bugle, harp) opens the drawbridge. The notes are randomized per game. You can learn them by trying different sequences: the game tells you how many notes are correct after each attempt, like a game of Mastermind. Stand one knight’s-move from the bridge while guessing; adjacent squares get crushed when the bridge opens or breaks. The notes are A–G; “H” is also accepted, in the German notation where it means B.
• Wand of opening pointed at the drawbridge.
• Spell of knock cast at the drawbridge.
• Wand of striking destroys the drawbridge entirely. The moat squares become walkable, but the bridge is gone and the tune is useless afterward. Use this as a one-way option.

Once you’re across, the Castle contains:

• A throne room with a throne and a random court of high-letter monsters (liches, nymphs, eyes, giants, and the like). Sitting on the throne is tempting but risky (see Points of Interest). The throne room also holds a separate treasure chest with random loot. This is not the wand chest, just a side prize.
• Barracks full of soldiers carrying decent equipment, which is to say your equipment once you’ve dealt with them.
• Four corner-tower alcoves. One (and only one, randomly) contains the wand of wishing in a locked chest. Search them all, or quaff a potion of object detection from the courtyard to see which tower holds the chest and skip the other three. That chest also holds a potion of gain level. The chest’s square is protected by a burned-in Elbereth engraving and sealed with a cursed scroll of scare monster. Those wards exist to keep wandering monsters from eating the chest itself (some species, like leprechauns and rats, gnaw containers). The cursed scroll is also a known gotcha: don’t try to read it casually. The locked chest opens by force, by a key, or by a wand of opening.
• Four storerooms along the north and south walls, each guarded by a dragon (D-class). Don’t confuse them with the corner alcoves; the storerooms hold random fodder.
• A central hallway lined with five trap doors. Stepping on one drops you straight to the Valley of the Dead, which is rarely what you want at this stage. Watch the floor. The trap doors are also the only way down from the Castle: the level has no conventional > stair to Gehennom, so when you are ready to descend, you do so by deliberately stepping on one.
• A fountain in the moat-side corridor, usable in emergencies but not worth risking the wand of wishing for.
• A moat surrounding the fortress, occupied by giant eels and the occasional shark.

Strategy: clear the Castle carefully. A ring of conflict turns the guards against each other: walk in, put on the ring, and let the soldiers solve your monster problem for you. Loot everything. Then use your wand of wishing to fill critical gaps in your equipment (gray dragon scale mail, silver dragon scale mail, gauntlets of power, speed boots, whatever you’re missing).

The locked Castle wand chest is safe to leave temporarily: monsters in 5.0 can pick up and rummage through unlocked containers, and they can unlock doors with keys, but they cannot unlock chests. A chest that started life locked stays locked until you or a wand of opening intervene. Unlocked containers are fair game.

The Castle wand yields only two wishes on its own (its charge plus a wrested second), so plan a small wishlist and accept that further wishes will need to come from other guaranteed sources: Vlad’s throne, the Amulet pickup, Orcus Town’s lamp/marker, fountain luck, or wresting. The era of the bottomless wishing wand is over (see Key Wands for the full mechanics).

Once you’re fully equipped, the trap doors in the central hallway are your way down to Gehennom. Take a moment before descending. Sit down. Have a snack. Check your inventory twice. You should have magic resistance, reflection, fire and poison resistance, a wand of digging, a unicorn horn, plenty of food, holy water, scrolls of teleportation and identify, and your quest artifact.

Gehennom

Below the Castle the dungeon changes its character. Corridors give way to mazes, ordinary monsters to demons. Worst of all, your god goes silent. Prayer fails in Gehennom, and from this point on you survive on what you packed at the Castle.

This is the stretch of the game that separates tourists from ascenders. Everything you have prepared for has been leading here.

The Valley of the Dead

The first level of Gehennom, immediately below the Castle, is the Valley of the Dead. The arrival message reads “You arrive at the Valley of the Dead…” and the dungeon overview marks the level for the rest of the game. The map is a wide irregular level with three graveyards scattered across it and a permanent shrine to Moloch in the upper-left corner. The shrine sits on an unaligned high altar; do not pray here. The walls are non-diggable everywhere, so no shortcuts, and both noteleport and nommap are set, which means magic mapping will not reveal the level and teleportation does not work.

A morbid detail worth noticing. Scattered across the level are dead bodies of every player role the dungeon has ever seen descend: two corpses each of Archeologists, Barbarians, Cavemen, Healers, Knights, Rangers, Rogues, Samurai, Tourists, Valkyries, and Wizards. Pointedly absent: no Priests and no Monks. Moloch may have a special fate reserved for members of those classes.

What’s Different in Gehennom

• No prayer. Your god is deaf to you in Gehennom (unless you are a Moloch worshipper, and you are not). No emergency healing, no food rescue, no curse removal via divine intervention. Pack accordingly; from here on you are on your own.
• Fire everywhere. Fire traps litter the corridors, and demons breathe fire as casually as you breathe air. If you do not have fire resistance by now, turn around.
• Hot ground. The ground itself is hot enough to shatter potions dropped on the floor. Keep everything in a bag at all times.
• Demon lords on specific levels. Asmodeus, Baalzebub, Juiblex, Orcus, Yeenoghu, and, very rarely, Demogorgon hold court on private throne levels. Each fight is a major battle, several can summon reinforcements, and all of them are angry you are here. Their lairs and the bribery rules get their own section below.
• Teleportation restrictions. Teleportation is blocked on a demon lord’s lair level while that lord still lives. Kill or banish them and the restriction lifts. In older editions, most Gehennom levels permanently blocked teleportation, which is no longer the case.
• Mazes. Nearly every level is a maze. A wand of digging or a pickaxe is no longer optional. Dig straight lines to the stairs and don’t look back.

The demon-prince lairs

Three of Gehennom’s special levels are the personal thrones of Asmodeus (fire-, cold-, and poison-resistant, casts cold spells, carries wands of cold and fire), Baalzebub (the Lord of the Flies, with a stunning gaze and a poisonous bite that drains Strength; his lair is a beetle-shaped maze), and Juiblex (the Faceless Lord, a slime that engulfs in melee and spits acid). All three sit alone in their lairs and will not pursue you, so you can avoid them entirely by skipping their level.

Asmodeus and Baalzebub are bribable. The demand is a random fraction of the gold in your main inventory, so stash gold in a bag of holding before walking up to the throne and a few hundred zm will buy off a prince who would otherwise have demanded thousands. Lawful characters get a sweetener. All four bribable demon princes are themselves lawful, and they discount the demand by half for a co-aligned visitor. Juiblex is not bribable, and neither are Yeenoghu, Orcus, or Demogorgon. Only the Arch-Devil demons with the bribe disposition (Geryon, Dispater, Baalzebub, Asmodeus) accept gold. The rest attack on sight regardless of how friendly your wallet looks.

Fighting Juiblex is viable late game (a wand of death works on all four), but expect a real fight. None of their corpses is useful for sacrifice the way a fresh weak monster’s would be. One thing the demon never forgets: a refused bribe converts the prince to permanent hostility, and he will not offer terms again. Bribe or fight. Don’t dither.

Wielding Excalibur or Demonbane closes off bribery entirely. Those artifacts refuse to talk and attack on sight, so a Lawful character planning to bribe should sheathe them before approach.

Vlad’s Tower

A three-level tower branching upward off Gehennom, one of the only side-branches in the lower dungeon. Vlad the Impaler, a unique vampire lord, guards the Candelabrum of Invocation at the top. Climb the tower, kill Vlad, take the Candelabrum.

The tower also contains a special throne, and 5.0 has made it both more rewarding and more painful. The good news: it never disintegrates from sheer use the way ordinary thrones do, so you can sit on it again and again. The bad news: you will, because the prize is rare. Each sit rolls one of thirteen effects. Four of them grant a wish (the throne does disintegrate after the wish, having spent its power). The other nine are bad: permanent level drain, an inventory-coating layer of grease (your weapon will slip, your shield will fall off), a stripped intrinsic, a forced level teleport to the vibrating-square level (sometimes useful, often not), three summoned demons, a confused-blessed remove curse on your gear, forced polymorph, acid damage in eighty-HP gulps if you do not have acid resistance, or a randomized stat shuffle that will probably make several of your scores worse.

The arithmetic: only one sit in three picks an effect at all (the other two roll “you feel out of place” and do nothing), and of those that fire, 4/13 are the wish. The unconditional rate is about 1 in 10, so plan on roughly ten sits before the wish lands, with about seven bad effects absorbed along the way. Stand at full HP, leave any precious gear behind (a grease hit coats your whole pack and makes your hands slippery for 100 to 200 turns, dropping items when you try to use them), and have acid resistance or magic resistance ready before you sit. If you do not want a forced wish right now (say, you have already used your Castle wish and Amulet wish and want to keep this one for the ascension kit), you can come back later. The throne stays put unless something destroys it.

Orcus Town

Orcus is a god of the underworld in Roman mythology, a chthonic figure who punishes broken oaths and devours the dead. In the Mazes he is a unique demon prince (&, level 66, fast flier), the Prince of Undead, who casts spells, swings a weapon, claws twice, and stings for strength drain. His signature artifact is the Wand of Orcus, a wand of death by another name. His fingertip cantrip is also a death ray, so wear an amulet of life saving and consider opening with your own wand of death rather than a melee approach.

His level is a ghost town. A normal shopping district has been emptied: the shopkeepers and customers were all killed off by his ambient aura, and the buildings are stocked with random loot instead of for-sale inventory. What remains is an honor guard of liches, vampires, and ghouls. Somewhere on the level the dungeon guarantees either a magic lamp or a magic marker (50/50). Walk carefully, since fire and magic traps are everywhere; deal with the residents, and lift the lamp or marker on your way out. Either one extends the wishes you can pull from the Castle wand.

The Wizard’s Tower

A sequence of three special Gehennom levels that lead to the Wizard of Yendor himself and the Book of the Dead. He is dangerous not for raw combat power but because he never stops. He teleports to your location, summons monsters, steals back his Amulet whenever you grab it, curses your gear, and once you wake him he will not leave you alone for the rest of the game.

Kill him cleanly the first time, grab the Book, and move on. Subsequent kills don’t yield new loot (he respawns), so don’t engage him voluntarily again. The “Run, don’t fight” advice for the Ascension Run is mostly about him.

Moloch’s Sanctum

The bottom level of Gehennom. It is sealed: until the Invocation ritual is performed (see “The Heist” below), the down-stair to the Sanctum doesn’t exist, and the level above is just one more maze. Once the seal breaks, descend to find the High Priest of Moloch standing on the high altar with the Amulet of Yendor. The High Priest is a unique non-bribable boss who casts spells, summons minions, and aggrieves anyone in melee range. The standard answer is a wand of death or finger of death from a safe distance.

The Heist

The climax of the game is a choreographed sequence: three Invocation items, one vibrating square, one final boss, and one frantic climb back to the surface. Everything up to the invocation can be done at your own pace; the moment you perform it the dungeon wakes up, every covetous monster starts hunting you, and there is no longer any such thing as a safe turn. Have the whole kit ready before you begin. The steps:

1. Collect the trio. You need the Bell of Opening (the Quest goal, dropped by your quest nemesis), the Candelabrum of Invocation (the top of Vlad’s Tower), and the Book of the Dead (the bottom of the Wizard’s Tower). Missing any one means walking all the way back to fetch it; the Bell in particular is easy to leave behind on the nemesis’s corpse the first time through the Quest.

2. Attach all seven candles to the Candelabrum. Apply (a) each candle and select the Candelabrum. Candles spawn often enough that you’ll usually have enough, but you need a source for seven: Izchak’s lighting shop in Minetown is the clean answer, or seven are scattered on that level if the shop is absent (Orcish Town layout).

3. Find the vibrating square. On the Gehennom level directly above Moloch’s Sanctum, a single square vibrates when you step on it: “You feel an unsettling vibration under your feet.” The square’s position is random within the maze, so you have to search by walking. Scrolls of magic mapping help enormously.

4. Perform the Invocation. Standing on the vibrating square, with the Candelabrum lit and the Book in your pack, #invoke the Bell of Opening. The floor opens; a down-stair to the Sanctum appears under your feet.

5. Swipe the Amulet from Moloch. Descend, take down the High Priest (wand of death is the clean answer), walk onto the high altar, and pick up the Amulet of Yendor.

6. Begin the getaway. The up-stair from the Sanctum now lifts you out (it would not before you had the Amulet). You are now on the Ascension Run. Every covetous monster in the game has noticed, the Wizard of Yendor will keep teleporting to you to take his Amulet back, and the Mysterious Force will keep yanking you back down. Climb fast (see The Ascension Run below).

Survival Tips

• Bring extra food. You will be moving fast and prayer is not a reliable refill.
• Bring scrolls of remove curse. Fast inventory cleanup when something goes wrong.
• Dig, don’t navigate. Maze walls are faster to go through than around.
• Kill the Wizard quickly. Every turn he lives is another summoned monster, another stolen item, another cursed piece of gear. He will come back (he always comes back), but the intervals between his appearances give you breathing room.
• The Amulet anchors you. Level teleportation does not work while you carry it. Every step back to the surface must be climbed by foot.
• Genocide the lich class. A blessed scroll of genocide applied to L removes liches, demiliches, master liches, and arch-liches in one read. Some of the worst Gehennom threats, gone for the rest of the run.

The Ascension Kit

The adventurers who died deep in Gehennom carried almost exactly this kit. Assemble it, then read the next section to see how they died anyway. Slot by slot:

A typical ascension AC sits in the −25 to −40 range, but AC alone is not the difference between winning and losing.

The Ascension Run

You did it. You fought through Gehennom, defeated the High Priest, and snatched the Amulet of Yendor from Moloch’s Sanctum. Now all you have to do is carry it from the absolute bottom of the dungeon, through every level of Gehennom, past every demon lord you thought you were done with, all the way back to the surface, and then through the Elemental Planes to the Astral Plane where your god awaits. Easy, right?

A free wish on pickup. The moment you pick up the Amulet of Yendor, your god grants you a single wish on the next turn. It fires automatically; you do not need to invoke it. This is one of the most generous moments in the game. Have your wish list ready before you reach the Sanctum: gauntlets of power, a +5 weapon of your choice, a blessed cloak of magic resistance, or whatever you are missing for the climb. You only get this wish once. A late-game favorite is a wish for a cursed potion of gain level. Drinking one while carrying the Amulet skips you up a whole Gehennom level without provoking the Mysterious Force.

Bring the authentic Amulet. The climb out is always open. Every up-stair in the Dungeons of Doom takes you closer to the surface regardless of what you carry. The Astral plane portal at the top of the Endgame ladder, however, will not open without the real Amulet of Yendor in your inventory. Only the Amulet you took off the High Priest’s body in Moloch’s Sanctum counts. Bones-pile Amulets are fakes (the game converts a dead adventurer’s real Amulet to a fake when their corpse becomes a bones level), and a wish for an Amulet of Yendor silently substitutes a fake too. If you didn’t pick yours up off the High Priest, you don’t have the real one.

The Ascension Run is the victory lap that keeps killing even the strongest adventurers. You have the most powerful artifact in the dungeon in your pack, every covetous monster in the Mazes knows it, and the dungeon itself is fighting to keep you from leaving. The most exhilarating and terrifying stretch of the game.

The Elemental Planes

Beyond the top of the Dungeons of Doom, the world dissolves into its raw elements. Four planes stand between you and the gods, each one a different flavor of hostile. There are no stairs here, only magic portals, hidden somewhere on each plane, leading to the next. Each plane is a closed world; the portal you find is the only way out of it, and it closes behind you. There is no going back.

Two cheap ways to find a portal. A scroll of gold detection read while confused marks every trap on the level, the portal included: one read, one map. And the Amulet of Yendor is itself a compass while you carry it: wielded or worn, it occasionally mutters hot, very warm, or warm as you get closer (within 3, 8, or 12 squares of the portal). It’s a hot/cold game you can play your way across the void.