Farming

Farming is any kind of repetitive behaviour which is felt to be against the spirit of the game. This definition does not tie down exactly what behaviours count as farming, as opinion varies.

Altar scumming

Hanging around an altar sacrificing anything that comes along is a natural part of many legitimate games of NetHack, but some feel that taking this to extremes is scumming.

Pudding farming

Main article: Pudding farming

Advancing your character to the point where black puddings pose no threat, then carefully using weak weapons to divide them without killing them allows players to "farm" as many puddings as they wish. The puddings can be killed to get a death dropped item, and their corpses can be sacrificed for a variety of benefits.

Players can continue this process (and even automate it) until they possess thousands of hit points, AC:-128, and hundreds of wands of wishing.

Kraken farming

Kraken can be killed trivially when on dry land, and their corpses can be revived using undead turning. This means you can continue killing the same monsters indefinitely, racking up a very high score with very little effort.

You can also trap kraken (which are MZ_HUGE, and so can't pass squeeze through a diagonal) by digging walls in the following pattern:

    # # # # # # 
   #;#;#;#;#;#;#
  #;#;#;#;#;#;# 
 #;#;#;#;#;#;#  
#;#;#;#;#;#;#   
 # # # # # #    

This allows a farmer to repeatedly cast undead turning and finger of death with copy and paste.

Death farming

This is only borderline scumming, as any character capable of doing it is more than capable of ascending. The goal might be to gain large numbers of exotic items to ascend with, to gain billions of points, or (more commonly) to impress onlookers.

1. Eat rings of increase damage until you have a high enough intrinsic damage bonus to kill Death in one hit (+60 should work).
2. Clear the Astral plane of all distractions.
3. Increase your polearm proficiency to skilled.
4. Trap Death in a corner on the Astral plane, like so:

----
|&0@
|jjj
|jjj

In this example, Death is trapped between blue jellies and a boulder. He cannot move, but you can hit him with a polearm. Once he's dead (in one hit), attempt to push the boulder over his corpse. This will revive him. You can then repeat the procedure. You can work out the exact sequence of key strokes used in a complete cycle of this process, such as "aahh.h", and copy this line a few thousand times in a text editor, then paste the whole lot into the NetHack interface.

The result will be many thousand death-dropped items and a very high score. If the number of death-dropped items exceeds 32,768 on the same square, the game will probably crash, so periodically checking Death's square and redistributing the items (possibly by teleporting them away, or polymorphing them together) is necessary. This is due to the fact that the number of items present on a square is stored in a signed short when the items are listed.