What’s the deal with fruit juice

nethack

Fruit juice seems to be a pretty worthless item on itself:

  • For its intended purpose, it conveys a very low amount of nutrition and also a very low nutrition per weight ratio (it is 0.5, 1 or 1.5 depending on BUC status). Any food or corpse has a better ratio.
  • There are only two Alchemical recipes that require fruit juice.
    • The potion of see invisible can be made once, then blessed, to give the permanent intrinsic.
    • The potion of booze has a single desirable effect (confusion), and it offers the same nutrition values that fruit juice does.
      • Also, both booze and fruit juice don't break foodless conduct.
  • Throwing it doesn't appear to have an effect.
  • Diluting the juice into water seems to be the best use for it. However, it isn't the purpose of the potion.

Are there any other uses (preferably practical) for fruit juice?

Best Answer

Short answer: no, there are no other uses. (I generally dilute and then bless/curse it to add to my stockpile of aligned water.)

According to the Nethack Spoiler List, that list of uses is comprehensive, but we can check that by reading the source.

POT_FRUIT_JUICE is mentioned in shknam.c (shop initialization), zap.c (wands) and potion.c (potions). shknam.c is just as an entry in the item list for delis, and zap.c is for the cancellation of potions of sickness and see invisible into fruit juice, so the meat is in potion.c.

Of the ten mentions in potion.c...

  • two for the "this tastes like" handling
  • one commented out in the terrifying edifice that is potionhit(), and another in potionbreathe()
  • six in potionmix(), covering
    • unihorn + sickess => juice
    • amethyst + booze => juice
    • gain {level,energy} + juice => see invisible
    • fruit + {speed,enlightenment} => booze
    • fruit + sickness => sickness

And that's everything; it has no other properties that are specific to fruit juice (as opposed to shared with all potions like being dilutable).

As for why, the revision history of Nethack might tell us -- if it were publically available. But as far as I can tell, it's not.

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