Does destroying an artifact affect later artifact wishes

nethack

In my exploration, I've found a few useless artifacts (Grimtooth and Orcrist) which puts my known artifact count at 5. The wiki shows that this greatly inhibits the chances of another artifact being generated. I have a few polymorph wands and am planning to polypile a great number of things. I know that artifacts have a strong chance to resist changing, but if I do manage to get rid of them, will it increase my chances of wishing or does "generated" mean "generated" regardless of its current existential state?

Best Answer

"Generated" means "was ever generated", not "currently in existence". From the source code (artifact.c):

/* flags including which artifacts have already been created */
static boolean artiexist[1 + NROFARTIFACTS + 1];

The appropriate entry in this list of artifacts is set to "true" when the corresponding artifact is created; the number of "true" entries in the list is used whenever the number of artifacts generated is needed. There is no code for setting an entry in this list to false.