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.

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 use nethack -X if you can do nethack -D. nethack -X grants a wand of wishing, but wizard mode adds a wish command with ^W.

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. 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 dying.

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, dying 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.