Cheating

Cheating is a heinous, yet ill-defined crime in the NetHack community. On the one hand, it is not a major problem, as NetHack is single player, and thus cheaters merely cheat themselves. On the other hand, some of the actions listed below are applicable to games played on public servers.

Not cheating

 * Using Explore mode or Wizard mode, providing any resulting ascensions are not claimed as genuine.
 * Engraving Elbereth
 * Modifying the source code. This isn't cheating at NetHack, since you're not playing NetHack any more.

Reading spoilers
While some say playing is more fun without being spoiled, few would consider it cheating, even to the level of using the source code as a reference.

Degenerate behaviour
This is behaviour which is widely considered to be against the spirit of the game, but which can not exactly be defined as cheating.


 * Pudding farming
 * Death farming
 * Kraken farming
 * Altar scumming

Possibly cheating

 * Using a bot. This is somewhat hypothetical, since few bots exist.

Out of game notes
This is a controversial topic. Most players take some form of notes, such as which levels have altars on, where the stash is, etc., but other players believe too many out of game notes constitutes a mild form of cheating. Taken to an extreme, it can nullify the mind flayer's memory loss attack.

Probably cheating

 * Exploiting a known bug
 * Exploiting an unknown bug

Save scumming
This is the practice of copying a NetHack save file from the NetHack playground, so that if the character dies or suffers a calamity, the game can be restored by copying the file back into the playground. This directly bypasses a major design decision of the game - to disallow saving-and-restoring.

NetHack has a limited ability to detect any cheating which involves fiddling the game files. If it finds something suspicious, a death by trickery is likely.