Door

Dungeon features
Air	_ Altar
# Corridor	# Cloud
#. Drawbridge	+-| Door
. Doorway	{ Fountain
| Headstone	.  Floor
>< Ladder	. Ice
# Iron bars	} Lava
} Moat	# Sink
Solid rock	>< Staircase
\ Throne	^" Trap
# Tree	- | Wall
~ Vibrating square

Doors are represented by + when closed, and - or | when open: - when the door is in a vertical wall and | in a horizontal wall. Doors are distinct from drawbridges and trap doors.

Opening

Doors can be generated locked or unlocked. Unlocked doors are opened using the open command (o). Locked doors can be passed in a variety of ways:

• Unlocking by applying a skeleton key, lock pick, or credit card to the door. In Minetown, if unlocking takes you more than one turn, you may receive a warning from a watchman if they are present.
• Zapping a wand of opening or casting the knock spell at it. This unlocks the door but does not open it.
• Breaking the door down with force, with any of the below methods. This should not be done in Minetown when watchmen or their captains are present, or if a shop is on the other side. Note that doors with "Closed for inventory" written in the dust next to them are locked doors to shops.
  • Kicking it until it is smashed to pieces.
  • Zapping a wand of striking, wand of fire, wand of lightning, or wand of cold at it, or casting force bolt, fireball, or cone of cold at it, destroying the door. Striking and force bolt are noisy; the other methods are not.
  • Applying an axe, pick-axe, or dwarvish mattock on a door. A shop door will be "too hard" to chop into.

Doors may be booby-trapped. Opening them causes 1d(5+level) damage if your dungeon level is less than 5, and 1d(7+level2) otherwise.

Closing

Open doors can be closed using the close command (c). Zapping a wand of locking at it will close (and lock) it.

Locking

Doors can be locked by applying a skeleton key or a lock pick to a closed door, casting the wizard lock spell, or by using a wand of locking. Shopkeepers can unlock and open doors with a key, and the Riders can unlock doors on the Astral Plane.

Monsters getting through

Monsters can unlock locked doors if they have hands and a key (but not other tools) and are not very small. For this reason, you might want to dispose of keys if you lock up the Minetown watch. The Riders and the Wizard of Yendor can unlock doors even without a tool.

Titans, giant zombies, and all giants can bust down locked doors. Amoeboids and fog clouds can flow beneath locked doors, and phasing monsters pass right through them.

Creation

A destroyed door, or any square leading to a corridor, can be turned into a fully functional door by zapping a wand of locking or casting the wizard lock spell at it. A destroyed door is not shown on the map, but can be detected with the near look command (:). This effectively means that any destroyed bit of wall can be replaced with a door (although they cannot be created elsewhere). This is one way to make a room impenetrable even to umber hulks, although it's not likely to have much use.

Secret doors

Some walls are in fact secret doors, which can be discovered by searching, brute force, or magic.

Searching is done with the s key, and is aided by wearing a ring of searching or wielding Excalibur. Luck affects the chance of a searching successfully, so players who mistreat their luck can find themselves stuck on a dungeon level with no obvious exit. Applying a stethoscope to a wall will always reveal whether it is a secret door.

The brute force method involves kicking at walls, applying a pick-axe, or zapping force bolt at a likely position where a secret door might be. This is very time-consuming and often dangerous.

The magical method involves using a wand of secret door detection or the spell of detect unseen; these will immediately reveal any secret doors within a 13-square radius. A blessed scroll of magic mapping reveals secret doors on the entire level.

Messages

You feel an unexpected draft.

Whenever a monster breaks a door, there is a one-third chance of this message (affected by verbose option)

As you kick the door, it <crashes open/shatters to pieces>!

You kicked down a closed door.

WHAMMM!!!

You kicked a closed door, but failed to kick it down. This does not injure your legs.

Ouch! You bump into a door.

You are blind, stunned, or fumbling, or you have a dexterity rating lower than 10, and you tried to walk onto a square with a closed door. This abuses your dexterity.

It won't come off the hinges.

You tried to pick up while standing on an open door with no items on it.

Strategy

Use in combat

Doors do not allow either monsters or you to pass through diagonally. This can be a great advantage when fighting multiple foes. A door like the entrance to the treasure zoo at the top of Sokoban can become a killing ground for monsters who will stream through one by one, allowing you to avoid their ranged attacks.

Exercising strength

Opening and closing doors exercises your strength every time the door resists. However, doors are less likely to resist if your strength or luck is high.

This technique is only useful for luckless Healers with strength as weak as 7 or 8. With decent physical attributes and luck, the odds of the door resisting become very low. For example, if the character's physical attributes average say 16 with a luck of 4, the chance of the door resisting becomes ¹⁄₁₈₄ (0.54%). This means that the player has to open and close the door 100 to 200 times to exercise the strength attribute once.

Variants

SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM, doors can be forced open the same way chests can.

xNetHack

In xNetHack, secret doors are less likely to appear on earlier dungeon levels; they will not appear at all before level 4.

xNetHack introduces iron doors, which cannot be destroyed by most brute-force methods (such as kicking and force bolts). These occasionally replace ordinary doors as the player reaches deeper dungeon levels.

The stunning door trap is replaced by a variety of traps with effects such as wetting your inventory, burning your hands or gloves, or creating noise with screechy hinges. The full list is found at xNetHack § Trap changes.

Encyclopedia entry

Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric mov'd:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.

[ The Inferno, from The Divine Comedy of Dante
                 Alighieri, translated by H.F. Cary ]

References

This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.

It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.0. Information on this page may be out of date.

Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-360}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.