Potion of recovery

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! Pink potion.png
Name recovery
Appearance random
Base price 300 zm
Weight 20
Monster use Will not be used by monsters.

The potion of recovery is a potentially useful potion originally in NetHack: The Next Generation, which also appears in SlashTHEM.

As long as the potion is non-cursed, quaffing it will set your health to its maximum value. If the potion is blessed, it also raises the maximum by 0-4 points. If the potion is cursed, it will have no effect, apart from displaying a silly message.

Messages

You feel much, much better.
You quaffed a noncursed potion of recovery.
You decide to recover yourself. Nothing happens, however.
You quaffed a cursed potion of recovery and nothing happened.

Strategy

At first glance, the potion of recovery seems redundant, as there is already a potion of "full healing" from vanilla. But recovery has one advantage over full healing: as long as it is not cursed, it will always raise your health to its maximum, while full healing, despite what its name implies, only adds 400 HP to your current total, cutting off at the maximum.

However, this advantage is only likely to be relevant to a player who has managed to get a max health in excess of 400. Otherwise, a potion of recovery is no more useful than a potion of full healing. Indeed, full healing has several advantages over recovery:

  • Full healing has other benefits besides giving hit points. It cures hallucination and blindness, and, if not cursed, sickness. It exercises constitution and strength. A blessed potion can restore lost experience levels as well. Recovery only restores lost hit points.
  • Full healing will add 4 health if uncursed, 8 if blessed; recovery only raises your max if blessed, and then by only 0-4 points.
  • Full healing still works if cursed, though it will not cure sickness. Recovery has no effect if cursed.
  • Full healing can be used to make a potion of gain ability in alchemy. Recovery currently has no alchemical function.

Thus you may find full healing more useful than recovery. If you do find any potions of recovery, however, you may wish to keep them and quaff them instead of potions of full healing whenever your health gets dangerously low, saving full healing for its other benefits, like regaining lost experience levels, or curing status ailments when you don't have a good (non-cursed) unihorn handy.

If you can spare any holy water, bless your potions of recovery for the max HP gain, though the increment will rarely be as much as a potion of full healing will give. At any rate, blessing a potion of recovery carried in open inventory will make it less likely to be cursed (and therefore useless) by the time you need it.