Stash
Players can carry only a limited weight, and without a bag only a maximum of 52 items. Thus, most games will involve the creation of a stash - a safe repository of useful or useless objects.
Contents
Where is a good place for a stash?
Since monsters are quite capable of picking up and using any items they come across, it is best to stash items in a container. Using a heavy chest is more likely to stop a troll picking it up than a simple sack. No monsters are capable of looting any container, although gelatinous cubes can engulf even large boxes, destroying them (but not their contents) immediately.
A good stash:
- is located in a convenient place. This is very often next to an altar, to tidy away all the items that numerous sacrifices will generate.
- is protected by burning Elbereth into the floor beneath it. To burn Elbereth, use a wand of fire (uses a charge) or a wand of lightning (uses a charge and normally causes temporary blindess).
Some players prefer a greater degree of organisation during long games, and so use several chests in their stashes. For long sessions of sacrificing at an altar, it can be useful to have one chest in which useful items are stored, and another in which junk can be cleared away into. Players of extremely long games even have separate chests for each object type (potions, rings, wands, etc.).
The Castle or the Valley of the Dead are popular stash levels, as they both generate immense amounts of loot and have abundant chests. The Valley also has a temple, but it is unaligned.
Some players prefer to keep their stashes on levels which can leave bones files, so that if the unthinkable happens, they stand a chance of seeing their loot again, albeit through the eyes of a different character. Some consider this a mild form of cheating.
Stash security
A chest will suffice to protect your items from nearly all threats, but paranoid players have been known to go several steps futher. The easiest additional security measure is to place a boulder on top of your container. A chest with a blue jelly on it is incredibly secure, but inaccessible without killing or moving the jelly (a tame blue jelly might work very well). An oilskin sack underwater is also perfectly secure, providing there are no water trolls on the level and you can get to dry land immediately after looting it. You can store items in a pit, and push a boulder on top of them. This makes the items totally inaccessable, except for you and monsters which are trying to flee by digging a hole in the floor. You will need a new boulder each time you want to cover your items after digging them up for retrieval.
If your stash contains only junk, then perhaps it does not need security. That pile of cursed weapons and armor would not help those monsters much anyway. You might want to secure your junk if you plan to retrieve it later; you might come back for that potion of sickness and scroll of punishment when you have cancellation, whether your plans involve making holy water or using a magic marker. Do not let some monster throw that potion at you!
Additional use of stashes - polypiling
As mentioned, you might have use for scrolls of punishment and so on once you have a wand of cancellation. If you have a wand of polymorph, polypiling is a great way to make use of otherwise useless magical junk.
The sortloot and menucolors patches can help you identify your stash. Both patches are installed on nethack.alt.org, thus many players do use them. When configured, the sortloot patch sorts the inventories of piles and containers, while the menucolors patch assigns colors to certain menu items. With these patches, you can list all your wands of fire together and flag as red all the cursed junk.
