Wood

Wood is a kind of material for items that appears in NetHack.

Wooden objects are subject to burning and rotting; for wooden weapons, they can be burnt by dropping them in lava or using them to strike a monster with a fire-based passive attack ²⁄₃ of the time. Elven weapons and several pieces of elven armor are among the many items made of wood.

Wood golems are constructs made of wood, and are vulnerable to rotting - being hit by a rotting attack will cause them to fall to pieces, and a player in wood golem form will be reverted to their normal form, even if they have unchanging. Polypiling enough items made of wood will create a wood golem.

Gelatinous cubes will engulf and eat any wooden items they come across; polymorphing into a gelatinous cube will also allow you to eat wooden items.

List of wooden items

The following items are made of wood:

• Elven items
  • Elven daggers
    • Sting, an artifact elven dagger
  • Elven short swords
  • Elven broadswords
    • Orcrist, an artifact elven broadsword
  • Elven bows
  • Elven arrows
  • Elven spears
  • Elven shields
• Clubs
• Quarterstaves
  • The Staff of Aesculapius, an artifact quarterstaff
• Bows, including orcish bows and yumi
  • The Longbow of Diana, an artifact bow
• Crossbows
• Boomerangs
• Small shields
• Flutes and harps
• Chests and large boxes
• Wands with the randomized appearance of oak, balsa, ebony, maple, pine, or forked
• Rings with the "wooden" randomized appearance

Strategy

Wooden weapons (particularly elven ones) are favored by some players for their immunity to rusting, though they will need to take care when using such weapons against monsters with fiery passive attacks, such as fire elementals.

Polyself into a gelatinous cube allows you to eat wooden items, which in practice can be very occasionally useful for eating wooden rings to gain otherwise unobtainable intrinsics.

Origin

The use of wood in elven weapons and shields suggest that they may be made of (or at least inspired by) D&D's ironwood.

Variants

Some variants add new items made of wood, and variants that implement an object materials system also make it possible for certain items with hard base materials to be made of wood.

SLASH'EM

SLASH'EM adds the following wooden items:

• Baseball bat
  • Bat from Hell, an artifact baseball bat
• Dark elven items
  • Dark elven bow
    • Plague, an artifact dark elven bow
  • Dark elven arrow
  • Dark elven dagger
  • Dark elven short sword
• Skullcrusher, an artifact club
• Quick Blade, an artifact elven short sword
• Torch
• Wooden stake
  • The Stake of Van Helsing, an artifact wooden stake
• Defunct objects:
  • The Staff of Withering, an artifact quarterstaff
  • The Tentacle Staff, an artifact quarterstaff

Elven and dark elven weapons are represented by ) and ), respectively, rather than the standard wood glyph.

dNetHack

In dNetHack, wooden weapons are of greater importance due to the inclusion of staves: a stave is a type of magical ward that is carved into wooden items, and can be learned from some spellbooks and wooden weapons. Staves are made by carving them into a wooden weapon with any other weapon that uses the knife or dagger skills; the stave is used by dropping that wooden weapon at your feet, and some staves grant special effects when the weapon they are carved on is wielded. If you choose to re-carve a weapon that already has a stave, you will chip off the existing stave before carving the new one, damaging the carved weapon and adding a turn to the time required to carve the stave. Dwarves start the game with knowledge of all wards, and are always given a knife for carving and a club to carve into.

dNetHack also adds the following wooden items:

• Atlatl
• Elven items:
  • Elven mace
  • Elven sickle
  • Elven lance
• Macuahuitl
• Shadowlander's torch
• dNetHack artifacts:
  • The Rogue Gear-spirits

Elven helms and elven boots are made of wood instead of leather.

NetHack Fourk

In NetHack Fourk, the Big Stick, which is the new Caveman quest artifact, is made of wood.

xNetHack

In xNetHack, many objects with a hard base material can be made of wood. As a material, wood has a −1 damage penalty for bladed weapons, and wooden armor offers one less AC point compared to their iron equivalents; however, wooden equipment is much cheaper and more than twice as light as their iron counterparts. Wooden helms are sufficiently rigid enough to offer metal-like protection against falling objects.

xNetHack also uses the Big Stick from Fourk as the Caveman quest artifact, with the Sceptre of Might serving as the Priest quest artifact instead.

EvilHack

In EvilHack, wood functions similarly to xNetHack, with wooden slashing weapons taking a -1 penalty to damage and wooden armor offering 1 less AC compared to iron armor.

EvilHack adds the following items with a base material of wood:

• Atlatl
  • Xiuhcoatl, an artifact atlatl
• Elven long sword
• Staff of divination
• Staff of healing
• Staff of escape

80% of items with a default base material of wood will retain that material when generated - the rest of them have different materials based on the following distribution:

• 8% stone
• 4% iron
• 2% each bone, steel or mithril
• 1% each silver or copper

70% of regular bows and 5% of horns will be made of wood, as are 5% of items with an iron or steel base material that are not of dwarvish or orcish make. Non-cloth elven armor and weapons have an 80% chance of generating as wooden if their base material is wood, and a 20% chance otherwise.

SlashTHEM

In addition to SLASH'EM changes, SlashTHEM adds the following wooden items:

• Mallet
  • Tenderizer, an artifact mallet
• Sharpened pencil
• The Staff of Withering, an artifact quarterstaff that was deferred in SLASH'EM