Protection racket

The protection racket is a form of metastrategy in NetHack that involves reaching the temple in Minetown at a low experience level with lots of gold and purchasing a large amount of divine protection. As of NetHack 3.6.0, the protection racket is riskier as there is a 1/8 chance of Minetown not having any shops or a priest.

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 and the stethoscope lets you know when your pet needs your help. Two more advantages of Healers are the large amount of gold they start with, and their starting potions can increase their maximum HP without leveling 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. Pacifists might want to go get the Sokoban food - they often lack the alignment to reliably pray.

To avoid death by pits, gas spores and the like, you might want to gain 1-2 levels before entering the mines and then level drain yourself in the Minetown temple. How many depends on your means, e.g. prayer if you do not mind your god's anger, the spell or reverse-genociding wraiths. Above all else, be sure not to lose your intrinsic protection too soon after you have obtained it.

Race and role

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

"Someone with practical experience needs to review the following for balance. Some advantages (knights jumping but starving, wizards pawning starting equipment versus credit cloning, arcs starting vs. anybody finding a pick-axe) are vastly exaggerated."

For characters other than Healers and dwarven Archeologists, the chance of an inexperienced player surviving the protection racket is slim.

Being a gnome or dwarf generally makes the mines easier. Stronger (Str+Con) race/role combinations will be able to carry more loot with less encumbrance, making credit cloning easier. Being encumbered is almost always a big mistake, but more so when doing the protection racket. You are playing a near-pacifist, so you'll have a hard time finding food. If you are encumbered, you are making the problem worse. It is possible to get to Minetown with the required credit without eating anything at all, just praying when you are weak. (Kill one wimpy monster to get the necessary alignment.) But if you ever get encumbered, the prayer timeout won't match the hunger timeout.

Speed is also a key intrinsic for survival for your way to mine town.

Most roles have specific advantages at the protection racket, and all of them are perfectly capable of achieving it. The classic protection racket character is a gnomish healer, let's see how it compares to a:

• Archaeologist:
  • Fast. Easy escape, remember: for now you are almost a pacifist
  • Stealth. Can avoid sleeping monsters, such as nymphs.
  • Touchstone. Can identify gems and potentially bankrupt shopkeepers.
  • Sack. A lightweight container is a necessity for credit cloning when pet dogs and cats are little.
  • Pick-axe. Can dig to vaults for money and holes in the floor of the mines to get to Minetown easier.
  • Starts with some food.
  • Chances of starting with a lamp, which makes the mines much easier.

• Knight:
  • Starts with a pony and plenty of treats for it (carrots and apples). This means that credit cloning is easier. Horses are also stronger than cats and dogs, allowing them to protect you better. The downside to this, of course, is that if your pet maxes out its level after becoming a warhorse, it will think it is a match for shopkeepers and attack them on sight (hint: it isn't), so you need to make sure you've done all the credit cloning you need to before allowing it to level much as a warhorse.
  • Herbivorous pet. The food problem won't be much of a hassle, because your pet will let you eat most corpses. In fact, your pet will be the one with a food problem, though this shouldn't be a factor until after the protection racket is over (if your pet gets hungry and you have found no vegetarian food, you can always give it an apple--just watch out for the "confused from hunger" message, or you could get killed by your own pet!)
  • Can jump, which uses some nutrition but is a good escape tool. You can't jump in dark areas.
  • Can ride their pet to gain effective speed and prevent it from picking up unwanted items (remember, you lose apport every time a pet picks up & drops an item). There is a possibility that you will slip and fall, taking significant damage; however, this can be avoided by feeding your horse enough apples before riding to increase its tameness.
  • Starts with a pretty good set of armor.

• Monk:
  • Fast.
  • Decent initial set of armor.
  • Starts with some food.
  • His initial spells (either healing, protection or sleep) are very useful for a pacifist.
  • Chances of starting with a lamp, which makes the mines much easier.

• Ranger:
  • Starts with some food.
  • If not elven, the cloak of displacement is useful for avoiding early monsters.
  • Poor HP and HP growth. Non-gnomish rangers should not attempt this strategy.

• Tourist:
  • Starts with lots of food. Usually, he starts with some tripe rations too, which makes credit cloning easier.
  • May start with a leash, and always starts with an expensive camera and 2 potions of extra healing, all of them very useful for a pacifist.
  • His initial scrolls of magic mapping will make the Mines a breeze
  • Starts with a decent amount of gold for credit cloning.
  • Stack of +2 darts can be sold for a few hundred additional gold.
  • Lack of infravision and poor AC and starting HP makes this risky and a poorer choice than leveling up normally.

• Wizard:
  • His initial inventory may be of some help for either credit cloning or survival while not killing monsters.
  • May have the charm monster spell, which helps a lot in fights.
  • Not recommended outside of fringe cases such as a pacifist wizard attempt.

Surviving the Mines

The mines can be very hard for a low level character for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that the mine residents can often kill a level 1 character in a couple of hits and there are lots of them. This problem is made worse because the mines are frequently dark, making the monsters difficult to avoid and the stairs hard to find. There are several things one can do to make the chances of survival greater.

• Get as many pets as you can and learn how to keep them with you. Not only will they be able to kill monsters more easily, but having more targets to attack increases the chances that enemies will attack them instead of you. Also, it's good to have a backup in case one pet falls into a trapdoor or is killed by another trap.

• If you have 15 or fewer max hit points, consider praying with 5 or fewer points left to increase your max HP by up to 5. Do this before quaffing any potions of healing, which will raise your HP even more.

• If you have any scrolls of magic mapping, save them for the dark mine levels.

• Choosing a race with infravision will help you avoid monsters even when in dark levels. Gnomes are the best choice since the mine residents are more likely to be peaceful as well. If you do not have infravision, you might want to dig past the dark mines levels: Dig two squares of corridor into the rock where you arrive, displace your pet into the dead-end you created so it will stay adjacent, engrave enough Elbereths, and dig down.

• Remember that if it is a choice between gaining a level and dying, kill the monster. Paying for only 5 or 6 points of protection at level 2 will still save you a lot of protection money down the road and help a lot as well.

• Some players recommend becoming level 3 before entering the mines to avoid death by traps and give you a hit point cushion.

Determine how much gold you need

Divine protection costs 400 gold per experience level, offering more than this will not give more protection (up to 600 gold will give you the protection, any more and you get none), so you should make individual donations of 400*XL. 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 of gaining 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.

Level	Gold Required per donation	Level	Gold Required per donation
1	400	16	6400
2	800	17	6800
3	1200	18	7200
4	1600	19	7600
5	2000	20	8000
6	2400	21	8400
7	2800	22	8800
8	3200	23	9200
9	3600	24	9600
10	4000	25	10000
11	4400	26	10400
12	4800	27	10800
13	5200	28	11200
14	5600	29	11600
15	6000	30	12000

How many times will I need to donate?

The first 9 points of protection are guaranteed if you can afford eight donations. The subsequent ten points are progressively more difficult to obtain. The table lists the minimum number of donations required to have a given probability of at least a given protection.

# Donations needed

Protection	Confidence level
	25%	50%	95%	99%
02	1	1	1	1
03	1	1	2	2
04	1	2	3	3
05	2	3	4	4
06	3	4	5	5
07	4	5	6	6
08	5	6	7	7
09	6	7	8	8
10	10	13	33	47
11	17	23	51	67
12	25	34	68	88
13	34	46	86	109
14	45	59	106	131
15	56	72	126	154
16	69	87	147	179
17	82	103	169	204
18	97	120	193	231
19	112	138	217	258
20	128	156	243	288

Getting the gold

There are many ways to get the gold you need:

• Start as a healer or a tourist. Healers start with a large amount of gold (1,001 to 2,000 at random), and tourists with some (1 to 1000 at random) as well, which can be donated to the Minetown priest.

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

• Loot vaults. You'll need some means of digging. A scroll of magic mapping or two would be nice but don't expect to have found and identified them this early in the game (unless you're a tourist). 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. Finding a bag of holding will help you carry more junk to sell.
• Sell valuable gems. An archeologist will always start off with a touchstone and can use an uncursed one as blessed, making it trivial to find and identify all the valuable gems and leave behind any unvaluable ones.

• Polymorph your pet into something strong enough to kill shopkeepers, then clear out the Minetown shops. 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

• Use that protection you just spent all that time and money on and get some levels.

• 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. At this point you might be low on food. Now that you can start killing stuff, hope for some lichen.

• Sokoban is also a good choice as the next step, if you haven't done it already.

• Continue downward to Mines' End to get the guaranteed luckstone.

• Combine this strategy with the digging for victory strategy for the ultimate metastrategy experience.

• Take the racket to its logical extreme and go for a pacifist ascension.

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.

Other information

The protection racket is arguably considered the gnomish Healer's best opening strategy, and is a virtual necessity for conducts such as pacifist and/or nudist.

To settle the perennial argument whether the protection racket is a generally viable strategy, Derek Ray posed the protection racket efficiency challenge. It has generated much discussion, but no convincing, pure-PR ascension streak.

Examining over 35,000 NetHack 3.4.3 games by expert players (filtering out "escaped", quit, and start-scummed games), Codehappy found AC gained in the early game--regardless of how it is gained--increases the chance of ascension by an average 4% per AC point. Successful protection rackets resulted in a 46% chance of ascension from that point and was present in about 10% of all ascensions; this includes pacifist conducts, which lowered the chance from 50% to 46%. However, Codehappy also showed (leaving out pacifist conducts) that characters who achieved AC -1 or better (in some other way) had a 48% chance of ascension. This finding suggests a character who finds a couple pieces of good armor can, and perhaps should, abandon the protection racket.

Further analysis (leaving out pacifist conducts) of Codehappy's data shows that Healers were responsible for 47% of all successful protection rackets, trailed by Archaeologists at 11%, Tourists at 10%, and Wizards at 5%. All other classes trailed distantly, with Barbarians faring the worst at 1.6%. However, it is interesting to note that 75% of Barbarians who succeeded at the protection racket also ascended--and only in one of those games did the Barbarian receive the help of an early wish. Note that these numbers do not represent the same number of attempts by each role--an equal number of attempts may change those percentages. However, one can assume the expert players in this dataset know which roles are best suited to attempt the strategy.

The protection racket is considered a distinctly separate strategy from level draining later in the game to buy cheap protection.

Variants

SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM, it is also possible for Rogues to attempt the racket, due to the significant boost in their starting gold, giving them more gold in the beginning than even Healers. Unfortunately, characters who would normally have peaceful Mines inhabitants will find they have been replaced with far more hostile undead, making the strategy far more difficult for all dwarves and gnomes, and Healers in particular.

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