Apple
% | |
---|---|
Name | apple |
Base price | 7 zm |
Nutrition | 50 |
Turns to eat | 1 |
Weight | 2 |
Conduct | {{{conduct}}} |
An apple is a veggy fruit. You will sometimes find apples in the dungeon. A Healer or Monk starts with five apples in their initial inventory; a Knight starts with ten apples. (A Monk will also have five oranges, while a Knight will also have ten carrots. See u_init.c#line58.)
In real life, an apple is a round, sweet fruit that grows on a tree and hangs from a stem. In the center is an inedible core of apple seeds; consumers often dump this core into the trash. Apples typically feature a red, green, or yellow skin. With color on, NetHack colors its apples red.
Messages
Some YAFMs appear if you eat an apple in NetHack upon a Unix or Mac OS system. No extra messages appear on other systems. See eat.c#line1423.
Message | Effect |
---|---|
"Core dumped." (Unix, not hallucinating) | No effect
When a Unix program performs an illegal operation, the kernel shuts down the program. The program often dumps a core file for loading into debuggers. This message can scare a player into thinking that NetHack had suddenly crashed and exited. The joke here is that the hero has only discarded an inedible apple core. |
"Segmentation fault -- core dumped." (75/100 chance) "Bus error -- core dumped." (24/100 chance) |
No effect
These error messages are more realistic - the typical "core dumped" error on Unix comes with the cause of the crash. |
"Delicious! Must be a Macintosh!" (Mac OS) | No effect
Apple Computer named their Macintosh computers after a real type of apple. |
In no case does the game actually crash.
Strategy
Apples do not give much nutrition. Eat your rations first and save your apples for other uses, such as taming or feeding pets.
Healers, Knights, and Monks might need to eat their apples before they can find other food.
Other Reading
Joke Unix documentation from which the "core dumped" messages appear to be derived. This appears to be a Usenet post, but Google Groups doesn't seem to have this one.