Worm tooth

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Name	worm tooth
Appearance	worm tooth
Damage vs. small	1d2
Damage vs. large	1d2
To-hit bonus	0
Weapon skill	knife
Size	one-handed
Base price	2 zm (+10/positive enchant)
Weight	20
Material	undefined

A worm tooth is a type of weapon that appears in NetHack. It is made of an undefined material, and uses the knife skill. A worm tooth or stack of worm teeth can be turned into a powerful crysknife by reading a non-cursed scroll of enchant weapon while wielding it.

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that it is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate this information.

Worm teeth are now made of bone.

Generation

Worm teeth are not randomly generated. Killing a long worm in a manner that leaves a corpse will also generate a worm tooth on the same square.

A crysknife that leaves the inventory will revert to a worm tooth; fixed crysknives only have a ¹⁄₁₀ chance of reverting.

Strategy

In its natural state, a worm tooth does little damage, and is even more useless against thick-skinned monsters - while it is possible to multishot them with sufficient skill in knives, the low base damage severely limits their usefulness. Players planning to make extensive use of crysknives will naturally seek out a means of obtaining worm teeth. While a crysknife is inferior to many artifact weapons and generally not worth wishing for, it still has some solid use as a secondary weapon when #twoweaponing, and it can serve as a primary weapon for roles such as Healers; certain conducts can also complicate or prevent artifact weapon use.

It is possible to farm worm teeth by splitting larger worms in half, though sometimes this may result in the worm "shrinking" from losing its tail segments. While using a means of create monster or waiting for them to spawn could work, long worms are quite rare and generally only spawn if the average of the player's level and the dungeon level is 10 or higher. The most consistent means of generating long worms is reverse genocide, which yields an average of 5 worm teeth per scroll.

History

The worm tooth first appears in Hack 1.0.

In NetHack 3.4.3 and earlier versions, including some variants based on these versions, worm teeth did not stack. Worm teeth become stackable in NetHack 3.6.0, qualifying for multishot bonuses.

Origin

The worm tooth and long worm originate from Frank Herbert's Dune series of novels. In the setting of Dune, the Fremen, a group of people inhabiting the desert planet Arrakis, have adapted to using the sharp teeth of dead sandworms in order to produce the sacred knives they call crysknives.

Variants

SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM, a cursed -4 worm tooth named Storm Brand can be found in the Chamber of Junk within the Lawful Quest. The Wyrm Caves branch also contains four random worms, which can include long worms that can provide a source of worm teeth.

Shopkeeper services can be used to convert worm teeth into crysknives without altering their enchantment.

Encyclopedia entry

[The crysknife] is manufactured in two forms from teeth taken from dead sandworms. The two forms are "fixed" and "unfixed". An unfixed knife requires proximity to a human body's electrical field to prevent disintegration. Fixed knives are treated for storage. All are about 20 centimeters long.

[ Dune, by Frank Herbert ]