Pear
A pear is a type of comestible that appears in NetHack. It is veggy and considered vegan.
Contents
Generation
Tourists may start with pears among their random food items.[1]
Pears make up 1⁄100 (1%) of all comestibles randomly generated on the ground, in general shops or as death drops. Delicatessens and health food stores can also stock pears.
Tree 'fruits' have a 1⁄5 chance of being pears, and generate in the following circumstances:[2][3]
- Kicking a tree has a one-time 14⁄15 chance of dropping (8−rnl(7)) pears.[4]
- Cutting down a tree has a 1⁄5 chance of producing a pears.[5]
- A tree that is tunneled through has a 1⁄3 chance of leaving behind pears.[6]
Applying a charged horn of plenty has a 0.9% chance of generating a pear or two.[7]
Description
Eating a pear grants 50 nutrition and takes 1 turn to consume it. A hero can throw pears to tame domestic herbivorous monsters and pacify domestic carnivores.
History
The pear first appears in Hack 1.21 and Hack for PDP-11, which are based on Jay Fenlason's Hack, and is included in the initial item list for Hack 1.0.
Origin
Pears are pomeaceous fruits grown on trees and shrubs that are species of the genus Pyrus in the family Rosaceae. The tree is medium-sized and native to coastal and mildly temperate regions of Europe, North Africa, and Asia. About 3,000 known varieties of pears are grown and consumed worldwide, which vary in both shape and taste, and the fruit is eaten fresh, canned, as juice, dried, or fermented as perry. Several species of pears are valued for their edible fruit and juices, while others are cultivated as trees—pear wood is one of the preferred materials in the manufacture of high-quality woodwind instruments and furniture.
The Unix-specific messages appear to be derived from joke Unix documentation within a Usenet post that is not archived by Google Groups.
Messages
Some YAFMs appear if you eat an apple or pear while playing NetHack on a Unix or classic Mac OS system:[8][9]
| Message | Effect |
|---|---|
| "Core dumped." (Unix (including modern macOS), not hallucinating) | No effect
When a Unix program performs an illegal operation, the kernel shuts down the program, and the program often dumps a core file for loading into debuggers; the pun is that pears are usually dumped once the core is the only thing left. |
| "Segmentation fault -- core dumped." (75⁄100 chance) "Bus error -- core dumped." (24⁄100 chance) |
No effect
As above, but these error messages are more 'realistic' - an actual "core dumped" error on Unix comes with the cause of the crash. |
Variants
UnNetHack
In UnNetHack, the "Pacman" random vault has a guaranteed pear at a random position.
dNetHack
In dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack, pears may appear among the food items found in antholes, which have a higher chance of being populated with specific food item types compared to antholes in NetHack.
A pear is placed in the ice box within the warden's office on the Convict quest locate level during level creation.
Eve is a spirit that increases the amount of pears dropped from kicking trees by 50% while she is bound, but her taboo prevents the hero from consuming any pears.
SpliceHack
In SpliceHack, the defunct Dancer role starts with 1-2 pears among their food items.
Encyclopedia entry
The pear and orange share an encyclopedia entry:
What was the fruit like? Unfortunately, no one can describe
a taste. All I can say is that, compared with those fruits,
the freshest grapefruit you've ever eaten was dull, and the
juiciest orange was dry, and the most melting pear was hard
and woody, and the sweetest wild strawberry was sour. And
there were no seeds or stones, and no wasps. If you had once
eaten that fruit, all the nicest things in this world would
taste like medicines after it. But I can't describe it. You
can't find out what it is like unless you can get to that
country and taste it for yourself.
References
- ↑ src/u_init.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 144
- ↑ src/mkobj.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 1474
- ↑ src/mkobj.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 1481
- ↑ src/dokick.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 1115
- ↑ src/dig.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 398
- ↑ src/dig.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 1321
- ↑ src/mkobj.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 2219: any comestible that can be randomly generated is eligible
- ↑ src/eat.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 1851
- ↑ src/eat.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 1859
