Material

In NetHack, each item is made of a specific material. Some materials such as iron are very common, while others such as wax are rare. At least one item exists for each given material.

Description

Different materials are subject to different forms of erosion: for example, iron may rust or corrode, while wood may burn or rot. Certain item materials may also be edible for the hero and monsters, while others are only edible for specific monsters, and still others are not intended to be edible at all.

Some individual item types are exceptions to these categorizations, and may not behave like others made of the same material depending on their specific functions—for example, scrolls of fire and spellbooks of fireball are not flammable like other scrolls and spellbooks; rings of fire resistance cannot be burnt, even if they are made of a material like wood that can normally burn; and both the Amulet of Yendor and the three invocation items are completely indestructible.

List of materials

Unde­fined	Liq­uid	Wax	Veggy	Flesh	Paper	Cloth	Leather	Wood	Bone	Dragon hide	Iron	Metal	Cop­per	Sil­ver	Gold	Plat­inum	Mith­ril	Plas­tic	Glass	Gem­stone	Min­eral
0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21
Flimsy
											Metallic
Organic
											Rust­prone
											Corrod­able		Corrod­able
Flam­mable		Flammable																Flam­mable

History

Item materials are first formally defined in NetHack 3.0.0, with items being classified more simply as glass, wood, mineral, or metal—though materials are not as formally defined in versions prior to this, many of their traits are generally established, such as thrown potions breaking when hitting monsters.

In NetHack 3.0.0, metal objects have a boolean determining if they are subject to erosion or not, which consists of their enchantment being lowered rather than the item itself being damaged. Objects made of a material that does not fit into these broad categories, such as the bullwhip and leather armor, are treated as "undefined". Versions following NetHack 3.0.0 gradually add other materials and differentiate them further from each other (e.g. copper, mithril and silver), with much of the current material list established by the last release of the 3.0 series in NetHack 3.0.10: the material list is composed of glass, wood, copper, metal, silver, gold, platinum, mineral, and mithril.

NetHack 3.1.0 introduces the current erosion system and adds most of the remaining material types such as bone, leather, gemstone, iron, and dragon hidemdash;only two items, the worm tooth and the "ivory ring" randomized appearance for rings, have an undefined material after this point. NetHack 3.2.0 gives the "ivory ring" a material of bone—the worm tooth's material remains undefined until NetHack 3.6.7, and NetHack 5.0.0 changes its material to bone via commit 60ec7256.

Variants

Many NetHack variants introduce new types of materials—several of them also use object materials systems that make it possible for different items of the same individual type to be made of different materials from each other, e.g. three suits of chain mail can be made of iron, bone or mineral. See the linked article at the top of each section (including this one) for more information on this system and details on how it is implemented in each variant.

GruntHack

GruntHack retains all materials for items as they appear in NetHack 3.4.3.

dNetHack

dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack implement object materials and make gemstone into a "super-material" of sorts, which gemstone items being made from one of several valuable gem types rather than a generic gemstone material. They also add several new materials:

• chitin
• shell
• green-steel
• lead
• obsidian
• salt
• shadowsteel
• mercurial
• hemargyos
• firmament

EvilHack

EvilHack adds adamantine and spider silk as new materials, and also makes bronze a distinct material from copper.