Your lantern

A lantern is a tool. It gives light only while it is ready in the Tool slot of your equipment, where a pick-axe would go, so you hold one or the other. It weighs 400 g. Every race without darkvision starts with one ready, unlit: elves, half-elves, humans, halflings, gnomes, lizardfolk, and ratfolk. The others see in the dark and start without one.

Press u (use a tool) to change what it does: from unlit to lit, from lit to hooded, and from hooded back to unlit. Lighting it or putting it out is a normal action (6 seconds). Lowering the hood takes half that (3 seconds). Its name says how it is: “a lantern (lit)”, “a lantern (hooded)”. A lantern you take off or drop stays as it was, but gives no light until it is ready in the Tool slot again.

A lit lantern is a light source that moves with you: a warm light whose reach is given in the table of lights. It burns calmly; it flickers a little, but less than a torch. What it lights, your vision can see. It is the answer to dark dungeons, and to nights outdoors when the moon gives little or no light, or is hidden by clouds. In daylight you do not need it.

Light works both ways, though. Creatures see by the same light you do. A lit lantern shows you to every creature that has a clear line to you and is near enough, even one whose eyes need light. With the lantern out, standing in the dark hides you from such eyes, and you can watch creatures that carry their own light without being seen. See Creatures.

The hood

Your lantern has a hood. u on a lit lantern lowers it, and u again puts the lantern out. Lit again, it burns open.

Hooded, the lantern gives half its light and reaches 2 cells instead of 5 (see the table of lights). The hood also keeps the light off you: it lights the ground around you, but not the cell you stand on.

• You see less. With normal eyes you see the 8 cells around you by it, and no farther. They get about 24 % of full light straight beside you and 19 % on the diagonals, and normal eyes need 16 %. Low-light eyes see out to 2 cells, except the far corners. Darkvision is as good as ever.
• You are seen less. Your own cell gets none of the lantern’s light, only a glimmer reflected off the ground nearby: at most an eighth of the light around you, too little for any eyes. So creatures whose eyes need light do not see you by it, even right next to you, while you see them in its ring. Creatures with darkvision still see you within their darkvision, and any other light that falls on you (a torch, daylight) shows you as usual.

There is no fuel yet: the lantern burns as long as you leave it lit. The Lamplighter talent makes it burn brighter and reach a cell farther, so you are also seen from a little farther away. Hooded, it gives the same hooded light as before.

With no light ready, u asks which way to dig if you have a digging tool ready. Otherwise it tells you that you have none, which takes no time.

See also: Equipment, Sight and memory, and Sun and moon.