Unofficial conduct

Unofficial conducts are conducts that are not tracked by the vanilla version of the game. They are enforced by the players themselves only.

Popular Conducts

Celibate

Celibacy means not having sex. Having sex with an incubus or succubus may have positive effects such as gaining levels. SLASH'EM officially tracks this conduct.

Nudist

Nudism means not wearing any armor throughout the game, except for the first turns during which you remove any starting armor.

Petless

The starting pet can be turned off from the options file.

Zen

The zen conduct is one of the most difficult conducts. It means wearing a blindfold throughout the whole game. Only a handful of people are known to have ascended zen games and all of them have been zen samurai.

The difficulty in zen comes in that it is like a mixture of other conducts with additional twists to make it even harder. While blind, you may not read, though you may still use scrolls after you get the shopkeepers to name them to you (you only need to know those magic words). You cannot use altars to find the BUC status of an object because you do not see if the objects glow and what color. You also do not see what your objects look like by their material or color, so all potions are only shown as "a potion", wands as "a wand" and so on.

Inventoryless

Inventoryless conduct requires you to not pick up or carry any items (with limited exceptions made only for actions required to win the game).

On turn one, remove all your armor and drop all inventory on the ground. You may not pick up any more items for the rest of the game, with the following exceptions:

• You may take your quest artifact to your quest leader. Since you won't be using it, you should just leave it with him. You should not wield, wear, apply, or invoke any properties of the artifact other than those it grants merely by being carried. Do not carry it any longer than necessary.
• You may take the Bell of Opening, the Candelabrum of Invocation, and the Book of the Dead from their previous owners' locations to the Vibrating Square. Again, do not use any of their powers except to perform the Invocation, and do not carry them any longer than necessary. Locating the Vibrating Square before collecting the items and bringing them straight down is an acceptable course of action.
• You may pick up candles. You should attach them to the Candelabrum at the first available opportunity.
• You may carry the Amulet of Yendor from Moloch's Sanctum to the Astral Plane.

Other Conducts

This is where users can post their own conducts. You must give some description to the ways the conduct makes NetHack harder, as well as your signature without a timestamp(~~~).

Stubborn

Go through the entire game with your starting equipment. This is a difficult task, due to the fact that you cannot use any rings, amulets, weapons, spellbooks, or items other than the ones with which you started. This is nearly impossible for the Tourist, due to the class's nature of buying items to start. Exceptions are allowed for food, the Amulet of Yendor, the Bell of Opening, any of the items necessary to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor or the quest artifact that you earn through the quest. --Edrobot

Racial

Racial ascensions require the player to make use of weapons and armor appropriate for the character's race. "Soft" racial conducts require the player to use racial armour and weapons whenever possible (thus allowing any race to use a T-shirt or Hawaiian shirt, because there are no race-specific items for the shirt slot). "Hard" racial conducts require the player only use race-specific items in the weapon and armor slots (thus making shirts and gloves completely unavailable).

It is generally acceptable to use items that are not technically race-specific, but have a strong association with that race (such as the aklys for gnomes). Thus, the acceptable items for each race are as follows:

• Dwarf: Dwarvish mattock, dwarvish short sword, dwarvish spear, dwarvish cloak, dwarvish iron helm, dwarvish mithril-coat, dwarvish roundshield, iron shoes.
• Elf: Elven dagger, elven short sword, elven spear, elven broadsword, elven bow, elven arrow, elven mithril-coat, elven cloak, elven boots, elven shield, elven leather helm.
• Gnome: Aklys.
• Orc: Orcish dagger, orcish short sword, orcish spear, orcish bow, orcish arrow, orcish chain mail, orcish ring mail, orcish cloak, orcish helm, orcish shield, Uruk-hai shield.

There are no restrictions on items that are neither weapons nor armor.

Racial ascensions obviously vary in difficulty depending on the race. A hard racial elf suffers from little more than a lack of access to dragon mail or powerful artifacts, while a hard racial gnome is playing a nude conduct with a substandard weapon.

• A page of racial ascensions can be found here: [1]
• A racial orc, combined with the illiterate conduct: [2]

Humans are generally not used for racial ascensions. --Snikers

Impatient

The Impatient conduct requires that on every floor you rush for the stairs, ignoring any and all deviations from that path- skipping the mines and Sokoban is a must. Picking up items along the way is accepted, but spending time going after out-of-the-way monsters or items, shopping, engraving, speaking with the Oracle, praying, sacrificing, quaffing from fountains, and so on are against this conduct. 67.171.167.228

Alchemyless

Don't dip potions into potions except water - should be combined with refraining from nurse-dancing and sleeping with foocubes on purpose and polypiling (and what else I forgot) so you can't grow HP beyond obscene values. Master Kaen is more fun that way. 77.187.80.94

See also

• Speed ascension