Medical kit
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| |
|---|---|
| Name | Medical kit |
| Appearance | leather bag |
| Base price | 500 zm |
| Weight | 25 |
| Material | leather |
| Monster use | Will not be used by monsters. |
A medical kit is a type of tool that appears in SLASH'EM, SlashTHEM and Hack'EM, and is also a defunct item that appears in early versions of SpliceHack. It is a special type of container that is made of leather. In SLASH'EM and SlashTHEM, it appears as a leather bag while unidentified, and in Hack'EM it appears as a bag while unidentified due to the object materials system.
Contents
Generation
Medical kits make up 1% of all randomly-generated tools in SLASH'EM. They are created with 1-60 items, which each have an equal chance of being a pill, bandage, or phial.[1]
General stores and hardware stores can sell medical kits. Note that even though the items inside are not directly accessible to the player, they will still have to pay for them - all are "valueless" (similar to rocks) and therefore sold at a base price of 5zm each, adding an effective 5-300zm to the base price of the kit.
Healers start each game with a medical kit.
Description
A medical kit is much different from a traditional container: the hero is unable to add items to a medical kit, and cannot directly remove its contents, though they can still view said contents by looting.
Pills
- For the item appearing by itself, see pill.
Applying a medical kit will cause the hero to take a pill from the bag and consume it, with the odds of the pill "working" and having a beneficial effect depending on the hero's role:
- Healers will always gain beneficial effects from pills ingested by applying a non-cursed medical kit, while a cursed medical kit instead reduces this chance to 1⁄3.[2][3]
- If the hero is a Monk, Priest, Samurai, or Undead Slayer, then they have a 5⁄6 chance of a beneficial effect from applying a blessed medical kit to ingest a pill, a 1⁄2 chance with an uncursed medical kit, and a 1⁄6 chance with a cursed medical kit.
- Otherwise, the hero has a 3⁄4 chance of a beneficial effect from applying a blessed medical kit to ingest a pill, a 1⁄4 chance with an uncursed medical kit, and a 1⁄12 chance with a cursed medical kit.
A pill that works when consumed this way will cure one of the following troubles, in order of priority:[4] sickness, blindness not caused by venom or a cream pie, hallucination, nausea, confusion, and stunning. If none of these troubles apply to the hero, the pill will heal them for 10-19 HP. If a pill from an applied medical kit fails, it may have no effect, cause HP loss or induce sickness.
Bandages
- For the item in NetHack brass, see bandage.
Bandages are items that are only generated in medical kits, and are designed for use as part of the surgery technique that is available to Healers. If a Healer performs the technique while carrying a medical kit with bandages, they are not curing sliming or sickness, and their current HP is below maximum, then they use up one of the bandages - the technique restores an amount of HP equal to TECHLEVEL + 4 + d5, plus an additional (TECHLEVEL)d2 HP if using a bandage.
Phials
Phials are items that are only generated in medical kits, and are designed for use as part of the draw blood technique that is available to vampire heroes. Performing the technique while carrying a medical kit with phials uses up one phial and drains an experience level in order to create a potion of vampire blood of the same beatitude as the medical kit.
Strategy
Early on, the Healer's starting medical kit can be a potent (if limited) source of healing, and they can be important for vampiric players looking to create permafood, but past the mid-game they are not terribly useful: a well-enchanted unicorn horn works just as well to cure ailments, while healing potions and spells are generally much better at reversing HP loss. They are flat-out dangerous to other characters, even when blessed.
Burying
Due to one of SLASH'EM's more infamous bugs, it is actually possible (if tedious) to directly access the items in a medical kit. Burying the kit by dropping it in a pit and filling it in with a boulder will eventually cause the kit to rot away, after a random period of 250 to 500 turns[5]. Unearthing the kit early will restart the timer, while unearthing it too late will cause the pills and bandages to themselves rot away. A source of object detection (or a wand of probing) is useful to "check on" the kit to see when it is ready. Once the kit has rotted away, the items can be unearthed and directly added to the character's inventory.
The bandages and phials are useless on their own, but the pills are in fact the same pink pills that are occasionally found as food items, complete with 1⁄7 chance apiece of producing a wish when eaten; as the pills will always be old enough to be rotten when unearthed, this chance is reduced to 6⁄49 in practice. This means a kit containing 10 pills has a roughly 73% chance of producing at least one wish. Players will need to be able resist or mitigate the negative effects of the pills: poison resistance or a unicorn horn is a must to resist/restore the strength drain, and without sleep resistance, players will want to create a safe place to consume the pills.
While slow, getting the wish(es) requires nothing more than a medical kit, a pick-axe, a boulder, and some time. Kits with more than 10 or so pills can be regarded as tedious magic lamps: expensive items with a high chance of producing a wish. This is particularly useful for early healers, who in addition to starting with a medical kit, also start with poison resistance. Be sure to check the number of pills in the kit (with the #loot command) before burying it: kits containing very few pills are generally not worth burying.
Theoretically, this technique produces slightly more than one wish per kit on average (approximately 1.23), meaning it could be carried on indefinitely by wishing for more medical kits. However, due to the high variance in the number of pills per kit and wishes per pill, it has a high chance to "fizzle out" without producing a single wish: an individual kit has a roughly 36% chance of providing zero wishes. Producing two or more wishes from a single kit (i.e. to get anything other than another medical kit) occurs approximately 1⁄3 of the time, meaning one may have to perform this technique several times before getting a useful wish. A character truly desiring to carry this technique on indefinitely will also need a source of boulders. Wishing for scrolls of earth is a possibility, but makes the technique even less efficient. A monster capable of casting summon nasties can produce an indefinite number of fire giants, as the spell does not respect extinction, and they may be generated with boulders. The slow speed of the technique combined with the availability of wishes through gypsies generally makes it impractical in a real game.
External links
- This spoiler on tools in SLASH'EM has more detail on medical kits.
