Religion

As NetHack is a fantasy adventure game, religion ties in closely with its occult themes and mythology. The very mission of the game is to recover The Amulet of Yendor for your god. This article is a portal to detailed articles about the religious aspects of the game which affect gameplay.

General desctiption

Rituals

In Nethack, there are four religious rituals: prayer, sacrificing, turn undead, and donating money to a priest.

Prayer (#pray) may cause beneficial outcomes, from restoring your HP to uncursing your item or making a holy water. However, prayer never improves your relationships with your god. For example, if your god is angry at you, you cannot mollify him or her by prayers. There are several conditions of safe pray.

Sacrificing (#offer) a corpse on a coaligned altar (i. e. lawful altar if you are lawful) can improve your relationships with your god, including your luck. It can also grant you an artifact weapon. Sacrificing on a coaligned altar is always safe, unless you sacrifice a coaligned unicorn (white/gray/black if you are lawful/neutral/chaotic correspondently), your former pet, or member of your own race (the latter is permitted, and beneficial, for chaotic players). Sacrificing on non-coaligned altar, if you are in a good standing with your god, may either convert it or harm your luck. Finally, donating amulet of Yendor on a co-aligned altar on the Astral Plane wins the game.

Turn undead (#turn) allows Knights and Priests to frighten, and possibly even destroy (if they are lawful or neutral) or pacify (if they are chaotic) nearby undead creatures by calling upon the power of their deity. It should not be confused with the spell of turn undead, which causes only minor damage to undead creatures. Like prayer, turning works only under specific conditions.

For donating money (#chat), you must stand in the square adjanced to a peaceful priest in a temple. His alignment is not important. Donating 400 times your experience level (or more, but less than 600 times your experience level) grants or improves intrinsic protection. Other sums of money may grant temporary clairvoyance, improve your alignment record, or excersize your wisdom. Donating $0 or less is a bad idea (you loose one point of alignment). For more information, see the chatting section in the Aligned_priest article.

Monsters cannot pray, sacrifice, turn undead, or donate money.

Parameters

There are several parameters which determine your relationships with your god.

Parameter	Range	Initially	Normally	Ideally	Safe pray interval
Alignment	Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic	May be any	Same as initial value	No "best" alignment	any
Alignment record	$-\infty$ to $10+Time/200$	0 or 10, depending on the role	near the maximum	maximum	zero or positive
Anger	0 to infinity	0	0	0	0
Prayer timeout	0 to 23500	300	often 0	0	at most 0/100/200 if you have (only) no/minor/major problems
Luck	-13 to 13	0	zero or positive	13*	zero or positive

* There is an obscure bug certain favorable events occur most likely if your Luck is 7.

Alignment determines to which of three gods you serve. There are three alighnments: lawful, neutral, and chaotic. Monsters, artifacts, altars and even the dungeon itself can have an alignment as well. Some entities loyal to Moloch are unaligned. Your you choose (or let the game pick) your starting alignment, not all roles can serve all gods. You can change it temporarily by wearing a helm of opposite alignment, or permanently only once by sacrificing on non-coaligned altar when your alignment record is negative. The helm removes any intrinsic protection, and permanent change of your alignment additionally sets your alignment record to zero. If you permanently change your alignment before starting your quest, your quest leader will never send you to the quest, therefore you cannot win.

Your alignment record is a number which affects your chance of praying successfully (the higher the better he responds to your prayers; if negative, he only smites you) and your ability to enter the quest (you cannot if it is under 20). Its maximum is initially 10 and increases by 1 every 200 turns. It has no lower bound. Initially your alignment record is 0 or 10, depending on your role. There are many actions which affect it positively or negatively. Since killing hostile monsters usually improves your alignment record, it is normally near the maximum. If you "feel guilty", "are feeling like an empty coward" etc., this means you violated your role conduct and got an alignment penalty. You can approximately determine your alignment with enlightenment or a stethoscope. If your alignment is negative, you can improve it by sacrifices (see Altar#Ordinary sacrifice).

The anger is a number which measures how angry your god is with you. Positive anger cause several bad effects. Most notably, your prayers become useless and only cause your god to smite you, and Luck times out twice as fast. Anger is from 0 to infinity, initially 0. It is normally 0. You can anger your god by "wrong" praying or sacrificing (most notably praying too often), or displacing your pet into a damaging trap, killing it. There are only two ways to mollify your god: sacrificing sufficiently powerful monsters at a coaligned altar (see Altar#Ordinary sacrifice), or finding a non-coaligned altar and sacrificing either a unicorn of the same alignment or your former pet. The cross-alignend unicorn sacrifice also causes the altar's god to smite you. You can approximately determine anger by enlightenment.

The prayer timeout refers to how much time you need to wait before your god will accept another prayer. You can safely pray if it is at most 0, 100, or 200, depending on which problems you have (see prayer). Initially set to 300, it decreases by one each game turn until becomes zero, and increases when you pray, typically by several hundred turns. The exact prayer timeout increase depends on the random number generator, whether you had been crowned and/or killed Wizard of Yendor (each of these significantly prolongues intervals between players), and other things. Getting an object by sacrificing or succesful wish also increases the prayer timeout. You can decrease it or get a clue about it by sacrificing on a co-aligned altar (see Altar#Ordinary sacrifice): "hopeful feeling" means it is still positive, "reconciliation" means you just made it zero.

Luck is always between -13 and +13. Initilaly it is zero. In order to safely pray, your Luck must be zero or positive; otherwise prayers only cause your god to smite you. Luck has too many other effects to enumerate. Unless you have a luckitem in your main inventory, your positive or negative luck times out at a rate of one point per 600 moves (300 if you are wearing the Amulet of Yendor, or if your God is angry). With luckstone, your positive/any/negative/ Luck never times out if the luckstone is blessed/uncursed/cursed. Sacrificing at a coaligned altar may increase your luck, depending on the corpse's difficulty, in which case you "see a four-leaf clover".

Altars and priests

Altars

Altars are high-bandwidth connections directly to your god. They are either aligned or unaligned. Aligned altars are either lawful, or neutral, or chaotic.

There are three uses of altars:

• If you drop items onto an altar while not blind, you know their beautitude. Any altar can be used for this purpose. Note however that if you drop a fragile item (e. g. potion, mirror, crystal ball...) while levitating, it will break.
• Sacrificing. There is no way to sacrifice unless you stay on an altar.
• Prayer. While you certainly can pray out of altars, prayers while standing on altar causes better or different outcomes.

Priests and temples

Temple is a room with altar and priest. Not to be confused with the player role, priest is generated peaceful and stays at the temple, most of the time at or neart the altar. Altars in temples can have any alignment or be unaligned. Priest has same alignment (or lack of it) as the altar.

In a temple you can donate money to its priest, providing he or she is peaceful, and the altar had not been converted. His alignment (or luck of it) is not important.

If you convert an altar in a temple, the priest gets angry, and does not accept donations anymore.

Distribution of altars, priests and temples

Above the Medusa level

Each level in the main dungeon above the Medusa level can contain temples or off-temple altars, depending on random number generator. All of these are randomly aligned. There are no altars in special rooms other than temples (shops, beehivies, zoos etc.).

There is one randomly aligned temple in Minestown, and no other temples, priests, or altars in Gnomish Mines.

There are no temples, priests, or altars at Sokoban or Fort Ludios.

There are temples or off-temples altars at some quests.

Medusa level and beneath

There are three temples on the Gehenom:

• Unaligned temple with peaceful priest at the Valley of the Dead (1st level of Gehennom)
• Unaligned altar without a priest at the Orcus-town (approximately middle of the Gehennom)
• Unaligned temple with hostile priest at the Moloch's Sanctum (Bottom level of the Gehennom)

There are no altars, priests, or temples in any other levels beneath the Medusa level, or at the Medusa level itself.

Above the first level

At the Astral Plane there are three temples which are randomly assigned to lawful, neutral and chaotic alignments (one of each), and many off-temple aligned priests, some of them may be hostile.

There are no altars, priests, or temples at other Planes.

Other issues

Gods

Each role has its own pantheon of gods - one for each alignment. Priests are assigned the pantheon of another role at random.

Atheism

Players may choose to forego all of the above religious activities, and thus ascend as atheists. This is a voluntary conduct.

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It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.4.3. Information on this page may be out of date.

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