Most useless item?

What's the most useless item in your opinion?

My vote would be scrolls of teleportation. You can't keep them handy, otherwise they risk burning up. So in order to actually use one you have to a) take it out of your chest and b) read it, which takes some time too. When you do need one urgently, those 2 steps are costly, and in my experience you're dead before you even finish reading

Horn of plenty. Weights a lot and provides less food than gods.

EDIT: If you have teleportation control, scroll of teleportation can be a very useful tool for getting into secret rooms. Even though they are not optimal, they can be used for trivial tasks and save you teleportation wand charges.

Teleportation scrolls are actually pretty handy to have out in your inventory. Yeah, they do burn occasionally and take time to read out, but they do have one thing going for them wands don't. Reading doesn't require functional arms unlike wands, so they work as a last resort escape if both your arms are disabled or cut off.

Wands of necromancy though, just why. I've never found situation where having a weak zombie pet would be useful. Or do they nowadays create zombies according to the type of corpse? Something like a zombie orc general could be a decent temporary ally if equipped.

Except for clocks and fish skeletons? I'd say backpacks full of gunpowder. They are generally unsafe to be around, so I rather let them rot on the floor and keep my distance.


That's exactly how I use them.

Also horns of plenty can generate carrots and other special food items, though with deliberately low chances.

Ah I never realized you could read them without arms. That actually could be useful.

Good call on the wands of necromancy

Hmm, apart from the ad shirt and the pile of roubles, I often find myself collecting a lot of bottles of poison and not knowing what to do with them. Anyone got any good uses for bottles of poison?

Dip a knife in it and throw the knife. Helps to soften up tougher enemies. I don't recall if you can dip multiples at once, but if you can - a couple poison-knives followed by backing up a little bit before engaging can make a big difference. Of course this tactic relies on having some spacing, so good perception is a must.

Actually I've just generally taken to collecting knives for throwing purposes. Low weight, expendable, trains small blades...

As for useless items: Bronze plate armor. And boots of kicking.

Dip things into them twice to get an empty bottle. :^)

As far as that goes, I want to be able to dip food items in liquids. Poisoned school food, healing loaf of bread, wet banana, etc.

Still useless after all these years of development. I was going to try improve them, but I failed to come up with a good model.

Chao, dipping food items in liquids would be such an awesome improvement to the game that I think I will code that right now.

Have you considered reworking unarmed combat? Currently if you have arms you punch, if you don't have arms you kick, if you have neither arms nor legs you bite. (Barring vampire.) If a person wearing Boots of Kicking preferentially kicked in melee, or if the actual attack performed depended on relative skill levels, it might make the boots of kicking more useful.

Another model might be to take a page from Crawl: if the limb is free, you have a (skill)/(skill+X) chance of attacking with the limb whenever you make a normal melee attack. X can be tuned for balance. Allows a skilled boxer who picks up a knife to keep punching between stabs, or someone who is good at kicking to get free kicks once in a while. X could include a constant, modifiers from e.g. encumbrance, and even be reduced by stats. How many free attacks per round of melee are possible would be a different discussion: should a highly skilled boxer, kicker, and biter be able to stab with a sword, punch, kick, and bite all in one round? Etc.

I offten end up using them to dip burning scrolls

most useless item would be the bananas on new attnam they rot after like 2 turns

You guys should take that discussion to the unarmed improvement thread.

Incidentally I'm surprised you passed up a comment on the "wet banana". I was thinking the bananas the mistresses sometimes spawn with should sometimes be wet. These forums aren't what they used to be...

We would need to add VAGINAL_FLUID liquid first, though.

Thinking of that, what about ommel semen? Except we don't have an attribute that would need a new associated ommel liquid right now.

Who said anything about sexual fluids? Obviously, you get stuff wet with water.

Silly me, thinking such inappropriate thoughts. I blame my girlfriend.

In the 0.50 era, my vote would be ways between Bottles of Poison and Bottles of Sulphuric Acid. Unlike in NetHack you can't make poisoned weapons with a 10% chance to instakill non-resistant baddies, and the only real use for acid was to drink it to kill parasites, for which you had to be massively acid-resistant not to kill yourself. They were also dangerous as hell for lowlevel player-characters if they broke while carried.

Post 0.50...clocks. IRL keeping track of time underground (with no day/night cycle) would be useful. In the game they just make no sense whatsoever.

Bottles of SA are pretty useful for opening walls you cant dig through. And dipping your weapons in poison is marginally useful when fighting lower level named baddies.

Emphasis on marginally. Between their weight, fragility (unless you do something insane like SoCM them) and not-all-that-great damage increase...meh.