Pill
A pill is a food item introduced in SLASH'EM that has one of seven random effects when eaten.
Generation
Pills are randomly generated. They are very infrequently found, being similar in rarity to a wand of wishing.
Tourists in SLASH'EM will occasionally find a pill in their starting inventory: unlike other wish-granting items such as magic lamps and wands of wishing, pills are not specifically barred from starting inventories, making a first-turn wish theoretically possible, albeit unlikely without start scumming.
Effects
When a pink pill is eaten, it will have one of seven equally likely effects ("You swallow the little pink pill."):
| Effect | Message |
|---|---|
| You get a wish. | "The pink sugar coating hid a silver wishing pill! You may wish for an object." |
| You gain 600 points of nutrition. | "That tasted like vitamins" |
| You become very fast for 200–209 turns. | "Wow... everything is moving in slow motion..." |
| You are poisoned; you lose 1–4 points of strength and 1–15 hit points. | "You feel your stomach twinge." |
| You fall asleep for up to 49 turns. | "You feel drowsy..." |
| You hallucinate for 150 (more) turns. | "Oh wow! Look at the lights!" |
| You are stunned for 30 (more) turns. | "Everything begins to get blurry." |
The four negative effects may be resisted, or fixed with a unicorn horn, making pills a safe, albeit unlikely, way of getting a wish. If any of the negative effects are resisted, you will get the message "Hmm. Nothing happens."
You may suffer the ill effects of rotten food, including passing out. Thus it is best to eat your pills in a safe place while not satiated or starving.
Medical kits
Looting a medical kit will reveal the presence of pills, phials, and bandages. While these are technically real items, they are not intended to be accessible: you cannot directly take them, and applying the medical kit will have its usual effects, rather than allowing you to access them. However, due to a rather spectacular bug, it is possible to access these items by burying the medical kit, waiting several hundred turns for it to rot away, and then digging up the items found inside it. The resultant pills will be ordinary pills with a 1⁄7 chance of giving a wish. As medical kits have more than seven pills on average, it is possible to gain infinite wishes this way by wishing for more medical kits. Attempting to dig up the items too early will reset the rot timer, but waiting too long will cause the pills themselves to rot away; a wand of probing, potion of object detection, or spellbook of detect treasure can be used to "check on" the medical kit without disturbing the timer.
Overall, this method is quite slow, and there is a nontrivial chance of receiving zero wishes from a medical kit, meaning it may "fizzle out" at the start.
SpliceHack
Early versions of SpliceHack had pink pills which were mostly the same as in SLASH'EM, but did not grant wishes. The other six outcomes remained equally likely. They were removed on or before SpliceHack 1.0.0, becoming a defunct feature.
Hack'EM
Pills also appear in Hack'EM with a few tweaks.
- If the 1 in 7 chance for a wish is hit, there is a further roll of 1 in (25 - luck) required to attain the wish.
- The case where it ("tastes like vitamins") now only gives 80 nutrition, but also grants gain ability (just like fountains, with a blessed effect if the player has high luck)
- Pills always cure larval infection no matter what effect they roll.
Origin
A pill is a small, solid dose of a medical substance or drug. While pills are typically made to help a person with health or sickness, they can be dangerous if overdosed. The effects of the pill in game are based off of many real life substances.
- Getting nutrition from a pill is based on vitamin tablets.
- Getting poisoned by a pill is based on how poisons may be disguised as pills or on taking the wrong medication.
- Getting hallucinations from a pill is based on real life psychedelic drugs, which is also what many of the hallucinatory messages in the vanilla game is based on.
- Falling asleep upon taking a pill is based on real life sleeping medications.
See also
