Objects and your pack

Weapons, armor, tools, potions, scrolls, food, stones and gems, coins, rings, and amulets lie about the world. You can pick them up, carry them, and put them down again. Weapons, armor, rings, and amulets can be worn and wielded (see Equipment). Food can be eaten (see Food and corpses), potions drunk, and scrolls read.

Weapons and armour fight and protect (see Combat). Some of them are magic, and so are some tools, the pick-axe among them (see Magic items). Everything you carry weighs on you (see Burden). What things are made of, and why it matters, is on its own page: Materials.

What an object is

Every object has its own glyph and color, a class, the materials it is made of, a weight, and a worth in gold. Shops set their prices from the worth. The glyph hints at what kind of thing it is:

Some glyphs are shared with terrain. Wildflowers are * too, and glowing fungus and tall grass are ". Color and look mode tell them apart.

Item classes

Every object belongs to an item class: the kind of thing it is. Every list of objects (your pack, a pile, what to drop, eat, throw, or put on) groups them by class, in the order below, with each class under a heading. Within a class, things stay in the order you picked them up, or in the order of the pile. Shops sell and buy by class. You always know the class of anything you see, even of a magic item you have not identified.

Weights are in grams. They read 450 g below a kilogram and 3.5 kg above.

Some objects stack: coins, arrows, candles, potions, scrolls, food, and stones and gems lie together as one stack, such as “12 gold coins” (see the “Stacks” column below). Everything else is a stack of one, so three daggers are three stacks.

Piles

Objects lie in piles, any number to a cell, and only where you can walk. The map shows the top object of a pile in place of the floor. It is lit by the light around it as the floor would be, and drawn under any creature standing there. The last thing dropped on a pile goes on top.

When you step onto a pile, the message line tells you what is there: You see here a dagger. for a single stack, There are several objects here. for more.

If you arrive on a special feature of the ground, such as an altar or a faint rune, it is named first, once each time you come to it: There is an altar here. A feature you cannot stand on, such as a worn statue, is named when you come beside it, and not again while you walk around it. Whatever is written on it is read out after.

Look mode (l) names what lies on any cell you see or remember: up to three stacks by name (“a dagger and 12 arrows”), or a count for more (“17 objects”).

You see objects where you would see a creature: on cells in your line of sight that are lit enough for your eyes, or within your darkvision. Your own cell is always visible, so you always know what lies under you. A pile in the dark stays unseen until you light it or come close enough.

Remembering piles

The game remembers each pile as you last saw it, the same way it remembers terrain (see Sight and memory). Remembered piles are drawn dim, like the rest of what you remember. If a pile changes while you are not looking, you still remember it as it was. Once you see the cell again, your memory catches up. If the pile is gone, it is gone from memory too.

Picking up

Stand on a pile and press , or ;. A single stack is picked up at once. Where several lie, a screen lists them, grouped by class (see Lists of objects):

• Each stack has a letter (a for the first on the page), its glyph, its name, and its weight.
• Press a letter to mark or unmark that stack (+ marked, - not). Press , to mark everything, and again to unmark everything.
• The arrow keys move the > cursor, and Space marks the cursor’s row.
• > and < (or PageDown and PageUp) turn the pages of a long list. What you marked stays marked on every page.
• Enter picks up everything marked, or the cursor’s row if nothing is marked.
• Esc cancels.

On this screen every letter names a stack, even h, j, k, and l.

Picking up is one action (6 seconds), however many stacks you take. If there is nothing here, you are told so and no time passes. In a shop, what you pick up is not yours until you pay for it.

Dropping

Press d to choose what to drop: it opens your pack in its drop mode, titled “Inventory: drop”. In the pack itself, D turns the drop mode on. It works like the pick-up screen: a letter marks or unmarks a stack (marks stay as you turn the pages), , marks everything, and Enter drops what is marked. Esc drops nothing: it takes you back to the plain pack, or, if you pressed d, back to the game. Dropped objects go on top of the pile where you stand, and stackable ones join a stack of the same object already there.

Dropping is one action too. Something you wear or wield is taken off first, which takes its own time as well (see Equipment). In a shop, dropping puts back what you have not paid for, and the keeper offers to buy your own things.

You cannot close a door while objects lie in its doorway.

Your pack

Press I to see what you carry. Nothing changes and no time passes. Esc closes the screen, and so does I. Press D to drop things from it. Press a stack’s letter to look at it: the description says what it is and what it does (see Magic items).

Your pack holds as many stacks as you can carry. Only their weight limits you (see Burden). Picking up a stackable object you already carry adds it to that stack. Magic items show their names in blue and rare items in yellow (see Magic items).

Lists of objects

Your pack, a pile to pick up from, and every other list you choose objects from (what to drop, throw, or eat, what to put on in an equipment slot) all work the same way:

• Stacks are grouped by item class, each class under a heading. Headings have no letter.
• Weapons and armour show what they give after their name: “a long sword (+0 hit, 1d9)”, “a leather jerkin (Dv +1, Pv 1)” (see Equipment).
• The list shows one page at a time: as many rows as fit your window, and at most 26 stacks. The frame says which page you are on (Page 2/3).
• The letters a to z name the stacks on the page you see, starting again at a on every page. A class that runs over onto the next page shows its heading there again.
• > or PageDown turns to the next page, < or PageUp to the one before (you can change these keys in Controls). The arrow keys move the > cursor from page to page.

The inventory screen lists each stack’s weight and marks what you wear or wield (“(being worn)”, “(wielded)”, and so on; see Equipment). Below the list it shows:

• Carrying: the weight of everything in your pack, worn and wielded things included, and your burden if you have one;
• Your weight: your own weight plus what you carry;
• the weights at which you become burdened, strained, and overloaded.

What you can carry is limited by your Strength and Toughness. Carry too much and everything you do is slower, until you are overloaded and cannot move. See Burden. Creatures have weights too, and some carry objects, but you cannot see what they carry or what they weigh, only what they wear and wield.

The objects

See also: Equipment, Burden, and Shops.