Whetstone

*
Name	whetstone
Appearance	gray stone
Damage vs. small	1d3
Damage vs. large	1d3
To-hit bonus	+0
Weapon skill	sling
Size	one-handed
Base price	45 zm
Weight	10
Material	mineral

In SLASH'EM, a whetstone is a gray stone that can remove rust and negative enchantments (up to +0) from an edged weapon or a pick-axe. This action requires a source of water (fountain, sink, toilet or pool). Stand at some water and apply the whetstone.

The whetstone's beatitude determines the chance of success. An artifact weapon will resist the whetstone, lowering this chance.

stone	chance of success	with artifact
blessed whestone	1/3	1/6
uncursed whetstone	1/4	1/7
cursed whestone	1/6	1/9
other gray stone	0	0

If you fail, you can try again. If you always fail, your gray stone is not a whetstone. If you succeed, you remove one level of rust; or if there was no rust, you remove one point of negative enchantment.

Restrictions

Note that a whetstone cannot remove corrosion.

If you try to use a whetsone with no water other than potions (BUC status does not matter), you get the message, "Better not waste bottled water on that."

If your gray stone is not a whetstone, then you will try to sharpen the edge, but your attempt will always fail.

Time

The number of turns is initially calculated as: 130 + (rnl(13) * 5)

If cursed, the time is doubled.

On each turn while occupied by sharpening, there are checks to see if you are blind, fumbling, confused, stunned, or hallucinating. If you are free of any of these afflictions, your time remaining is decreased by 2 turns. For each affliction, you get a penalty of 1 turn. As example, if you are confused, your time remaining is reduced by only 1 turn, and if confused and stunned, it is not reduced at all.

Strategy

These stones are rarely useful. There are many ways to obtain an erodeproof weapon, and most players will have access to one of those long before they find and identify a whetstone. Even for players who luck out and manage to find a whetstone early, they only repair one kind of damage (rust) for one kind of weapon (edged weapons). Furthermore, they require many turns to use, meaning players will likely consume a fair amount of food in using them (especially since their use is easily interrupted by passing monsters).

History

Whetstone
Author	Pasi Kallinen
Download	link
NetHack PatchDB	34

The whetstone first appeared in a patch for NetHack 3.4.0. Then SLASH'EM 0.0.7E0 included this patch.