Worm tooth

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) Worm tooth.png
Name worm tooth
Appearance worm tooth
Damage vs. small 1d2
Damage vs. large 1d2
To-hit bonus 0
Weapon skill knife
Size one-handed
Base price 2 zm
(+10/positive
enchant)
Weight 20
Material undefined

A worm tooth may be left behind when a long worm dies. It is considered a weapon that uses the knife skill.

In its natural state, a worm tooth does little damage, but it can be turned into a powerful crysknife by enchanting it. Be careful to keep the crysknife in your possession; if dropped, it will revert to a +0 worm tooth (with a chance of resisting if fixed).

Generation

Worm teeth are not generated separately from long worms.

Strategy

Over the course of the game the player is bound to encounter several long worms. But should the player not be able to find one, it may be worthwhile to try reverse genocide. Other methods include create monster (for Healers), as well as loitering. Even skipping a step straight to the crysknife, it is generally not worth burning a wish on a worm tooth (a better choice would be a magic marker to write the scrolls, for instance).

As long worms sometimes split when the tail is attacked, it may be worth farming should one, for some reason, be trying to get multiple teeth. Beware, the game will crash if you split worms when extinct, or when the new worm would have zero health points.

  • Reverse Genocide. A cursed scroll of genocide will create 4-6, for an average of 5 worm teeth for every scroll; thus, to get a worm tooth in such a way, one needs at least one scroll of genocide and at least two scrolls of enchant weapon (if the user wishes to immediately have it fixed.)
  • Create Monster. Note that long worms will not spawn if the average of the player level and the dungeon level is less than nine; this means that for a level 14 player (such as post-quest) you must be on at least dungeon level four, and no greater a level than 54; they are listed as quite rare, and so this could take considerable time.
  • Random Generation. See above note.

Note that enchanting a stack of worm teeth will only make one crysknife, as though the stack had merged into a single knife. If you want multiple crysknives, you will have to enchant them each separately.

History

In NetHack 3.4.3 and earlier versions, worm teeth did not stack.[1] As of NetHack 3.6.0, worm teeth stack and can even be thrown multishot, given a high enough knife skill.[2] Even when several are thrown at once, however, worm teeth deal too little damage to make them good ranged weapons.

SLASH'EM

The Wyrm Caves branch in SLASH'EM contains four random w, any one of which may be a long worm.

Mythology

The worm tooth represents the tooth of a dead sandworm from Frank Herbert's Dune series of novels.

Encyclopedia entry

[The crysknife] is manufactured in two forms from teeth taken
from dead sandworms. The two forms are "fixed" and "unfixed".
An unfixed knife requires proximity to a human body's
electrical field to prevent disintegration. Fixed knives
are treated for storage. All are about 20 centimeters long.

[ Dune, by Frank Herbert ]

References

<references>

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It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.0. Information on this page may be out of date.

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