Life saving

Life saving is a property that occurs in NetHack, and is capable of resurrecting a player character or monster from death, though at a slight cost.

The only item that confers the property is the worn amulet of life saving - a character in explore mode or wizard mode can also choose not to die, which has roughly the same effects.

Description

The following effects occur for a character whose life is saved:

• If their life is saved by an amulet of life saving, they lose a point of constitution.
• Their hit points are restored to the maximum - if said maximum is lower than either 10 or twice the character's experience level, then it is raised to the higher value of the two.
• Their nutrition is set to a minimum of 500 unless they died of choking, in which case it is set to 900 and they vomit.
• Sickness that would kill the character immediately after they revive is cured.
• A character trapped in lava becomes untrapped.
• A character killed by a drowning attack will resurrect as normal, though they will remain held by the monster that drowned them.

Life saving will not successfully resurrect a character in the following circumstances:

• Trickery forfeits the game rather than killing the character, so it ignores life saving entirely and does not generate bones - in wizard mode, the game will simply print a message acknowledging the trickery and delete the offending level files, allowing play to continue.
• Death by self-genocide or brainlessness will cause the character to die again immediately. A player in explore mode or wizard mode can still choose not to die:
  • If a character in either mode chooses not to die from genocide, all other genocided monsters will still be wiped out.
  • If a character in either mode chooses not to die from brainlessness, their intelligence is set to 5 before applying attribute loss from the successful brain-eating attack.
• Level teleporting to a negative dungeon level causes the game to end regardless of life saving, though a character whose life is saved in this case will escape the dungeon rather than dying.
  • Level teleporting to level 0 does not count: as 0 is a non-negative level, the character will cease to exist instead, which life saving can reverse as normal.

Having a character's life saved breaks the survivor semi-conduct, with more details explained below. Monsters that are "killed" and have their life saved do not award experience, but doing so will still break pacifist conduct.

Survivor

NetHack keeps track of how many times a character's life has been saved by amulets of life saving. If this number is zero, and the game ends without dying (i.e. by ascension, escaping or quitting), the end-of-game attributes list will note as much - this is referred to as the survivor semi-conduct:

You survived.

Choosing not to die in explore mode or wizard mode also counts towards this statistic. If the number is not zero, the line will instead read:

You survived after being killed <x> times.

Strategy

Surviving is usually an indicator that the player was lucky or skillful enough not to die during a particular game - in particular, survivor can add prestige to a foodless ascension, which removes one of the game's alternative sources of nutrition. Exploiting the polyself bug to raise maximum HP is incompatible with surviving.

Messages

You feel like a scarecrow.

While in explore or wizard mode, you died of brainlessness from a brain-eating attack landing while your intelligence is 3, but chose not to die.

Variants

Some variants add other methods and sources of life saving.

SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM, the amulet versus stone confers life saving to its wearer that only applies if they are petrified, with the same effects as an amulet of life saving.