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 extended command #conduct. Note that conducts only apply to actions in game; a priest obviously believes in a god but does not automatically lose athiest conduct, and classes that begin the game with learned spells do not automatically lose illiterate conduct.
Pundits say popular conducts are as much about avoiding chores as about challenge.
Contents
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 sucking brains when polymorphed into a mind flayer, or digesting monsters when polymorphed into a monster with a digest attack.
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 user-defined fruit
- the corpse of any monster (or a tin of its 'meat') represented by b, j, or F.
- tins of spinach.
When polymorphed into something with a digest attack, vegans may consume monsters that leave vegetarian corpses, as well as corpseless monsters such as ghosts and yellow lights, which are hardly even food. The exceptions are flesh and leather golems, which are obviously also not vegetarian.
Vegetarian
Vegetarians may, on top of vegan foods, eat:
- brown puddings, gray oozes and green slimes
- eggs, pancakes, fortune cookies, candy bars, royal jelly and cream pies
- wax candles (but not tallow candles)
All other comestibles break the conduct.
All of the food restriction conducts make it much harder to gain intrinsics, as the main source of intrinsics is eating corpses. When paired with other conducts such as polyselfless and/or atheist, it can make gaining some intrinsics impossible.
Atheist
Being an atheist means that you are not involved with religion in any way. You must not drop any objects on an altar while nonblind, pray, turn undead as a priest or knight, offer to gods (with the exception of offering the Amulet of Yendor to complete the game), or even chat with priests. Atheists may, however, make use of holy or unholy water if they obtain some without praying. Atheists may also destroy altars with wands of digging or drums of earthquake, if they like.
The worst problem for a late-game atheist character is likely to be the lack of divine protection. Holy water and an artifact weapon can be wished for or obtained in other ways, and Luck can be maximised by throwing valuable gems to a coaligned unicorn in lieu of sacrificing.
Christian Cooper's NetHack page includes a patch enabling atheist characters to win the game without sacrificing the Amulet of Yendor.
4.0% of all winning accounts on NAO have an atheist ascension.
Take note of the difference between formally known BUC and informally known BUC. An "uncursed scroll of enchant armor" and a "scroll of enchant armor named uncursed" WILL NOT STACK FOR BLESSING, unless you formally BUC the second one. Sometimes it is advantageous to NOT formally BUC items to make sure your inventory stacks appropriately.
Items which are formally IDed are formally BUCed, but an item can be formally BUCed without being formally IDed, e.g. by dipping it in holy water and seeing it become blessed.
If the BUC of a formally BUCed item changes (e.g. a lich curses it) you will know immediately. If the item is merely informally BUCed, you will not get any warning. This makes cursing monsters particularly nasty for atheists. Formally BUCing your unicorn horn is a very good idea, and don't trust any unicorn horn that has been exposed to a cursing monster since you last ensured it wasn't cursed.
Formal and informal BUC together give you 10 states to worry about, items who's BUC you know nothing about; known formally identified cursed, uncursed, and blessed; known informally identified cursed, uncursed, and blessed; and items which you know are either not cursed, not uncursed, or not blessed (informally). Those last two are rather rare.
List of ways to BUC items without breaking atheist
- Everything in Curse-testing EXCEPT altar testing. Do NOT drop items on an altar. Do not even go near one. You do not want to drop something on it by mistake.
- Scroll of identify. Note that if you identify an item, it will no longer stack with unIDed items of its type and BUC. A stack of "Q - 15 daggers named +0 probably uncursed, maybe blessed" (enchantment derived from price ID) will automatically merge with any more +0 uncursed daggers you pick up, identifying their BUC for free. If you identify your stack of daggers "Q - 15 uncursed +0 daggers", that won't happen.
- Scroll of remove curse. Read a uncursed one and none of your worn or wielded items are cursed. Read a blessed one and none of the items in your inventory are cursed.
- Uncursed potions of water have a base cost of 5, blessed and cursed ones both have a base cost of 100.
- Potions of confusion, hallucination, blindness, and sickness purified by a unicorn horn will turn into potions of water and fruit juice.
- Unicorn horns dropped by unicorns will always be uncursed (and +0).
- If you pick up a scroll of scare monster from the ground, you know for a fact that its uncursed, though you don't know if the scroll was blessed (and therefore safe to used as uncursed) or not.
- Use the item and see what it does. Don't do this unless you know it won't hurt you or waste resources unduly.
- Relative frequency. For most items, uncursed is more common. A stack of 15 teleport scrolls is probably uncursed, whereas the nearby stack of 2 is probably either cursed or blessed.
- Watch your stacks. "a scroll labeled HACKEM MUCHE" and "a scroll labeled HACKEM MUCHE" will stack, unless they are of different BUC. If you pay attention, and subsequently BUC one of the stacks, (say it turns out to be uncursed), then you know for a fact that the other is either blessed or cursed and can name it accordingly.
Pacifist
A pacifist is a player who does not directly kill 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. Applying a bullwhip only breaks conduct if the target is not wielding a weapon. 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. Scrolls of mail (e.g. from users viewing your game on NAO) also break the conduct (although this is a bug), so it is advisable to turn off this option when attempting to be illiterate. 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 via spell, wand, or potion of polymorph. Polymorphing monsters does not break this conduct. However, if a monster drops carried objects as a result of polymorphing, they will also get polymorphed[citation needed].
This conduct is comparatively easy: 42.3% of all winning accounts on NAO have a polpiles-less ascension.
Never change form
"Polyselfless" conduct means never changing into another monster, including from lycanthropy. Becoming a new man/woman/orc/etc does not count as changing.
This conduct is relatively easy: 73.5% of all winning accounts on NAO achieve it.
Genocideless
Genocideless conduct is pretty obvious; refrain from causing genocide. Reverse genocide does not break this conduct.
Fully 33.1% of all winning accounts on NAO achieve this conduct at least once.
Wishless, artifact 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, regardless if the wish was granted.
Unofficial conducts
Unofficial conducts are conducts that are not tracked by the vanilla version of the game. They are enforced by the players themselves only.
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.
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