Base item
The base item of an artifact is the type of item that the artifact appears as. When an artifact is unidentified, it will be described as a named variation of its base item, e.g. "a blessed amulet of ESP named The Eye of the Aethiopica".
Artifacts will have all the properties of their base items in addition to the artifact's special abilities. If your quest artifact or any other artifact that already exists in your current game would be found in a bones level, the bones artifact will be reverted to its base item type.
Unique base items
The following artifact base items are not randomly generated on the floor in a vanilla game of NetHack:
Athames may rarely appear in the inventory of a master lich or arch-lich or a player monster wizard; the other two are not randomly generated at all. The most common way to encounter these base items is to find the bones of a player that had any of the above artifacts during a game where you have already generated those artifacts; the base items can also be obtained by wishing.
Naming base items
Sting and Orcrist are special among artifacts in that they can be created by using the #name or call command to name their base items. Any elven dagger can be named Sting to create it, while any elven broadsword can be named Orcrist to create it.
Creating Sting and Orcrist early via naming is commonly used to "force" Stormbringer as the first sacrifice gift for a chaotic character, since naming both artifacts will only leave Stormbringer and Grimtooth in the sacrifice pool. However, in addition to the 50% chance of receiving Grimtooth instead, chances of receiving an artifact as a sacrifice gift after the first are decreased, as are your chances of receiving an artifact via wishing. Each weapon also has their own pros and cons with regards to early creation; see the articles on Sting and Orcrist for more information on each.
In NetHack 3.4.3 and earlier versions, naming artifacts could be used to distinguish the identities of certain base items such as luckstones; this is a result of the code to prevent non-artifacts being made into artifacts via naming. Specifically, attempting to name an object an artifact's name, outside of the aforementioned Sting and Orcrist, would force the name to be mis-engraved—but only if that object was of the same exact item type as the artifact's base item. For example, naming a gray stone The Heart of Ahriman would mis-engrave if it was a luckstone, formally identifying it. As of NetHack 3.6.0, this is fixed by having any attempt to name an item in the same category fail and force a mis-engrave, regardless of whether it is actually the same as the base item (i.e. any gray stone will now mis-engrave using the above trick).
This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.
It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.4. Information on this page may be out of date.
Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-364}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.
