Experience level

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Your experience level in NetHack is a measure of the overall power of your hero and progress of your adventure. The more experienced you are, the better you become at both fighting and magic.

Experience points (XP) are the units that you accumulate to increase your level. Depending on your game options, you may see a display of your XP or only see your current experience level.

You start at level 1 and can reach a maximum level of 30. Monsters also have an experience level defined, but it can only be seen with a wand of probing, stethoscope, or Magicbane.

Effects

Gaining an experience level will have a number of effects on gameplay:

• Increases your maximum HP
• Increases your maximum energy
• Increases your skill slots by one
• Increases your chance to hit in combat
• Increases your chance of successfully learning a spell from spellbook
• Decreases your spell failure rate
• Increases difficulty of monsters generated
• Changes your rank, based on your role (and possibly gender)
• Characters at level 14 or more can attempt the Quest
• Increase your chance of converting an altar
• Increases your chance of successfully playing certain musical instruments
• Scrolls will have more meaningful error messages once you aren't considered a beginner anymore ("You have a strange feeling, then it passes.")

Experience level has no direct effect on your attributes.

Gaining levels

There are several ways to gain an experience level, ranging from obvious to somewhat obscure:

• Experience points (mostly from killing monsters, also from consulting the Oracle, sinks, and untrapping squeaky board traps).
• Quaffing a blessed or uncursed potion of gain level.
• Eating a wraith corpse.
• Chance from incubus or succubus encounter .
• Chance when polymorphing into your own race.
• Chance of regaining a lost level when praying successfully at a coaligned altar.
• Regaining a lost level when quaffing a potion of full healing. Up to half of your lost levels can be regained this way.

You may never gain more than one experience level at a time; killing a water demon at XP1:0 will only put you on 2:39, not 4:169 as might be expected. (You can, however, gain multiple experience levels in a single turn, as for example when a beginner character manages to destroy many creatures at once with an exploding gas spore.)

If you are already level 30, experience points will not raise your level. Except for polymorph, the "Gain Level" methods above will cause your maximum HP and energy to increase.

Losing levels

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It's also possible to lose your hard-earned experience levels:

• Level drain attacks
  • Vampire bite, wraith touch
  • Getting hit by the Staff of Aesculapius or Stormbringer
• Chance from incubus or succubus encounter
• Chance when receiving a god's anger from incorrect prayer or sacrifice.
• Chance when polymorphing into your own race

These are preventable with drain resistance, except polymorph. If you kill anything after losing an experience level you immediately gain it back, however only one level can be restored in this way. A blessed potion of full healing will also restore a lost level, but only up to half of those lost. For this reason care should be taken when fighting wraiths.

Alternate Methods of Gaining Experience

Besides killing monsters or the above "Gain Level" methods, there are some alternate ways of getting experience. These may be useful if you're trying a pacifist ascension.

• A major or minor consultation with the Oracle. (see Oracle for number of points)
• Eating a tripe ration. (1 XP)
• Fixing a squeaky board. (1 XP)
• Drinking from a sink. 1/20 chance. (1 XP "Yuk, this water tastes awful.")

Experience points required per level

Level	NetHack - XP Required	SLASH'EM - XP Required
1	0	0
2	20	40
3	40	80
4	80	160
5	160	320
6	320	640
7	640	1280
8	1280	2560
9	2560	5120
10	5120	10000
11	10000	20000
12	20000	40000
13	40000	80000
14	80000	150000
15	160000	250000
16	320000	300000
17	640000	350000
18	1280000	400000
19	2560000	450000
20	5120000	500000
21	10000000	550000
22	20000000	600000
23	30000000	650000
24	40000000	700000
25	50000000	750000
26	60000000	800000
27	70000000	850000
28	80000000	900000
29	90000000	950000
30	100000000	1000000

Footnotes

This page is based on a spoiler by Dylan O'Donnell. The original license is: Redistribution, copying, and editing of these spoilers, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: The original contributors to any spoiler must continue to be credited. Any modifications to the spoiler must be acknowledged and credited.