You can configure a “list for Santa” or “wishlist” in your configuration file which specifies which gifts you would like your god to give you, and they will try to respect this wish.

A new object that creates a magic chest on any ordinary floor square you want. Proposed as a seed that you plant in the ground, which grows into the chest and whose roots are implied to stretch to the other magic chests.

You can apply an amulet to a pet to put it on that pet, assuming it has a neck.

An Alchemist role, revolving around potions and alchemy, and likely requiring overhauls of several systems.

• The main form of combat is to create phials of potion (where 1 potion splits into many phials), which can be tossed at enemies to cause potion effects on them. The main potions used are things like acid, paralysis, (lit) oil, and confusion.
  • Phials come in all the same types as normal potions but have somewhat weaker effects.
  • You can dip a stack of empty phials into a potion to fill them with that potion (up to some maximum).
  • Thrown phials have the same exact splash damage effect on things as throwing the potion would produce, but drinking it is a small enough dose to only cause the splash damage effects to the drinker. Requires some balance so that splash damage is useful against monsters but not useful for the player to drink for beneficial phials.
  • Phials can be dipped into potions, but nothing can be dipped into phials.
• The quest artifact is the Philosopher’s Stone.
  • The quest leader is Nicolas Flamel and the nemesis is an Avatar of Death (like Death, but weaker).
  • Fun possibilities for transmuting materials here if the object materials patch is in effect.
  • Its base item type could be a ruby (but perhaps not because dnethack makes the Heart of Ahriman a ruby) or a garnet, based on its color in Harry Potter, or an opal.
• Can also create alchemic gizmos: smoke bombs from potions of blindness, firebombs from potions of oil, all lighter and more numerous and useful than the base potions.
• Start with all potions identified.
• Could start with an alchemy kit, which is a rare tool find for other roles. NeroOneTrueKing proposed a set of mechanics for an alchemy kit:
  • Has 3 compartments. The first accepts only potions/phials of polymorph (or perhaps it just has charges and you can recharge it by using potions of polymorph).
  • The other compartments must each only contain items of the same material.
  • A success chance is displayed based on the amount of polymorph potion available, the weight ratio of the two compartments, and the materials themselves (metal can transform into metal relatively easily).
  • A successful use swaps all of the materials of the two compartments.
• Needs mechanics such that in an Alchemist’s hands, no potion is useless.

The invoke effect of the Philosopher’s Stone is heavily debated.

• It creates potions of the Elixir of Life. This potion cures disease and restores lost attributes, but most importantly it grants temporary intrinsic lifesaving. If you die with intrinsic lifesaving, you lose the remaining time for the intrinsic.
• Creating potions is way too powerful since the player will be able to bank them, so nerf this: perhaps you can only get Elixir of Life by dipping the Stone into a potion of full healing, or something. Or Elixir goes bad after a while and reverts to water, making it usable for before a fight but not for stashing.
• The Elixir should not be more powerful than a potion of full healing, or the invoke effect of the Staff of Aesculapius - healers should be the best at actual healing. Probably, getting lifesaved from intrinsic lifesaving will only restore enough HP to stay alive a little longer.
• The Elixir gives a large temporary boost to HP regeneration.
• No Elixir of Life; it instead turns potions of sickness into (extra? full?) healing.
• The Stone can turn metal objects into gold or can turn rocks into gold pieces when rubbed on them.
• When dipped into gain level or gain energy, transforms the potion into polymorph.

A really great Alchemist implementation would probably involve a full alchemy overhaul which adds herbs and fungi, harvesting ingredients from corpses, cooking, and interesting ways to combine everything. The challenge with making this is how to make it useful for other roles and not just the alchemist, and at the same time not overcomplicating the game with the new additions.

You can remove a cursed ring by greasing it.

If you kill a pet whose species has a zombie counterpart, a zombie of that pet may appear later to try and kill you.

If you are wearing fencing gloves and are carrying some iron chains, you can create iron bars (a “fence”).

You can convert spellbooks into scrolls. You may get scrolls related to the spellbook topic if possible, otherwise random. Possibly beatitude affects the number of scrolls produced.

If you throw a bell (or possibly any non-cloth item), it makes a clanging or clattering noise that wakes monsters.

Paper bags that are a container but disintegrate when wet. They can generate with a potion of booze inside.

Change up and add new failure effects of spellbook reading:

• Any failure confuses you instead of paralyzing.
• The level 5+ confusion effect seems quite tame in comparison to the other effects, so replace it with paralysis.
• New effect: book tries to eat you
• New effect: level drain
• Spell enters your head automatically, but erases your knowledge of one/all of your other spells. (This could be quite annoying and may be better off as an Evil Patch Idea.)
• New effect (possible in combination with other effects, and for any book): book curses

Books no longer have a 1/3 chance of disintegrating when failing to read them; instead, a cursed book will always disintegrate.

Dragons can cast spells.

Artifact pickaxe that blows up the wall instead of simply digging it.

Store type “sushi restaurant”, which sells sea monster corpses, kelp fronds, various sushi rolls, and sushi mats, tools which allow you to combine kelp and sea monster corpses into higher-nutrition sushi rolls. Sushi rolls include kraken sushi, eel wrap, and shark tempura.

Bed, a \ which if you sit on it makes you fall asleep for d10 turns or you have fully recovered your health. While sleeping on the bed, you get the same effects as hungerless regeneration. Found in barracks and some special levels. Breakfast not provided.

Pets should eat at a consistent rate that does not depend on their speed, so the number of turns to eat something depends only on corpse size. Pets should also stop eating when hostile monsters approach.

Ideas around a system in which you can cook corpses:

• The general idea is to unbreak the hunger system by making regular corpses unsafe to eat, so the shortage in resources isn’t in food itself but is in safe methods of cooking it.
• Cooking sets a corpse’s rot timer to 0, lets them go longer without spoiling, or unspoils them.
• May also remove poison from some kinds of poisonous corpses.
• Cooked corpses are unsuitable for sacrifice and less likely to give intrinsics, or don’t at all (because the vitamins are destroyed).
• You can apply wands of fire to cook corpses.
• Or maybe eating raw non-vegetarian corpses is just plain dangerous, causing vomiting or sickness or other bad effects.
• Corpses can be cooked by killing monsters with fire or hitting monsters with fire attacks while they are carrying corpses.
• The problem is that nobody has yet proposed a mechanism for cooking corpses that would work well. Having firewood or some similar thing would massively affect the early game between characters that can and cannot manage to find it, and roles that start with or without it. Wands of fire have been proposed as a resource but those are valuable. Introducing a new item like firewood means that a whole lot of mechanics have to be reviewed for whether they should interact with or create that item.

Uranium wands should glow in the dark (radius 1).

You should be able to wear an empty bag over your head to blind yourself, but this sets charisma to 6. If you wear an oilskin sack on your head, it starts a strangulation timer. If you wear a bag of tricks on your head, you get YAFM and instadeath, or possibly it just constantly bites your head.

Net gnomes: they wield tridents and have a sticky attack (the net), which causes subsequent attacks to hit automatically.

Chicken eggs should identify as such when you formally ID them, and all eggs of a known type stay identified for the rest of the game.

The Bell of Opening should be carried by your quest leader, who gives it to you when you return to them with the quest artifact. This solves the problem of making a game unwinnable by permanently changing alignment, since you can also get it by killing the quest leader. Should the leader leave the level (by levelporting down, for example), they are considered derelict of duty and the player can start the quest.

Add Easter eggs as an actual item, in addition to monster and chicken eggs. Possibly they have a chance of containing a candy bar, or a figurine.

Applying a stethoscope should tell the target’s gender, and if it’s a pet, the pet’s hunger status.

Merge the P and b monster classes, on the grounds that puddings and blobs are both classes of amorphous monsters that are sparsely populated. (Some attempts have been made to also merge the j monster class in.)

New monster: green cube, which combines the abilities of a green slime and gelatinous cube: both sliming and paralysis.

Boots of shock resistance, which have a thick rubber sole to prevent you from being grounded.

Note: several other people have commented that since such boots would actually prevent you from being grounded, you should actually take extra shock damage from other things, like touching grounded metal objects.

Add a high level monster spell “raise dead”, which resurrects nearby corpses as hostile monsters.

The Watch should start with a small amount of gold, and throw it at a player of the opposite gender while the player is disrobing.