To beat NetHack, also known as “ascending,” you have to travel 45 to 53 floors deep to acquire the Amulet of Yendor, then climb back up and past the first level, through the first four Elemental Planes and finally to the Astral Plane, where you must sacrifice the amulet to the deity of your alignment. In the “Maniac’s Ascension Guide,” a popular strategy guide that was first posted to the game’s USENET newsgroup in 2002, the author claims that a “fast ascension” takes around 40,000 turns. “There is no time limit,” he explains. “Take as long as you need to do the job properly.” Ascending not
To beat NetHack, also known as “ascending,” you have to travel 45 to 53 floors deep to acquire the Amulet of Yendor, then climb back up and past the first level, through the first four Elemental Planes and finally to the Astral Plane, where you must sacrifice the amulet to the deity of your alignment. In the “Maniac’s Ascension Guide,” a popular strategy guide that was first posted to the game’s USENET newsgroup in 2002, the author claims that a “fast ascension” takes around 40,000 turns. “There is no time limit,” he explains. “Take as long as you need to do the job properly.” Ascending not only requires extensive knowledge about the game, but also a great deal of tedium. High-level play involves tactics like training a pet to steal items for you or “pudding farming,” an act where the player splits a monster called a black pudding in half over and over again to collect its corpses. The NetHack wiki describes the act as its own punishment because of how dull it is. Another high-level technique is called “polypiling” and involves creating large piles of items to zap with a wand of polymorph, transforming the items into something different (but of the same general category). Usually the transformed items are just useless junk, but there is a small chance that you will get something that is good enough to keep for your “ascension kit,” a collection of equipment that is more or less required to ascend—a problem in and of itself, since the existence of such a kit reduces the num...
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number of interesting choices the player can make if they want to win the game. https://alt.org/nethack/mirror/homepage.mac.com/mhjohnson/mag-r342.html
