1-turn ascension
Wizard mode
A 1-turn ascension is possible in wizard mode:
- Level teleport (Ctrl + v) to the Plane of Earth - use ? to see the menu and select the Plane of Earth ("-1" will not work), this will also automagically give you the Amulet of Yendor
- Level teleport to the Astral Plane
- Wish for a (lawful/neutral/chaotic) altar
- #offer the Amulet
Although this is four steps, none of them consume turns in wizard mode. Players hoping to save themselves tremendous amounts of embarrassment should refrain from claiming this as a real ascension.
Bug exploit
If you don't consider exploiting bugs to be cheating, the following procedure may allow an ascension on turn 1 in non-wizard mode:
- Play until you have the following:
- any means of creating a blue jelly
- a ring of slow digestion
- teleportitis
- teleport control
- NO cold resistance
- (optional, will make the setup faster) regeneration
- anything else you need to ascend
- Double-check you are not crowned, your god is not angry, and your experience level is at most 17.
- Go to a reasonably safe level. Any will do, but it is faster with a smaller level.
- Also, your experience level plus the dungeon level must be less than 20, to prevent creation of earth elementals.
- Create a blue jelly.
- Wield a weak weapon and divide jellies, carefully watching your HP.
- When another unwanted monster appears, teleport to it, kill it and teleport back.
- Repeat until the whole level is filled with jellies.
- Put on the ring of slow digestion while well-nourished, remove all other jewelry, and drop the Amulet of Yendor
Now write the following in a text editor:
99999.<ESC>99999.<ESC>#pray<CR>y<ESC>
Be sure to replace <ESC> with an actual escape character, and <CR> with an actual carriage return. These can be inserted, for example, with vi's Ctrl-V command.
Duplicate this line about 238,600 times, copy it into your paste buffer, paste it into NetHack's terminal, and wait approximately 19 days. This will overflow the turn counter, wrap around to -2,147,483,648 and slowly creep back up to zero. Each pasted line passes 18000 turns, so you must calculate precisely how many lines must be pasted to bring the counter back up to the right amount. As it approaches a reasonable negative value that should give you enough time, prepare to ascend, then offer the amulet to your deity as the counter ticks over to 1.
The hungry and weak status messages will interrupt the waiting command. Filling all tiles makes sure spellcasters cannot be created, whose spells would interrupt you and make the prayer go off too soon. You really nead to wait until you are "weak" but not "fainting" 17999 turns later because "hungry" counts only as a minor problem, and your cursed ring of slow digestion would get improved instead of your hunger. The limit on experience levels is because at higher levels, you stand a minuscule chance of a gigantic prayer timeout. While irrelevant in normal games, probabilities do add up.
A variation is to do this in the Astral Plane sanctuary. The Wizard cannot appear on Astral, but scrolls of earth do not work there. You need to polymorph statues to get boulders, and you can revive jelly corpses from under the boulders.
If NetHack is compiled for a 64-bit platform, the "long" type will not wrap around until it gets to 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. The above trick still works in principle, but will take a few hundred million years to complete.