Astral call bug

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The Astral call bug was a fairly serious loophole in NetHack 3.4.3 that affected handling of the call command when using telepathy. It was fixed in NetHack 3.6.0. The bug was listed as:

SC343-11: It's possible to easily find the identity of a high priest on the Astral plane.
SC343-12: Hero using telepathy can abuse Call on the Astral Plane.

It works as follows:

  1. Reach the Astral Plane with telepathy, then blind yourself
  2. Use call (C) to select a @ which looks like it might be a high priest(ess)
  3. Call them anything you like

The game will then tell you:

The high priestess of <DEITY> doesn't like being called names!

where <DEITY> is the name of a god in your pantheon. Repeat the procedure until you find a high priest(ess) of your god. You then know which high altar to go to first, significantly cutting down the time spent (and hence danger) on the Astral Plane.

All known public servers that host NetHack 3.4.3, such as hardfought, patch this bug. Even if you find an unpatched version of the game, exploiting this bug is considered cheating, and if you are caught using it, people will think less of your ascension.