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 @ 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 NetHack invalidates the score of an explore mode game, so that it taints never the high scores of the record file.

We note that players rarely use explore mode. Public servers like nethack.alt.org tend to disable it, and players who want to experiment often enter instead wizard mode. There is not much reason to do nethack -X if you can do nethack -D. True, nethack -X grants a wand of wishing, but wizard mode has its ^W command.

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.

Explore mode's escape-death feature, though, has not much use.

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. The problem with this is that typing [X] invalidates the entire game; #quit would at least maximise the score. The best thing to do, in nearly all cases, is to avoid [X] and instead try any desperate actions to prevent the hero from dieing. Do not let explore mode deny you the triumph of rescuing your character and delaying your doom!

Playing in explore mode for an extended time is also a bad idea. Players in explore mode tend to develop abnormal strategies. For example, instead of dealing with a soldier ant in an appropriate way, an explore mode player would probably just melee it, ignoring how many deaths this takes. Then they repeat this process with the next difficult monster, dieing hundreds of times in the same game! If you find yourself dieing many times in this way, you should say [y] or #quit.

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