Experience level

Your experience level in NetHack is a measure of the overall power of your hero and progress of your adventure. The more experienced you are, the better you become at both fighting and magic.

Experience points (XP) are the units that you accumulate to increase your level. Depending on your game options, you may see a display of your XP or only see your current experience level.

You start at level 1 and can reach a maximum level of 30. Monsters also have an experience level defined, but it can only be seen with a wand of probing, stethoscope, or Magicbane.

Effects

Gaining an experience level will have a number of effects on gameplay:

• Increases your maximum HP
• Increases your maximum energy
• Increases your skill slots by one
• Increases your chance to hit in combat
• Increases your chance of successfully learning a spell from spellbook
• Decreases your spell failure rate
• Increases difficulty of monsters generated
• Changes your title, based on your role (and possibly gender)
• Characters at level 14 or more can attempt the Quest

Experience level has no direct effect on your attributes.

Gaining levels

There are several ways to gain an experience level, ranging from obvious to somewhat obscure:

• Experience points (mostly from killing monsters)
• Quaffing a blessed or uncursed potion of gain level
• Eating a wraith corpse
• Chance from incubus or succubus encounter
• Chance when polymorphing into your own race

You may never gain more than one experience level at a time; killing a water demon at XP1:0 will only put you on 2:39, not 4:169 as might be expected.

If you are already level 30, experience points have no effect. The rest of the above methods will cause your maximum HP and energy to increase, except polymorph.

Losing levels

It's also possible to lose your hard-earned experience levels:

• Level drain attacks
  • Vampire bite, wraith touch
  • Getting hit by The Staff of Aesculapius or the Stormbringer
• Chance from incubus or succubus encounter
• Chance when polymorphing into your own race

These are preventable with level-drain resistance, except polymorph.

Experience points required per level

Level	Nethack - XP Required	Slashem - XP Required
1	0	1
2	20	40
3	40	80
4	80	160
5	160	320
6	320	640
7	640
8	1280
9	2560
10	5120
11	10000
12	20000
13	40000
14	80000
15	160000
16	320000
17	640000
18	1280000
19	2560000
20	5120000
21	10000000
22	20000000
23	30000000
24	40000000
25	50000000
26	60000000
27	70000000
28	80000000
29	90000000
30	100000000

Footnotes

This page is based on a spoiler by Dylan O'Donnell. The original license is:

Redistribution, copying, and editing of these spoilers, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. The original contributors to any spoiler must continue to be credited.
2. Any modifications to the spoiler must be acknowledged and credited.