Conduct

Conducts are various limitations player may set to themselves in order to make the game more challenging. The game keeps track of your conducts and shows them at the end of the game. You may also see them any time by using the external command #conduct.

Official conducts
The "official" conducts are the conducts that the game tracks.

When you start the game, the list of conducts looks as follows:

Voluntary challenges: You have gone without food. You have been an atheist. You have never hit with a wielded weapon. You have been a pacifist. You have been illiterate. You have never genocided any monsters. You have never polymorphed an object. You have never changed form. You have used no wishes.

Food
The first conduct is food-related. It is possible to go completely without food, but there are also vegan and vegetarian diets that are tracked. If following a vegan diet, you may not eat anything that is derived from an animal. Vegetarians may eat milk and egg products.

Religion
Being an atheist means that you are not involved with religion in any way. You do not pray or offer to gods or even chat with priests.

Fighting
The third and fourth lines are related to fighting. A pacifist is a player who does get experience from killing any monster. A pacifist may, however, use a wielded weapon if they take care not to kill the victim.

The not hitting with a wielded weapon conduct is pretty obvious. Such player may not hit with a wielded weapon and usually uses their hands and feet for fighting. Throwing weapons, firing missiles and using wands is allowed. Hitting with other objects than weapons does not break this conduct. Thus you may very well use a cockatrice corpse as a weapon should you acquire one.

Illiterate
Being illiterate means that you do not read or write anything. This includes scrolls, spellbooks and even fortune cookie messages and t-shirts. Using a magic marker is also banned. Reading random engravings you may encounter does not break this conduct. Engraving anything but an x, such as Elbereth, also breaks this conduct.

Polymorphing
Polymorphing can be targeted to you, a monster or pet or objects. Polymorphing self breaks one conduct. Polymorphing any object breaks another conduct. Polymorphing any monster or pet does not break any conducts.

Genociding
Genocideless conduct is pretty obvious. Reverse genociding does not break this conduct.

Wishing
Two wishing-related conducts are tracked: wishing for anything and wishing for artifacts. If you wish for, say, a silver dragon scale mail, you still have the artifact-wishless conduct. However, if you wish for any artifact, you lose both conducts.

Unofficial conducts
Unofficial conducts are conducts that are not tracked by the vanilla version of the game. They are enforced by the player themself only.

Celibacy
Celibacy means not having sex. Having sex with an incubus or succubus may have positive effects such as gaining levels. Slash'EM officially tracks this conduct.

Petless
The starting pet can be turned off from the options file.

Zen
The zen conduct is the most difficult conduct there is. It means wearing a blindfold through out the whole game. Only a handful of people are known to have ascended zen games and all of them have been zen samurais.

The difficulty in zen comes in that it is like a mixture of other conducts with additional twists to make it even harder. While blind, you may not read. You cannot use altars to find the BUC status of an object because you do not see if the objects glow and what color. You also do not see how your objects look like by their material or color, so all potions are only shown as "a potion", wands as "a wand" and so on.