Digging for victory

Dig for victory is a strategy in which the player aims to quickly reach the castle by digging down as soon as possible.

The player must have a tonal musical instrument (basically, not a leather drum or a bell) in order to open the drawbridge. Since elves are guaranteed to start with an instrument, an elven wizard is a popular choice of character for this strategy. The player's first task is to reach the Gnomish Mines and search for a pick-axe. The player then returns to the main dungeon, and digs down until the castle.

Digging with the pick-axe requires multiple turns, so occasionally monsters will appear and halt the digging process. These must be scared off with Elbereth or otherwise dealt with. The player may encounter a minotaur either on the castle level, or in a maze just beforehand, and these ignore Elbereth.

Once at the castle, the drawbridge can be opened and closed at will by playing the passtune, crushing anything that stands on it, which will hopefully be everything. Once the castle is clear, the wand of wishing is available for the taking.

Dig for victory is a relatively new strategy; the first mention of it by the name "dig for victory" in #nethack was on May 19th, 2006, by SpeedEvil, its creator.

Criticism

Much like the protection racket, dig for victory is nice when it works. Unfortunately, low experience level, interference from monsters, lack of equipment, minotaurs, collapsing drawbridges and purple liches all conspire to make the fatality rate very high. As such, it is really a metastrategy (a true strategy aims to maximise the survival chances of a particular character, not maximise the chance of at least one of many characters surviving), and even considered by some to be a form of scumming behaviour.

The Dig for Victory strategy, sometimes called "Die for Victory," is mostly preferred by players who find it an exciting way to reach the Castle in a high percentage of games. However, many strong players do employ a controlled dive to the Castle if they do not yet have magic resistance or reflection after completing Minetown and Sokoban. This dive can take a variety of forms, from simply not exploring every dungeon level thoroughly to actually digging down all of the way. A player making the dive after getting some protection, building up a set of armor, and collecting wands is much more likely to succeed.

One reason to do this is to avoid polymorph traps, which can destroy armor, but there are many threats to a character without magic resistance, including other traps (MR prevents the effects of teleportation traps and level teleportation traps) and, of course, the touch of death. Some players will preferentially genocide master liches over arch-liches because the former is more likely to appear at the Castle.

See also GreyKnight's humorous graphical criticism of the Dig for Victory strategy.