Junk
Junk is any item that a player does not consider useful. Most items serve at least some purpose, or are a small benefit in the early game, but later become obsolete. By the time your character is ready to ascend, nearly all items that do not belong to your ascension kit are junk.
Aside from corpses, items in NetHack are generally persistent, i.e., they don't spontaneously vanish. Over the course of a long game, this results in a lot of junk piling up around the dungeons.
Uses
Although by definition junk has no particular use to your character, there are tasks to which an item you don't care about is best suited:
- Selling to shopkeepers: This is not usually worthwhile—gold itself is often considered junk after the early game. However, those who come upon an early wand of wishing or wand of death may need to scrounge up some extra cash to buy said item, if they can't or don't wish to use a pet to steal it.
- Nymph fodder: Usually it is best to simply have a good AC, so nymphs will miss 95% of the time. However, in the early game, it can be useful to carry a few extra items, so that nymphs are less likely to take something useful. Note that this same concept will not help protect items from destruction by elemental attacks.
- Curse items fodder: It is actually advisable to have a full inventory by the time you encounter monsters that can cast this spell. Though it can still hit items you care about (like your luckstone) annoyingly often, having a few buffer items will help. Having a lot of otherwise useful wands in open inventory also helps, because curses have only marginal effect on wands (a tiny chance of exploding).
- Polyfodder: This is the typical use for junk other than iron chains. Polymorph it into something useful.
- Use it to move while levitating, e.g., on the Plane of Air.
Historical uses
These uses are no longer relevant to NetHack 3.6.0, but may still be useful for versions up to NetHack 3.4.3 and variants based on them:
- Activating Elbereth squares: For example, if you wish to create an Elbereth cage, you will probably want to use junk to activate the squares, as there will be many. A single gold piece fulfills this role nicely. Beginning with NetHack 3.6.0, Elbereth squares no longer repel monsters unless you are standing on them.
- Use it to mark the vibrating square. Iron chains have a unique glyph and work quite well for this. Beginning with NetHack 3.6.0, the vibrating square is marked as a trap automatically, and this tactic is no longer needed.
Dealing with junk
Most players are content to leave junk items where they are, but careful or tidy players like to ensure items like stray weapons are not available for any passing monsters to use, among various other reasons.
Some ways to get rid of junk:
- Polymorph it.
- Put it in a container and forget about it.
- Put it in a container and polymorph the container into a single item.
- For a cursed bag of holding, you can also place the junk in, then apply it repeatedly until all of the contents disappear; a simpler method is to use a noncursed bag of holding, put a dangerous item into it, and have all the contents destroyed in the resultant explosion.
- Engrave Elbereth under a pile of it and don't camp on the level; this is no longer effective in NetHack 3.6.0. However, some monsters will not be deterred; still, this is good enough for the dwarvish mattocks in the mines because elves rarely use them.
- Throw it into water or lava.
- Let a metallivore or a gelatinous cube eat it.
- Polymorph into a metallivore or a gelatinous cube and eat it.
- Simply kick it out of reach - this can also be especially useful if any of the junk is cursed and obstructing your pet(s) from following you down corridors.
- Drop it into a pit and fill the pit with a boulder.
- Empty wands can be broken by applying them.
- Smash it with a drawbridge.
One particularly untidy method of getting rid of junk is to zap a wand of teleportation at a pile of it (or down onto a pile of it). This will result in the junk being randomly distributed across every square on the level.
