Door

Doors are represented by + when closed, and - or | when open, depending on whether the door is in a vertical or horizontal wall, respectively.

Doors can be generated locked or unlocked, and can be opened in a variety of ways:

• Unlocking with a skeleton key, lockpick, or credit card.
• Zapping a wand of opening at it.
• Kicking at it until it is smashed to pieces. This should not be done when watchmen or their captains are present.
• Zapping a wand of striking at it, destroying it.

Some monsters can ooze beneath locked doors, and some with hands will open closed doors. (CHECK: can some intelligent monsters use keys? I don't think so.)

A destroyed door is not represented by any character, but can be detected with the : command. A destroyed door, or any square leading to a corridor, can be turned into a fully functional door by casting the Wizard Lock spell at it. A wand of locking will lock a door, but is insufficient to create one.

Secret doors

Some walls are in fact secret doors, which can be discovered by searching. This can be done with the s command, and is aided by wearing a ring of searching or wielding Excalibur. A wand of secret door detection will reveal any secret doors within a 13 square radius immediately.

Luck affects the chance of a search succeeding, so players who mistreat their luck can find themselves stuck in a series of rooms with no exits on level 1.

Kicking at walls, applying a pick-axe or zapping force bolt at them is another way to reveal secret doors, but much more time consuming and often dangerous.

Strategy

Doors do not allow either monsters or you to pass through diagonally. This can be a great advantage when fighting multiples 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.

Doorscumming

In this rgrn post, the following technique was suggested:

   However, the search led to one fairly abusable way
   to exercise strength: every time you try to open or
   close an unlocked door, and the door resists, you
   exercise strength (says lock.c). I suspect whether
   the door resists is tempered by your strength, so
   this is probably best abused to strengthen healers,
   from low strength to mid-level strength, not
   valkeries from high strength to supreme strength.

However, it was then pointed out that this is only useful for characters with poor stats and no luck:

   That means that whith decent physical stats and luck, the odds of
   the door resisting become very low [for example, if your physical stats
   average say 16 and you have a luck of 4-- which gives you
   a chance of 1/4 * 1/46 = 1/184]. Opening a door 100-200 times
   to exercise a stat once is going to give *very* slow progress..

The technique remains useful for luckless early Healers with strengths as low as 7 or 8.

See also

• Drawbridges