Scroll of identify
? 
| |
|---|---|
| Name | identify |
| Appearance | random |
| Base price | 20 zm |
| Weight | 5 |
| Ink to write | 7-13 |
| Monster use | Will not be used by monsters. |
The scroll of identify is a somewhat common scroll that identifies items in the player's inventory, with a chance based on its BUC status.
Details
As indicated by the tables extracted from the code below, an identify scroll always reveals the full identity of at least one unknown item in your inventory. A non-cursed indentify scroll has a chance of doing this for all items in the open inventory. Blessed scrolls have a 20% of IDing 1, 2, 3, 4, or all items in the inventory, making it more likely to get multiple IDs per scroll; uncursed scrolls only have a 4/25 chance to ID more than one item, and 1/25 to ID all unknown items. A cursed scroll will only ever ID one unknown item at a time; while always safe to read, noncursed scrolls are far more beneficial.
Tips
It is advantageous to make holy water and bless scrolls of identify, which significantly increases their chance of identifying more items. Price identification can point players to the most important items to identify and thus give them the tactical flexibility needed to get the most use out of a blessed stack. As the cheapest scroll in the game, it is fairly easy to identify itself. It is also a good idea to gather many unidentified items into the open inventory before reading the scrolls, due to the 20% chance of identifying the entire contents of the inventory.
Make sure the items you want to identify are in open inventory. Even if your scroll identifies your entire inventory, it will not identify items in containers.
Whether or not this is better than learning the third-level identify spell depends on the ability to train and reliably cast divination spells; if the player is a priest, wizard or another class that can at least reach Skilled in divination, the spell may provide a significant advantage. The identify spell in combination with The Eye of the Aethiopica lets you identify any object soon after you discover it, even if you only want to know the BUC status.
Facts
From scrl-343.txt:
identify
- Always identified when read.
- blessed
- You can identify items from your inventory:
# items: 1 2 3 4 all chance: 1/5 1/5 1/5 1/5 1/5
- If your luck is positive, then 1 item becomes 2 items.
- "This is an identify scroll."
- uncursed
- You can identify items from your inventory:
# items: 1 2 3 4 all chance: 21/25 1/25 1/25 1/25 1/25
- "This is an identify scroll."
- cursed
- You can identify one item from your inventory.
- "This is an identify scroll."
- confused
- You merely identify the scroll.
- "You identify this as an identify scroll."
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It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.4.3. Information on this page may be out of date.
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