Blindness

Blindness is an inability to see. When blind, normal movement will result in you using your hands to feel for items on the ground. Unseen items only appear as their base item, without even randomized appearance - for example, you will only feel "a wand" or "a potion". Items seem prior to blinding will continue to be identified with their randomized appearance.

Dangers

If you lack telepathy and move normally while blind, you attack anything you walk into as if it were invisible. This makes it very dangerous to move around, because if you move while blind you could inadvertently kill your pet or blunder into a peaceful monster.

To avoid this, be sure to move with [m] followed by a direction as this causes you to move but not feel on the ground for items or attack monsters if they are in the way. If you have telepathy or warning, using [m] to move will still cause you to attack the monster.

Special care should be taken on levels with cockatrices on them - if there is a cockatrice corpse and you move around while blind, you may stumble on to the corpse and feel for it. This will result in stoning for characters not wearing gloves. Use [m] movement (as above) to avoid touching the corpse while moving. Additionally, if you try to [;] (look) or [,] (pick up) on a square with a cockatrice corpse while blind you feel the square and will be also be stoned!

Benefits

If you have telepathy, though, blindness can be quite useful as it enables you to see all monsters with brains on the level. Intrinsic telepathy is only active when you are blind; extrinsic telepathy will work like intrinsic telepathy when you are blind.

Being blind has the beneficial "side effects" of protecting against Medusa and pyrolisks, as well as any other monster with a gaze attack (including the passive floating eye gaze).

Ways to be blinded

• Drink a potion of blindness. This is not recommended.

• Wearing a blindfold or a towel. If the blindfold or towel is cursed and you cannot remove it, you have an increased chance of success when praying for its removal, as this is considered a major problem.

• Being attacked by a yellow light or raven (preventable by wearing a blindfold or towel)

• Eating rotten food (one possible outcome)

• Being hit by a wielded or thrown cream pie (you can also apply one to yourself to cause the same effect)

• Applying an expensive camera at yourself

• Being zapped by a wand of lightning

• Engraving with a wand of lightning

• Fighting an aligned priest and having them blind you ("Scales cover your eyes!")

• Polymorph into a creature that has no eyes.

Inflicting blindness

A blind enemy will move and attack erratically, suffer a to-hit penalty and are much less dangerous, especially if you can keep moving. There are six main ways to inflict blindness.

• Apply an expensive camera. The tourist relies on this to survive early levels. Other adventurers tend to find them in the Gnomish Mines, where they may appear either in a cavern level or the Minetown hardware store. This will also cause enemies to flee, and is the only thing that will make the Riders flee from you.

• Throw a potion of blindness. This effect is much briefer than when quaffing.

• Zap a wand of lightning. Blinding is a secondary effect.

• Break (apply) a wand of light or lightning.

• Throw a cream pie. A run in with Keystone Kops allows you to really stock up.

• Polymorph yourself or your pet into a creature with a blinding attack.

Curing blindness

There are a few ways to cure intrinsic blindness.

• You can wait for it to heal - this can take a few turns if the blindness was caused by eating rotten food or being hit by a potion of blindness, but will take many hundreds of turns if you quaffed a potion of blindness.

• Apply a unicorn horn.

• Eat a carrot.

• Cast a spell of cure blindness or extra healing.

• Drink a potion of extra healing, potion of full healing or non-cursed potion of healing.

• Praying to your god may help, but be aware that blindness is only considered a minor problem.

Extrinsic blindness, such as getting hit in the face with a cream pie, can be cured by wiping your face using the #wipe command or applying a towel, or removing whatever it is that is blinding you (a blindfold for example). Having a cursed blindfold or towel stuck to your face is considered a major problem, so if it is safe to pray, your god is likely to help you out of this predicament.

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It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.4.3. Information on this page may be out of date.

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