Pear
A pear is a type of veggy comestible that appears in NetHack.
Generation
Tourists may start with pears among their random food items.[1]
General stores, delicatessens and health food stores can sell pears.
Kicking a tree has a one-time 14⁄15 chance of dropping (8−rnl(7)) fruits, which may be pears.[2] Cutting down a tree has a 1⁄5 chance of producing a piece of fruit that can be an pear.[3] If a tree is tunneled through, there is a 1⁄3 chance of fruit being left behind, which can be an pear.[4]
Applying a charged horn of plenty has a 0.9% chance of generating a pear or two.[5]
Description
When eaten, a pear provides 50 nutrition and takes 1 turn to consume.
Pears are vegan, and can be used to tame domestic herbivorous monsters and pacify domestic carnivores.
History
The pear first appears in Hack 1.21 and Hack for PDP-11, which is based on Jay Fenlason's Hack, and is included in the initial item list for Hack 1.0.
Origin
The Unix-specific messages appear to be derived from joke Unix documentation within a Usenet post that is not archived by Google Groups.
Messages
Some YAFMs appear if you eat an apple or pear while playing NetHack on a Unix or classic Mac OS system:[6][7]
| Message | Effect |
|---|---|
| "Core dumped." (Unix (including modern macOS), not hallucinating) | No effect
When a Unix program performs an illegal operation, the kernel shuts down the program, and the program often dumps a core file for loading into debuggers; the pun is that apples are usually dumped once the core is the only thing left. |
| "Segmentation fault -- core dumped." (75⁄100 chance) "Bus error -- core dumped." (24⁄100 chance) |
No effect
As above, but these error messages are more 'realistic' - an actual "core dumped" error on Unix comes with the cause of the crash. |
Encyclopedia entry
The pear and orange share an encyclopedia entry:
What was the fruit like? Unfortunately, no one can describe
a taste. All I can say is that, compared with those fruits,
the freshest grapefruit you've ever eaten was dull, and the
juiciest orange was dry, and the most melting pear was hard
and woody, and the sweetest wild strawberry was sour. And
there were no seeds or stones, and no wasps. If you had once
eaten that fruit, all the nicest things in this world would
taste like medicines after it. But I can't describe it. You
can't find out what it is like unless you can get to that
country and taste it for yourself.
References
- ↑ src/u_init.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 144
- ↑ src/dokick.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 1115
- ↑ src/dig.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 398
- ↑ src/dig.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 1321
- ↑ src/mkobj.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 2219: any comestible that can be randomly generated is eligible
- ↑ src/eat.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 1851
- ↑ src/eat.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 1859
