Medical kit
( 
| |
|---|---|
| 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 tool in SLASH'EM. It is a special type of container that appears as a leather bag when unidentified.
Contents
Description
A medical kit cannot hold anything except pills, bandages, and phials, and items cannot be put into or directly removed from it. You can view the contents of a medical kit by #looting it, but applying it will instead use it to swallow a pill (see below).
Medical kits contain 1-60 items, each with an equal chance of being a pill, bandage, or phial[1].
Use
Anyone can apply a medical kit to swallow a pill from it, but only Healers can reliably do this successfully, and then only if the kit is not cursed. If the pill works, it will cure your first trouble from the following list: sickness, blindness not caused by something on your face, hallucination, vomiting, confusion, stunning, and loss of hit points (it will heal you by 10–19 HP but won't increase your maximum). If the pill fails, it may have no effect, cause HP loss, or make you deathly sick. Whether the use was successful or not, a pill from the kit will be consumed.
Only Healers can use the bandages (to bandage their wounds as part of their surgery technique). Only vampiric players can use the phials (to draw off a phial of their own blood for later consumption). These items are of no use to other characters.
Success probabilities
As mentioned, only Healers can reliably use medical kits; blessing the kit makes it somewhat more reliable for other roles, and a few other roles are reasonably proficient in their use: a Monk, Priest, Samurai or Undead Slayer.
| Status | Healer | Monk, Priest, Samurai, or Undead Slayer | Other role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blessed | 1 | 5⁄6 | 3⁄4 |
| Uncursed | 1 | 1⁄2 | 1⁄4 |
| Cursed | 1⁄3 | 1⁄6 | 1⁄12 |
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 up to 250 turns. 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. Because each kit will contain an average of 10 or so pills, it is theoretically possible to produce infinite wishes this way, although the high variance in the number of pills per kit and the number of wishes produced by pills means that the technique can easily "fizzle out" before producing a large number of wishes.
A character truly wishing 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 considerably 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. Overall though, the slow speed of the technique combined with the availability of wishes through gypsies makes it impractical in a real game.
SpliceHack
Medical kits existed in early versions of SpliceHack but were later removed. They are a defunct feature of SpliceHack.
See also
- Pill: for pink pills, which are found separately and function differently from the pills in medical kits
External links
- This spoiler on tools in SLASH'EM has more detail on medical kits.
