Bad Idea

You feel that eating the little dog was a bad idea.

Many things in NetHack are a Bad Idea, although that often only becomes apparent after your demise, which may well be YASD.

A few Bad Ideas include:

• Using only the arrow keys.
• Holding keys down.
• Letting monsters hit you for no good reason.
• Genociding @.
• Blessed-genociding mind flayer as a dwarf.
• Attempting to genocide while confused.
• Casting force bolt in potion shops.
• Casting fireball in bookstores.
• Looting an exploding box in a tool shop.
• Shopping while feeling jumpy.
• Smashing open every locked door in your way.
• Pasting into the NetHack terminal without checking the clipboard.
• Quaffing from every fountain and risking water moccasins and water demons while at a low level in the hope of a wish.
• Getting on your pony right at the start of the game.
• Eating "just one more" giant or lump of royal jelly.
• Eating rotten corpses.
• Training strength by weight lifting.
• Running around while brandishing a cockatrice corpse.
• Levitating around while brandishing a cockatrice corpse.
• Groping around while blind and bare-handed.
• Leaving your wand of wishing in your main inventory, particularly before wishing for reflection.
• Kicking the box in the Castle that contains the wand of wishing before removing the wand.
• Putting all your wands or all your tools into your bag of holding.
• Picking up nondescript gray stones.
• Automatically picking up nondescript gray stones.
• Retreating to a sanctuary to test your unidentified rings.
• Letting an altar convert you.
• Treating werecreatures very inhumanely.
• Dipping for Excalibur before checking your experience level.
• Engraving with the wrong object.
• Teleporting the other Riders or their corpses.
• Hanging out next to a drawbridge.
• Looting bones files without pickup_burden.
• Killing a nymph with a force bolt.
• Throwing your metal daggers at a metallivore.
• Throwing your enchanted daggers at a disenchanter.
• Disconnecting from the server while you decide what to wish for.
• Eating a tin while wielding your artifact weapon in a shop.
• Editing wishes with the arrow keys in a terminal session. Your wish for an amulet of lifesaving may become a wish for a food ration.
• Using a weak weapon to train skills for a weapon that you do not yet possess. It's best to use the best weapon you currently have access to; you can go up floors to train a weapon later when you acquire it.

See also

• Lessons learned the hard way
• YASD
• DeathOnAStick

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It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.4.3. Information on this page may be out of date.

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