Worm tooth
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| |
|---|---|
| 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 is an item in NetHack. It is considered a weapon that uses the knife skill.
Contents
Generation
Killing a long worm usually leaves one tooth behind along with its corpse.
Strategy
In its natural state, a worm tooth does little damage; while it is possible to multishot them with sufficient skill in knives, the low damage severely limits their usefulness. However, 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).
The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that it is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate this information.
Worm teeth are now made of bone.Strategy
Players planning to make extensive use of crysknives will naturally seek out a means of obtaining worm teeth; while a crysknife is inferior to many artifact weapons and generally considered not worth a wish, it still has some solid use as a secondary weapon when #twoweaponing, as well as a primary weapon for Healers. The crysknife is also an ideal weapon choice for conducts that prevent access to more powerful weapons.
It is possible to farm worm teeth by splitting larger worms in half, though sometimes this may just result in the worm "shrinking" from losing its tail segments. Using a means of creating monsters (or waiting for them to spawn) could work as well, but long worms are quite rare, and only spawn if the average of the player's level and the dungeon level is higher than 9. The most consistent means of generating long worms is reverse genocide, which yields an average of 5 worm teeth per scroll.
Variants
SLASH'EM
The Wyrm Caves branch in SLASH'EM contains four random w, any one of which may be a long worm that can provide a source of worm teeth.
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 qualify for multishot.[2]
Origin
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.
References
