Naming artifacts

This article is about the item-identification bug. For the artifacts that can be created by naming, see Sting and Orcrist.

The naming artifacts trick is a bug exploitation that allows you to identify certain item types.

The way NetHack internally keeps track of which items are artifacts is through the item's name; this saves memory and allows a flexible artifact set (i.e. multiple artifacts can have the same base item type). If you try to name an item (say, a helm of brilliance) with the name of an artifact with the same base type (say, The Mitre of Holiness), you'll misengrave.

The abuse is that this only works on the same item type, even if appearances are randomized. In other words, naming a magical helmet "The Mitre of Holiness" will misengrave if and only if the magical helmet is a helm of brilliance. You must name, not call, the object in question (answer yes when it asks you to "Name an individual object?"). Use of this exploitation is frowned upon by some, because this behavior is obviously unintentional.

In this way you can identify (or rule out) the following items:

Appearance	Item type	Artifact name
amulet	amulet of ESP	The Eye of the Aethiopica
gray stone	luckstone	The Heart of Ahriman
magic helmet*	helm of brilliance	The Mitre of Holiness

*: The appearances of magic helmets are: plumed helmet, etched helmet, crested helmet, and visored helmet.

A possible fix is to prevent the naming of any item with the name of an artifact (so no items period could be named "The Eye of the Aethiopica"), or perhaps just those with the same appearance as the artifact (so no gray stones could be named "The Heart of Ahriman", but, say, frost horns could).