Intrinsic protection

Divine Protection is the common name for intrinsic protection, as it is typically gained or lost via divine intervention. Intrinsic protection grants a bonus to AC regardless of any armor you may be wearing.

Gaining Intrinsic Protection

You can gain one or more points of intrinsic protection by doing any of the following:

• Donating to a peaceful aligned priest of any alignment in a temple.
  • Donate 400-600 time your XL; guaranteed up to 9 points of intrinsic protection, unlikely after that.
• As a favor from prayer.
  • Luck must be at least 6.
• Eating a ring of protection.
  • Gain intrinsic protection equal to the ring's bonus if successful.

Losing Intrinsic Protection

All of your intrinsic protection is lost if you do any of the following:

• Incite any god to smite you.
• Kill a coaligned priest.
• Put on or remove a helm of opposite alignment.
• Convert yourself to another alignment through sacrifice.

Strategy

The ability to purchase protection from priests makes donations one of the most common uses for gold, especially gold in very large quantities.

As unholy water prayer is one of the means of losing divine protection, if you intend to pray to make unholy water, it is a good idea to do so before purchasing protection.

The protection racket meta-strategy is an approach to purchasing a great deal of divine protection via donating to the priest in Mine Town early in the game.

This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.

It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.4.3. Information on this page may be out of date.

Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-343}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.