Towel
( 
| |
|---|---|
| Name | towel |
| Appearance | towel |
| Base price | 50 zm |
| Weight | 2 |
| Material | cloth |
| Monster use | Will not be used by monsters. |
A towel is a multipurpose tool that appears in NetHack.
Contents
Generation
Tourists have a chance of beginning the game with a towel.
Effects
You can put on a towel using P and blind yourself, then R to remove it and see again; this makes towels a perfect substitute for a blindfold.[1]
You can also apply the towel for multiple purposes:
- If your fingers are slippery (such as from eating deep-fried food from a tin), you can apply a noncursed towel to wipe them off so you can wield a weapon again.
- If you are blind because of a cream pie or blinding venom, you can apply a noncursed towel to clean your face and unblind yourself. (If you remain blind for another reason, "Your face feels clean now.") Unlike the #wipe command, a towel cleans your face in one turn. A cursed towel will give you one of those effects instead.
- You can also engrave with a towel; you will not actually write anything, but you will erase anything written with dust, blood, or even magic marker.[2]
The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7). If this version is now released, please verify that it is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate this information.
You can no longer wear a towel in a form with no head. Also, wearing a wet towel halves damage from poison gas clouds and poison gas breath. It also blocks potion vapors from affecting you.As a weapon
NetHack 3.6.0 adds the ability to use a wet towel as a weapon. Earlier versions and derived variants treated a wielded towel as any other non-weapon object, but it could be jokingly used as a vladsbane. A towel can be made wet by any source of water, including an uncursed potion of water or a rust trap. This will add 1–7 levels of wetness,[3][4] to a maximum of 7. When wielded as a weapon, a wet towel will deal between 1 and (wetness) damage, capped at 6 damage. There is additionally a (wetness) in (wetness+1) chance of drying out, losing 1 point of wetness. If only 1 point of wetness remains, the towel will change to moist, then will dry out when the wetness level reaches zero. Applying the towel or wiping out an engraving in the dust with the towel removes 1 point of wetness.
Origin
The many uses for towels in NetHack are inspired by the towels carried by the titular hitchhikers of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
UnNetHack
In UnNetHack, all characters start with a towel on Towel Day (25th of May).[5] Tourists will not be given a second towel.[6]
Messages
- Your towel gets dusty.
- You 'engraved' with a towel while there was no message to wipe off the floor.
- Your towel gets frosty.
- As above, but you were standing on ice.
Encyclopedia entry
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say
on the subject of towels.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing
an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great
practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as
you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie
on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus
V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it
beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of
Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down down the slow heavy
River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it
round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze
of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly
stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't
see you - daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can
wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of
course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean
enough.
References
This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.
It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.4. Information on this page may be out of date.
Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-364}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.
