# Wand of teleportation

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Name

teleportation

Appearance

random

Abundance

4.5%

Base price

200 zm

Weight

7

Type

beam

Maximum charges

8  

Spell

teleport away

Monster use

May be used defensively by monsters.

The wand of teleportation is a wand that appears in NetHack.

Contents

1 Generation
2 Effects
3 Strategy
4 References

Generation
Monsters may be generated carrying a wand of teleportation as a defensive item.

Effects
Zapping this wand in a direction will teleport all monsters and items in the path of the wand;  you can teleport other monsters away even on no-teleport levels. Zapping a peaceful monster with this wand will anger it. Zapping the wand at yourself will teleport you and all items on your square.
When fleeing, monsters may zap themselves with this wand to escape. If they have the Amulet of Yendor, they may zap you instead, though this happens extremely rarely, and due to a bug, will usually not work.[1][2][3][4] On a no-teleport level, a monster will zap you with a wand of teleportation just once, wasting a charge, and will not try to teleport you again.[5]
Teleporting the Riders has a 12/13 chance of teleporting them to a square as close as possible to you; attempting to teleport away the Riders' corpses will cause them to immediately revive, but will not teleport them.[6]
Engraving with a wand of teleportation will make any previous engraving vanish; unlike the wand of cancellation and make invisible, however, you can find the engraving elsewhere on the level.
Applying a wand of teleportation to break it will create a damaging magical explosion that also teleports everything in a 3×3 area around you. See breaking wands for details.

Strategy
The wand of teleportation is a versatile escape item. The only enemies that can resist its beam are aligned priests in their temples or Riders. You can also use them to get out of engulfing monsters such as air elementals by zapping yourself; on no-teleport levels, however, you can zap the engulfer from the inside instead (which teleports you and the monster together in any other case). Breaking the wand can also work for tight spots where you are surrounded or else need to clear some room to maneuver.
If you engrave-ID a "vanishing" wand, you can test it by zapping a monster or item; it is a wand of teleportation if the item disappears, or the monster disappears and cannot be found by searching or moving into it.
In areas like Moloch's Sanctum or the Astral Plane, it's often faster to teleport enemies out of the way rather than killing them. Teleporting one of the Riders is generally a Bad Idea, but if you are already in an unfavorable position you may wish to gamble upon that 1/13 chance by zapping an already adjacent rider or breaking a wand of teleportation.

References

↑ muse.c in NetHack 3.4.3, line 447: Monsters with the amulet can choose to use their teleport wands on you.

↑ muse.c in NetHack 3.4.3, line 599: Here the function mbhit is called when a monster wants to use a wand of teleportation on you. Note that mbhitm is passed in as an argument.

↑ mbhit in muse.c: Note the comment above the function: "Unlike buzz(), bhit() doesn't take into account the possibility of a monster zapping you, so we need a special function for it."

↑ muse.c in NetHack 3.4.3, line 1209: Here's where mbhitm is called to zap you with the wand.

↑ muse.c in NetHack 3.4.3, line 605: Monsters only bother trying to teleport you on a no teleport level once. Then they learn it doesn't work.

↑ teleport.c in NetHack 3.4.3, line 1169

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It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.4. Information on this page may be out of date.
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