Protection racket

The protection racket is a strategy for reaching the temple in Minetown at a low experience level with lots of gold and purchasing a large amount of divine protection for a small amount of money.

Strategy

Use of your starting pet is essential, as killing monsters yourself will soon raise your level, and not killing them will result in your swift death. Healers are widely considered best for this task, as the healing spell can be used to keep your pet alive while they do the fighting. Another advantage of Healers is that they can drink their starting potions to increase their maximum HP without levelling up. Gnomish Healers have an extra advantage: more of the monsters in the mines will be peaceful.

The stairs to the Gnomish Mines can be found on dungeon level 2, 3, or 4. On dungeon level 1, take the down staircase as soon as you find it. If you make it to dungeon level 5 without finding the mines, you've gone too far and must go back.

Determine how much gold you need

Divine protection costs your level times 400, but not more than 600. If you have no divine protection, a single donation will buy you 2 to 4 points (it's random). After that, each donation will buy you 1 point until you have 9 protection points, after which you only have a 1-in-protection chance to gain another point for every donation, up to a maximum of 20 protection points.

This means that if you make it to the temple at level 1, you'll need to donate 400 gold between six and eight times to acquire the maximum easily obtainable amount of protection. In other words, you'll ideally want to have about 3,200 gold when you get to the temple.

To donate the gold for protection, #chat with the priest. He will ask you how much gold you want to donate.

Getting the gold

There are many ways to get the gold you need:

• Start as a healer. Healers start with a large amount of gold to donate to the Minetown priest, and their stone to flesh spell helps them create treats with which to train their pet to relieve shopkeepers of their gold.

• Credit clone. That might not be a viable option if you don't have enough food (although there is usually a delicatessen in Minetown), and some might consider it cheating.

• Loot vaults. You'll need some means of digging and maybe a scroll of magic mapping or two. Other means of finding a vault can be found on the vault page.

• Sell junk to shopkeepers. This requires extensive knowledge of item values since you don't want to carry 20 items to a shop just to find out they are only worth 1 gold each.

• Polymorph your pet into something strong enough to kill shopkeepers, then clear out the Minetown shops. But this is dangerous for several reasons: you risk killing the priest, leaving you with no way to donate; you risk losing your pet and therefore your source of income; and you risk killing Izchak.

What to do after

• It might be a good idea to make your way back to the top of the dungeon and explore the rooms you haven't been in yet. You never know what you might find.

• Sokoban is also a good choice as the next step.

No matter what you choose to do, the extra AC you got from protection will be a big help in keeping you alive through the rest of the game.

This page is a stub. Should you wish to do so, you can contribute by expanding this page.

A user has suggested improving this page or section as follows:

"What else would be a good idea to do after you bought as much protection as you could?"

Other information

For characters other than gnomish Healers, the chances of surviving the protection racket are slim, and hence it is a metastrategy. Conversely, it is arguable that the protection racket is actually the best strategy for gnomish Healers.

This page is a stub. Should you wish to do so, you can contribute by expanding this page.

A user has suggested improving this page or section as follows:

"There is a lot more to be said about this strategy. A detailed howto, some of its dangers, what to do after, etc."