Any quest-artifact-stealing attack has to pass an additional roll to work successfully if you currently have the artifact equipped.

A tree hit by a fire ray or explosion should instantly incinerate, provided it’s not marked non-diggable (petrified). Likewise, a tree hit by a disintegration blast should disintegrate.

Make the sparkle animation not necessarily synchronous with its related messages. Instead, when the core game engine calls the sparkle function, it informs the windowport that it should display a sparkle, and then proceeds as normal. The windowport may decide to play them immediately (as is currently enforced) or it may decide to defer playing any sparkles until just before the next time the player is prompted for input.

The primary use case for this is with multi-line windowports such as the curses interface, in which one might be on the Plane of Fire and get several messages like “foo stepped on a fire trap but is unharmed”, each with its own sparkle. Under the current system, the game must wait until each sparkle is finished before printing the next message. This implementation would allow the game to print all the messages at once, and then display all the sparkles one by one, or even simultaneously if it wants to.

Rather than placing random amounts of gold on each tile in a special room that generates gold on each tile (zoo, leprechaun hall, and any other that might get added), bias it so that there is more gold in the corners and along the walls, on the basis that things tend to accumulate in the corners of rooms. Should work on irregularly shaped rooms as well as rectangular ones.

One possible algorithm is that corners get 3 “helpings” of gold placed on them, walls 2, and every other space 1.

Another take is to instead put more gold into the center of the room and less further out, possibly guaranteeing some dragons on top of the biggest piles.

New artifact Dark Candle, of which there are seven in the game, carried by Medusa, the priest of Moloch in the Valley, Asmodeus, Baalzebub, Juiblex, Orcus, and the Wizard of Yendor. They are intended to be attached to the Candelabrum (and possibly don’t do anything when applied on their own), but attempting to do so warns the player “You feel cold and hollow”. When you attach the seventh one and complete the Dark Candelabrum, you are blasted, level drained, lose all divine protection and possibly crowning and a permanent intrinsic. When lit (requires an #invoke), it casts an “eerie shadow” but provides you “intense clarity of vision”, which is effectively a radius 4 light source. It never runs out of light on its own, but if you are targeted by curse magic, it is disrupted and shuts off.

Proposals to address the situation where all the candles needed for the invocation are guaranteed in Vlad’s Tower. The current situation removes frustration but many players feel that it’s trivialized, whereas the system in 3.4.3 was frustrating because it was a common occurrence to have to backtrack to the Mines for candles after forgetting they needed to be collected, or worse, having to wish for them because the game didn’t generate 7 of them.

• Make the Candelabrum come prefilled with 7 candles; this doesn’t address the trivialization concerns but does make it slightly less blatant.
• Put Izchak’s store on a bones-ineligible level and guarantee at least 7 candles in the shop.
• Rely on gnomes in the Mines being generated with candles, with a certain minimum amount of candles guaranteed.
• Candles generate randomly on the floor of Gehennom levels, zero or one stacks per level.
• Monsters in Gehennom sometimes generate with candles (though this would be difficult to tune and would not be as discoverable via object detection).
• Make bees occasionally drop beeswax, which you can craft into candles; or they just rarely drop wax candles, or wax candles appear in beehives.

Shops occasionally generate in Gehennom. They are staffed by peaceful demons, stocked with dodgy goods, and priced outrageously.

Give a special message when you fail to tame a dragon as a knight (for whom it’s impossible to tame dragons under any circumstances).