Conduct

Conducts are various limitations players may set to themselves in order to make the game more challenging. The game keeps track of your conducts and shows them at the end of the game. You may also see them any time by using the external command #conduct.

Official conducts

The "official" conducts are the conducts that the game tracks.

When you start the game, the list of conducts looks as follows:

Voluntary challenges:

You have gone without food.
You have been an atheist.
You have never hit with a wielded weapon.
You have been a pacifist.
You have been illiterate.
You have never genocided any monsters.
You have never polymorphed an object.
You have never changed form.
You have used no wishes.

Foodless

Foodless means not eating anything at all. This includes non-comestible objects, walls, doors and boulders, if you are polymorphed into a monster that can.

If polymorphed into a mind flayer, attacking a monster counts as eating its brain.

Vegan

Vegans refrain from eating anything which comes from an animal. Vegans may eat:

• food rations, cram rations, K-rations, C-rations and lembas wafers
• melons, oranges, carrots, pears, apples, bananas, kelp, eucalyptus, garlic, wolfsbane, and fruit
• the corpse of any monster represented by b, j, or F.
• tins of any monster represented by b, j, or F.

There are other monsters which are classified as vegan food, but which don't leave corpses.

Vegetarian

Vegetarians may, on top of vegan foods, eat:

• brown puddings and gray oozes
• eggs, pancakes, fortune cookies, candy bars, royal jelly
• candles

All other comestibles break the conduct.

Atheist

Being an atheist means that you are not involved with religion in any way. You must not drop any objects on an altar, pray or offer to gods, or even chat with priests.

Pacifist

A pacifist is a player who does not get experience from killing any monster. A pacifist may, however, use a wielded weapon if they take care not to kill the victim.

Never hit with a wielded weapon

This is mostly self-explanatory. Throwing weapons, firing missiles and using wands is allowed. Hitting with other objects than weapons does not break this conduct. Thus you may very well use a cockatrice corpse as a weapon should you acquire one. Pick-axes, unicorn horns, and grappling hooks, however, do count as weapons, even though they are shown in the tool-category. When trying to maintain a weaponless conduct, one should be very careful when wielding a pick-axe for digging.

Illiterate

Being illiterate means that you do not read or write anything. This includes scrolls, spellbooks and even fortune cookie messages and t-shirts. Using a magic marker is also banned. Reading random engravings you may encounter does not break this conduct. Engraving anything but an x, such as Elbereth, also breaks this conduct.

Never polymorph an object

"Polyless" conduct means never causing an object to be polymorphed, either with the spell or wand of polymorph. Polymorphing monsters does not break this conduct.

Never change form

"Polyselfless" conduct means never changing into another monster. Becoming a new man/woman/orc/etc does not count as changing.

Genocideless

Genocideless conduct is pretty obvious. Reverse genocide does not break this conduct.

Wishless

Two wishing-related conducts are tracked: wishing for anything and wishing for artifacts. If you wish for, say, a silver dragon scale mail, you still have the artifact-wishless conduct. However, if you wish for any artifact, you lose both conducts.

Unofficial conducts

Unofficial conducts are conducts that are not tracked by the vanilla version of the game. They are enforced by the player themself only.

Celibate

Celibacy means not having sex. Having sex with an incubus or succubus may have positive effects such as gaining levels. Slash'EM officially tracks this conduct.

Nudist

Nudism means not wearing any armour throughout the game, except for the first turns during which you remove any starting armor.

Petless

The starting pet can be turned off from the options file.

Zen

The zen conduct is one of the most difficult conducts. It means wearing a blindfold through out the whole game. Only a handful of people are known to have ascended zen games and all of them have been zen samurais.

The difficulty in zen comes in that it is like a mixture of other conducts with additional twists to make it even harder. While blind, you may not read. You cannot use altars to find the BUC status of an object because you do not see if the objects glow and what color. You also do not see how your objects look like by their material or color, so all potions are only shown as "a potion", wands as "a wand" and so on.