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Today on NetHack, I'm short on potions of water. Dipping them one at a time turns them diluted before changing them to water, so two dips - to get around this, I put them all into a sack and dip that.
And then this happens
Turns out there's a bug where dipping potions of acid into a moat causes a game crash. Luckily, NetHack 4 allows you to recover, unlike the original which just crashes and corrupts your save.
We're fine, but I'm going to keep backups now. Sorry.
Time to start polypiling! We drop items on the floor in a line, then cast polymorph over them. I get a tinning kit - don't need it, but I wanted it. I was trying for magic markers but no dice.
A stethoscope. This one is actually really useful, it tells me the HP of various enemies. This will come in handy towards the end of this update.
We can zap pretty much anything, including rings. I try for a long, long time to get a ring of polymorph control - I want to eat my rings of searching to gain it passively. No luck after exhausting my ring supply.
And I have a lot of rings. My stash has more.
Polypiling some armor nets me a shirt. Shirts are their own armor category, so I can wear them in addition to my other armor. They're normally extremely rare, but polypiling huge amounts of armor will get you several in short order.
Cloak of displacement. Unfortunately I can't use displacement - I'd have to remove my robe, and that would give me a failure rate on my spells (due to the metal gauntlets of power). I don't need it at all, though.
Polypiling some amulets gets me another life saving. I'm not ready to get rid of my amulet of reflection, but it's getting to about that time where I should just reverse genocide (i.e. summon) some silver dragons and take their scales.
I don't really need to keep talking to succubi at this point, but they have a chance to completely refill my power. I need this because even with the Eye my power regeneration is not high enough to counteract the 30 power cost of polymorph.
Polymorphing scrolls. A scroll of scare monster acts like Elbereth; stand on one, and monsters won't attack you in melee.
Can of grease! Grease makes it harder for grabbing monsters to latch onto you. Examples include giant eels, which have a two-turn instadeath drown attack, and mind flayers, who I really hate. Grease also prevents water damage, so I put some on my bag of holding. Unfortunately I am a disgusting goon and grease sloughs out of our pores and onto all our gear. It's a wonder it didn't happen sooner 
Nah, nah, the can of grease isn't the important part. Look at our defense stat - all our gear is blessed and enchanted and it's now at 30. NetHack uses the AC system, which is a holdover from D&D and means lower number = better. NetHack 4 changes this to higher = better. They're functionally identical, but this version makes more sense. 30 defense allows us to shrug off pretty much anything, and I'm not done raising it yet.
I've been putting this off for a while, but it's time to take down Fort Ludios. This place is owned by Croesus, and is choc full of gold. Since we're branchporting in, we don't arrive at the entrance - we arrive inside.
A horde of guards appear. Time to get to work.
FUCK YOU
Ahem. A short while later, they're all dealt with. Look at that zoo - look at that vault 
I find a couple of spellbooks - good to have backups. By the way, all those items on the floor in the throne room are being held by enemies. It took me a while to work that out, but they're not on the floor.
I use detect unseen to find the door, then launch magic missiles into the throne room until everything is dead.
With Croesus out of the way, we can raid his vault. It's full of land mines, but detect unseen tells me where those are.
The take: 46 thousand gold. I will never, ever be able to spend this - there just aren't enough shops.
Wasn't sure if I showed this, so I took a screenshot: the branchport interface. It only shows places we've been, but we've been to most of them. I think there's only one we're missing.
A quick branch + levelport down (:smug
and we come across Baalzebub's lair. Note to self: find and kill Asmodeus. I do not want to encounter him after I get the amulet of Yendor, because he can steal it.
We find the clairvoyance spell. It's of no use to me at the moment, but some levels can't be magic mapped, which is where it will have some minor use. It shows all squares around us in a radius, like the Eyes of the Overworld are currently doing.
Turns out Baalzebub has a stun. We unicorn horn it away.
By bouncing a magic missile off the wall, back onto the demon, onto ourselves and reflecting it off ourselves again, he goes down pretty quick. I use that trick wherever possible; some enemies can teleport away regardless of teleport blocking being in effect, so they have to be killed quickly.
Such as... on this level! Orcus Town, named because of the demon-in-residence, Orcus.
There are some shops down here, but they have no shopkeepers. Some OK stuff in them, but nothing I need.
I climb the yellow upward stairs in the top left corner.
We enter Vlad's Tower. This is (I think) the last branchport area. We can also pray here if we want - we're out of Gehennom for the moment. However, I've entered here, so it's now on our branchport list - I can head back down and come back whenever I like.
Orcus is, naturally, on the down stairs. We're not going to go down there though, or kill Orcus - I want to fight Demogorgon.
Demogorgon is the hardest enemy in the game. He's not guaranteed to spawn, so I need Orcus to spawn him for me. He's extremely nasty and has a lethal sickness attack, which I'll have to cure with the spell (unicorn horn doesn't guarantee a cure). He also runs away to the up stairs whenever he gets hurt (all demon princes do this) and is probably immune to magic missile. So I have to knife him. Luckily, he respects Elbereth. Hopefully I can use this against him. The only reason to fight Demogorgon is dickwaving, which... is pretty much what I've been doing this whole run. Wizard!
Orcus has a wand of death. It won't do anything to us, but he hits a bunch of his buddies. Why the fuck did you shoot it there? I'm on a different X-axis, you can't hit me from where you're standing.
A paragraph of enemies trying to breach our 30 defense. Not exactly working, is it? 
I can't see the dark blue of a disenchanter, and end up hitting him with my Magicbane, reducing it from +5 to +4. Doesn't matter, I have scrolls in my bag to fix that.
Orcus is a bit of an asshole, and insists on summoning arch-liches and mind flayers. I always kill the mind flayers first, because I dislike them on principle. The arch-liches are surprisingly non-threatening. I hope Orcus summons some silver dragons soon - I'm going to have to reverse genocide some at this rate.
At this point, I'm sick of fighting shit. Let's make it fight itself.
Ring of conflict 
This will make all those summoned enemies attack each other as well as me. I really have no reason to fight them myself.
But on the very next turn...
Demogorgon has arrived!
wait no it's just his little brother
That's a lot of hits there buddy, how they working out for you
I hit him with a bunch of rebounded magic missiles, wondering why he isn't dying, and eventually probe him with a stethoscope. Turns out he doesn't take damage from magic missile. He teleports away when I get him to half health.
I hit Orcus thinking he's Yeenoghu, and get to see his inventory. The dumb bastard is trying to hit me in melee with a bow.
I head over to the up stairs to cut Yeenoghu off. He can't climb them to run away from me if I'm standing in the way.
Wizard knife fight 
Orcus runs upstairs. I lure him back down.
More conflict. Note the ogre being turned into green slime - I don't want that to happen to me, so I stay away from the slimes and shoot them from a distance.
Demogorgon still hasn't shown up, and at this point I have to stop - I have a ton of screenshots, it's half past one in the morning -- he can show up next time.