(If you do need to haul around heavy stashes of equipment, stick to known territory and be ready to shed weight at the sight of danger.) In such occasions, a wand of speed monster or speed boots are a big advantage, allowing you to hit (or escape) faster.ĭo not use the arrow keys, because they provide only orthogonal movement, requiring twice as many steps to reach a diagonal destination. When you are Stressed, your average opponent can hit twice for your every chance to move, and your HP will just melt away.

(Note there is also the in-game stat of Luck, which is entirely different.) A large part of learning to play NetHack is acquiring safe habits. Truly outstanding players (such as Marvin) manage to ascend 80% of their games, and they do not get more wands of wishing than the rest of us. True, a few unavoidable deaths remain, like falling into a poisoned spiked pit, or the proverbial Gnome With the Wand of Death, but these are threatening only early, before countermeasures have been acquired. If your survival depends on luck then you are following the wrong strategy. You sometimes hear that NetHack is near impossible to win, because of the amount of exceptional luck that is required to win: it takes years to get just one lucky game, with an early wand of wishing and having everything else work out just right.

Lucky roulette rules of survival