If I'm playing as a Barbarian or a Valkyrie or something similar, is there anything I can do with spellbooks other than just sell them for a little bit of gold?
Are spellbooks of any practical use to more “physical” characters
nethack
Related Solutions
It is traditionally safe to #loot items from containers in a store. It's also free to pick their locks if you have a lockpick or similar such. Looking at the contents of the container is perfectly free. If you do successfully take an item out, then you can put it back in the store like any other item; it does not need to go back in the container. There are only two caveats to watch out for.
- A bag of tricks doesn't actually carry stuff, and #looting will cause you to get bitten for a minor amount of damage. This auto-identifies the bag, though, and does not cost any extra gold. So it's actually a pretty good thing to have done.
- A cursed bag of holding has a 1/13 chance of the item you try and take out vanishing. Which means that you won't be able to put it back in the store. This is fairly rare, though, as from my experience most bags of holding in stores are empty.
There are four main things that help in hording items: getting a bag of holding, keeping a stash, travel improvements, and value assessment.
Bag of Holding
These can be purchased in tool shops and other stores, can sometimes be found lying around in the Gnomish Mines, and there's a 50% chance you'll get one at the end of the Sokoban levels. Refer to this map for reaching the Mines and Sokoban, but simply put they're fairly early. The earlier you get one, the easier everything becomes.
The bag of holding is a container, which automatically expands your carrying capacity. Unlike your inventory which is limited by the number of letters in the alphabet, an infinite number of items can be stored in a container. Of course, an infinite item quantity is an infinite weight, which is where the second benefit comes in that a bag of holding reduces the weight of its contents. An uncursed bag of holding reduces the weight of items by 1/2, while a blessed one reduces the weight by a whopping 3/4!
Bags of holding make it a lot easier to both carry all the essentials you need to survive in the dungeon, as well as traffick heavy goods across long distances. Hope to get one as early as possible. However, there are some dangers involved with what you put into a bag of holding: read up on them here.
Keeping a Stash
It's indeed unreasonable to try and carry everything you can. So what is important is to have a place to safely store your stuff. Keeping a stash often is tasked with a few points.
- Scare monsters away - monsters that might pick up your stash items can be scared away by either dropping a scroll of scare monster on the stash, or by engraving "Elbereth" onto the ground. Ideally Elbereth written permanently via a wand of fire or wand of lightning. (Since 3.6.0 though, Elbereth only works on the square you are standing on, not on stashes.) So use one of these, or hostiles can do things like pick up and use your weapons, wands, potions, etc, or more dangerously gelatinous cubes can eat all your stuff.
- Use a container - Not every monster respects Elbereth, and the majority of creatures that don't happen to be the kind that pick stuff up. Storing it in a container prevents these creatures from accessing your stuff. Pick something like the many chests you see lying around. Just be warned that most containers are of an organic material which gelatinous cubes will eat, destroying everything inside - so don't forget Elbereth!
- Keep in a safe place - Elbereth and containers only protects against creatures themselves, not stray bolts of energy. You want the stash to be in a place that will ideally see no monster activity, or not be in danger of damage. Many people pick the first level of Sokoban, as its monster spawn rate is very low (and the Eye of Aethiopica artifact provides a very quick warp to Sokoban when Invoked). An alternative method is to store your stash in a one-tile room behind a locked door. Also consider using boulders, which block most monsters from accessing it.
- Keep easy access - Don't create a stash in a remote place if you can avoid it. Instead, try to stash it as close to stairs while still being out of the way of combat. Combine this with mining short-cuts through levels if you have a pick axe or mattock, and it'll be a lot quicker to return to the stash once you have better identification methods.
These are the main points of stashing. All it needs to do is hold onto items and keep them safe.
Travel Improvements
Keeping a stash is worthless if you can't use it! You need to have better methods of travel across the levels. This isn't really limited to hording items, but it's something I can cover as a relevant tangent. Just consider 3 commonly accessible methods of easing your travels (I'm not going to cover the Eye of Aethiopica since it's rather specialized and already covered up above).
- Level Teleportation - One of the best methods to reduce travel time is level teleportation. The easiest method is by reading a cursed scroll of teleportation. Combined with teleport control in some fashion, this lets you very quickly reach the level that your stash is from, and then return to where you need to be. Very risky without teleport control, however.
- Teleportation - Standard ease of travel when moving across a single floor. It can also speed up actually reaching your stash, and then returning to the stairs. Not as risky without teleport control, but can be more annoying and time-consuming.
- Digging - Pick up a pick axe or dwarvish mattock, and just start taking out walls. Convert as many floors to a straight line path from stair-to-stair. The less corridors you have to navigate, the less resources spent. While digging holes to fall is an option, do note that where you actually drop is random so building a complex "down elevator" doesn't quite work as well as it may seem in theory.
Value Assessment
The final point to knowing how to effectively horde items is knowing what to horde. Equipment, such as weapons and armour, are often useless to keep. They sell pitifully compared to their weight, and you rarely need to keep any equipment that isn't immediately useful to you. Also try to figure out the usefulness of items by unconventional means. Reduce not just how much you have to carry, but how much you need to stash as well.
And finally, consider carrying no more than one copy of heavy items like potions when unidentified. Identifying one serves to identify them all, and simply rely on one or more stashes to keep the extras.
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Best Answer
Every class, spellcasting oriented or not, has a "specialty spell" which they are extra proficient with. They also have different masteries for each different school of magic. The Nethack Wiki contains detailed information on masteries and such in their individual role pages, and I've included a condensed table of that information at the bottom of this answer. These bonuses primarily affect the success rate of the spells working.
For example, Barbarians actually can reach Skilled in Attack spells. Their specialty spell is haste self, although they cannot advance past Unskilled for Escape spells. Even though you aren't a true spellcaster, your success rate with those spells is enough that you can use them with relative ease. Of course, you probably won't use spells that often as you'll be beating your opponents to pieces, and one should also be mindful not to spend so many masteries on spellcraft and neglect your mightier physical prowess. But outside of spells, there's little else that you would be spending your Pw on.
Of special note are Knights, who are more traditionally physical but their Quest Artifact gives them, and them alone, a lot of power when casting spells. In particular, they deal double damage with the magic missile and cone of cold spells, resulting in even higher damage capability than Wizards.
Of course, without boosting your Intelligence, it is difficult to read the non-blessed books. So until you get smarter, you might consider selling the ones you know you'll never use, but stashing any that you might see yourself casting. Always keep in mind what your specialty spell is, and what masteries you can use. Sometimes, a spell can really shift the tides of battle, even if your blade is better 90% of the time.
Below is a table representing each role, what schools of magic they can reach what level of mastery, and what their specialty spell is. Note how every class other than the Valkyrie can reach Skilled in at least one school of magic, and the Valkyrie still gets a specialty spell in Attack spells.