1-turn ascension

A 1-turn ascension is possible in wizard mode:

1. 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
2. Level teleport to the Astral Plane
3. Wish for a (lawful/neutral/chaotic) altar
4. [[
5. offer|#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.

If you don't consider exploiting bugs to be cheating, the following procedure allows an ascension on turn 1 in non-wizard mode:

1. Play until you have the following:
   • a blessed scroll of genocide
   • 2 cursed scrolls of genocide
   • a blessed scroll of earth
   • a ring of slow digestion
2. Get the Amulet of Yendor, reach the Astral Plane, and stand on your deity's high altar
3. Read the cursed scrolls of genocide to surround yourself with blue jellies
4. Read the scroll of earth to surround yourself with boulders
5. Genocide h, to eliminate mind flayers that could attack from outside your fort
6. Put on the ring of slow digestion

Now write the following in a text editor:

99999.<ESC>#pray<CR>y<ESC>99999.<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 240,000 times, copy it into your paste buffer, paste it into NetHack's terminal, and wait approximately 19 days.

During this time, the turn counter will overflow, wrap around to -2,147,483,648 and slowly creep back up to zero. Each pasted line passes 17,000 turns, so you must calculate precisely how many lines must be pasted to bring the counter back up to zero. As it approaches zero, prepare to ascend, then offer the amulet to your deity as the counter ticks over to 1.

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.