Talk:Sickness
Talk pages from before the merge: Talk:Food_poisoning, Talk:Disease.
"You feel somewhat better."
Are there actually any remedies, in vanilla or variants, that only partially cure sickness and would thus give that message? Or is it a message that exists in the code but isn't actually used anywhere? -Ion frigate 07:56, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
- Vomiting cures only food poisoning, in case you have both. Fixed the article. --Tjr 11:24, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
Terminology
I wanted to document some notes about terminology, the kind of thing only fastidious editors will likely care about, which will explain the multitude of small changes I've been making in various articles.
Sickness, illness, and disease are used almost interchangeably in ordinary use, but the game is somewhat consistent, both in descriptions to the player and in the code:
- food poisoning and illness are distinct types of sickness and consistently described to the player as such, even indicated on the status line.
- sickness is the general condition of delayed instadeath, with these two subtypes. The game tells the player, "You feel deathly sick" and with enlightenment, "You are sick from <type of sickness>" or "You are immune to sickness" but otherwise refers to the subtypes separately and specifically. The code consistently calls the general condition SICK and distinguishes SICK_VOMITABLE (food poisoning) and SICK_NONVOMITABLE (illness). Unfortunately, as someone noted in the article, "sick" is also used in various other cases, including the unrelated potion of sickness.
- disease is not a condition, but a type of attack (AD_DISE and diseasemu, cf. AD_PEST) whose sole effect is to cause the condition of illness. There is nearly a one-to-one coupling between disease and illness--the cause and the effect--so the two are often used interchangeably in wiki articles. If we want to nitpick, though, illness has at least one other cause even in vanilla NetHack.
The last item above (which I began to realize only after my planned changes were mostly complete) suggests that Disease deserves its own article, but the two are so intertwined that I'm not sure it would be of any practical benefit. --Usethe4ce 08:12, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
Playing 3.4.3, I've come across something I've never seen: trying to untrap a dart trap I encountered the message "You feel very sick!" I cannot find any documentation on this. --User (talk) 04:09, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
