Teleportitis

Teleportitis is the common name for the teleportation intrinsic/extrinsic that allows you (or forces you, depending on your viewpoint) to teleport randomly every few turns. It may be gained by eating a leprechaun, nymph, tengu, or Wizard of Yendor corpse, or by wearing a ring of teleportation (these are often cursed, so be careful).

Teleportation via teleportitis works like other sources of teleportation, being blocked by no-teleport levels and sometimes by the Amulet of Yendor, controlled by teleport control, and landing you somewhere "safe."

Teleportitis is significantly more useful with teleport control, from a ring or an intrinsic. "Controlled" or "uncontrolled" teleportitis refers to whether a character has teleport control along with his teleportitis.

Details

Teleporting randomly

Every game turn, there is a 1/85 chance you will try to teleport. This does not cost nutrition or energy.

Teleporting at will

If you have teleportitis and you have reached experience level 12 (or level 8 for a Wizard) then you can use [^T] (Control-T) to teleport at will. This costs nutrition and energy like a spell; it always uses exactly 19 Pw, but will not work if the player has less than 20 available. It costs 100 nutrition, except in some rare cases where your pet prevents you from teleporting (see below). These costs are still incurred if you choose not to teleport by declining to pick a location (in the case of controlled teleportitis), or even if you cannot teleport because you are on a non-teleport level.

This can be useful; for example, with controlled teleportitis, you can repeatedly teleport to rapidly decrease your nutrition, so as to eat a set of giant corpses before they rot away.

If your leashed pet is standing too far away from you, cannot be moved next to you, and the leash is cursed, you will be prevented from at-will teleport with no nutrition cost. The same will happen if you are riding and your mount carries the Amulet of Yendor. Both cases will still cost Pw however.

If you cannot teleport at will, then [^T] will attempt to use your teleport away spell or the local teleport trap instead. (Source code: teleport.c#dotele)

Strategy

Curing teleportitis

The only cure is to have it stolen by a gremlin, at night. However, it will likely steal a lot of other useful intrinsics, and once you have teleport control, teleportitis becomes a boon anyway. A better strategy is to reverse-genocide tengu (best on a non-teleport level), to polymorph rings, or to level up as a wizard or monk.

Shopping with uncontrolled teleportitis

If you need to visit a shop when you have uncontrolled teleportitis, you should use the following procedure to avoid accidentally stealing items:

1. Stand on the item you want to buy and use the #chat command; the shopkeeper will tell you the price (eg, "a food ration, price 60 zorkmids.")
2. Drop that much gold to the shopkeeper by using a numerical amount with the drop command (eg, "d60$"). The shopkeeper will recognize it and establish a line of credit for you (eg, "You drop 60 gold pieces. 60 zorkmids are added to your credit.")
   • Try not to throw gold at shopkeepers. There's a chance that the shopkeeper will get angry with you.
3. Pick up the object. If you are randomly teleported out of the shop (or leave it in any other way) at this point, your entire credit will be used up to pay for the item without angering the shopkeeper (eg, "Your credit of 60 zorkmids is used to cover your shopping bill.") Note that if your credit is greater than the amount owed, the shopkeeper will keep the difference.
   • Alternatively, just use the pay command as usual, and the shopkeeper will use up your credit before asking you for any more gold (eg, "The price is deducted from your credit.")