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 may allow an ascension on turn 1 in non-wizard mode:

1. Play until you have the following:
   • 2 cursed scrolls of genocide
   • a blessed scroll of earth
   • a ring of slow digestion
   • a few hundred cursed scrolls of create monster and a means of confusion
   • a blessed scroll of remove curse
   • wands of slow monster and speed monster
   • a mummy wrapping
   • anything else you need to ascend
2. Double-check you are not crowned and your god is not angry
3. Get the Amulet of Yendor, reach the Plane of Earth, kill the umber hulk, and stand in a place where you are surrounded by open space
4. Read the cursed scrolls of genocide to surround yourself with spotted jellies
5. Read the scroll of earth to surround yourself with boulders
6. Confuse yourself and read create monster until all squares are occupied with acid blobs, and all phasing monsters are in rock
7. Remove speed boots and zap yourself with slow monster /speed monster if necessary to make sure you are at base speed
8. Drop the blessed scroll of remove curse, optionally burn Elbereth
9. Put on the mummy wrapping
10. Put on the ring of slow digestion, wait until you are just beginning to faint from hunger, remove all other jewelry, and drop the Amulet of Yendor

Now write the following in a text editor:

1. pray<CR>y<ESC>17999.<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.

If you can set your notifications so that you are not interrupted when the Wizard casts a spell ("You feel that monsters are aware of your presence"), this will overflow the turn counter, wrap around to -2 147 483 648 and slowly creep back up to zero. Each pasted line passes 17999 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.

You need to be base speed so that the process will be deterministic (and automatable). Filling all tiles makes sure the Wizard and spellcasters cannot be created, whose spells would interrupt your waiting 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. You have to faint initially so your exact value of hunger is known. The mummy wrapping makes you visible - monsters won't destroy your jellies and boulders because they mislocate you.

The Wizard is guaranteed not to appear on the Astral Plane, but scrolls of earth do not work there. Perhaps the way to make this strategy succeed is to execute it before one kills the Wizard, and at a low(-numbered) enough dungeon level that one can genocide all spellcasters that would be randomly generated at that level. Of course, the farther away from ascension you are when you do this, the more time you need to leave to actually get the Amulet and reach the planes with it.

A variation is to do this in the Astral Plane sanctuary. 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.