Prayer timeout

Your prayer timeout is the amount of time you need to wait before your god will accept another prayer. Gods in NetHack are often benevolent, but prefer if you wait some time between prayers. The initial value of your prayer timeout is set to 300, and decreases by one each game turn. That means it is generally safe to pray on turn 301, but not on 300. If you are fast or very fast, you may move more than once per game turn, and your prayer timeout may appear longer because you take more actions in the same number of game turns. A wand or potion of enlightenment can be used to determine if it is safe to pray.

The exact amount to which your prayer timeout is set after praying is a complex mathematical function involving several random variables, causing the timeout to usually range between 50 and 1000, though it can be much higher on occasion (see the tables below for precise numbers).

Trouble

If you are experiencing a major trouble, Gods will accept your prayer if your timeout is less than 201. If you are experiencing a minor trouble, Gods will accept your prayer if your timeout is less than 101. Since your prayer timeout is reset after prayer (as opposed to increased), if deliberately praying for an increase in max HP at the start of the game, it's better to do this on turn 101 than 301.

In the typical early game state (Gods are pleased, you are not crowned, and you are not in the endgame), there is a ~22% chance that your prayer timeout will be reset to less than 201. That means that there is a chance to successfully pray for major trouble help on consecutive turns (perhaps if a cockatrice is hissing at you during a new moon and you have no better option).

Enlightenment's message regarding safe prayer does account for your trouble status. That means that the message might say that it's safe to pray when your HP is low, but when your HP improves it becomes unsafe to pray due to a still positive prayer timeout.

Praying

Your prayer timeout is reset by praying. The amount it is reset to is significantly increased if you have:

• have been crowned.
• killed the Wizard of Yendor or have performed the invocation.

Also your prayer timeout may be incremented further if you've done any of the following actions:

• Being converted to another alignment through cross-aligned sacrifice
• Praying at an altar not of your alignment

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that it is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate this information.

If the game goes on longer than 100 000 turns, the prayer timeout after successfully praying is now increased by 1 turn per 100 turns beyond that time. This is to counter denial of service on public servers by pasting the same commands indefinitely.

Wishing

A successful wish increases your prayer timeout. The 95% confidence value is an additional 145 turns and the 100% confidence value is 150 turns. See below for more information on confidence values.

Sacrificing corpse

The only way to decrease your prayer timeout (other than waiting) is to sacrifice corpses at a co-aligned altar. This is governed by the following formula which depends on your alignment.

• Chaotic: $\frac{M \times 500}{24}$

• Lawful and neutral: $\frac{M \times 300}{24}$

Where M is the difficulty level of the monster the corpse came from. The value from above is then subtracted from your prayer timeout. You can determine if it is safe to pray depending on what message you received after your sacrifice.

Typical prayer timeouts

The confidence value is the prayer timeout value that will result 95% of the time. In other words, if you've waited that many turns, you can be 95% confident that you can pray again. As you can see, the 100% confidence value is extremely large and fairly useless except for those who fear the RNG. (Amusingly, for crowned characters, praying too early may actually shorten the prayer timeout.)

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7). If this version is now released, please verify that it is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate this information.

Prior to commit dde1ae2e, being smited by a god would unconditionally set prayer timeout to rnz(300), possibly making it shorter than the existing timeout, especially for a crowned character. Being smited now sets the prayer timeout to whichever is greater: the existing prayer timeout, or rnz(300).

Prayer	95% confidence	100% confidence if XL ≤ 17	100% confidence at XL 30
God is displeased	1053	2998	5997
God is pleased	1229	3498	6996
God is pleased, and you've been crowned OR are a demigod*	3980	13493	26986
God is pleased, and you've been crowned AND are a demigod*	7479	23488	46976

*This refers to having killed the Wizard of Yendor or performed the invocation ritual.

The waiting time is graphed below as a function of the desired confidence level (assuming you are level 17 or lower):

• 

  Pleased, zoom 95-100%

• 

  Pleased

• 

  Pleased, crowned

• 

  Pleased, crowned & Rodney

References

This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.

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

Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-343}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.