Explore mode

NetHack's explore mode, described in its Guidebook, allows you to avoid death, so you can explore the game further without playing well. The idea is that when your character would have died, this prompt appears.

Die? [yn]

Type n, and your character comes back to life so that you may continue playing the game. This is different from cheating in that the score will not enter the record file.

Also, inputting Ctrl-X will not only show your basic attributes, but also your current ones, as if you had used an uncursed wand or potion of enlightenment.

Public servers like nethack.alt.org tend to disable it. Explore mode has some value for players who install their distro's NetHack binaries on a Unix system, and lack the correct username to enter wizard mode. The main obstacle for these players is the bother of either creating a user account with the correct name, or compiling NetHack from source code. These players can use the explore mode's wand of wishing to play with specific objects.

Sometimes one remarks that the [X] key, which changes a normal game to explore mode, may save their hero from an impending death so that they can continue their game.

Players in explore mode may develop abnormal strategies. For example, instead of dealing with a soldier ant in an appropriate way, an explore mode player might just melee it, ignoring how many deaths this takes. Then they repeat this process with the next difficult monster, dying hundreds of times in the same game.

Instead of explore mode, consider how Elbereth or a pet could help you.