There should be a role, possibly Priest for flavor, that starts out with a few candles as a light source instead of an oil lamp.

On the vibrating square level, there is a small (perhaps 5% or 1%) chance that a death drop will produce one or a few candles instead of the random item it would be otherwise, meaning that even if you have used up all the other candles in the game, you don’t have to resort to either wishing or grinding for the much lower odds of naturally getting candles from a death drop.

The game should not assume heroes all carry an unlimited invisible box of matches to light candles and lamps with. Doing that should require a fire source, whether that is Fire Brand, lava, a fire trap, the wand of fire, the fireball spell, or an already lit candle, lamp, or potion of oil. There could also be a new “lighter” tool which enables you to light things, but can get lost or run out of charges.

“Priest of Flame” conduct, only available to Priests: they start with a lit candle or other source of flame, and must keep a lit flame on them at all times to maintain the conduct.

New type of terrain, “fire terrain”, a square that is on fire. It displays as an orange period. (If this will be too nasty to people who play with color off, the glyph should perhaps be changed.)

• Fire terrain has a certain amount of burning wood material on it.
• Standing next to or on fire terrain grants cold resistance, but standing on top of fire terrain has the same effect as a fire trap whenever you end your turn on it.
• The fire eventually burns out and reverts to normal floor, the duration determined by the total weight of the burning objects.
• Killing a wood golem with fire or burning more than a certain weight of objects on a square creates fire terrain on that space.
• Throwing burnables onto a fire trap may make them spontaneously combust and produce fire terrain.
• Fire terrain can be used to cook corpses.
• You can create fire terrain by applying a lit candle to a space with burnables on it
• You can also create it by applying a tinderbox to a space, which is a chargeable non-magical tool. Archeologists and Rangers start with one.
• Fires provide a light source of radius 3, but cannot be moved.
• Monster AI will not travel over fire if the monster is not resistant.

A new magical candle object. Zombie corpses within its light radius will not revive.

Chlorate candles, which appear rarely. They provide immunity to stinking clouds when carried, and stay lit when the hero is engulfed.

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.

Sconces (perhaps a black \ found on the walls of dark rooms, and in dark Mines levels, that may contain (lit or unlit) candles. You can untrap or loot them to remove the candle. Could also generate with an oil lamp, which would give you a potion of oil or a partially filled oil lamp when looted.

Add “candelabrum” as a new randomly generated tool. It can hold 3 candles and gives a light radius of 2 with one candle, 3 with two candles, and 4 with three candles. Its material is brass. The Candelabrum of Invocation’s unidentified description is now “ornate candelabrum”.

Fire vortices uniquely among whirly engulfers don’t make your lamp or candle go out when they engulf you; they keep it ignited. In fact, they might ignite any candles you happen to be carrying in main inventory.

Candles and lamps “burn brightly” when blessed and just “start burning”/”is now on” when uncursed. Lanterns don’t change their messages. Note though that this makes it trivial to tell when a potential magic lamp is blessed.

Allow the player to complete the Invocation as long as they have ‘‘ever had 7 different candles in the game’’, even if they don’t have any right now. Flavoring this as the candle stubs being kept around and sputtering to life for long enough to do the invocation, immediately snuffing them afterward.

A bunch of scattered ideas for handling candles, given that the hero almost always wants to have only one lit at a time:

• Track all candles separately unless they have the exact same number of turns remaining.
• Merge all candles automatically, but still keep track of each one’s lifetime. (This would enable lighting multiple candles and then having one of the stack burn out.) When you light part but not all of a stack, the game internally picks the shortest candles.
• When candles merge, their lifetimes are averaged together.
• You can’t light more than one candle at once at all. (Not a great idea since it would destroy the mechanic of lighting a large amount of candles for more light).
• When candles merge, the candle with the shortest life automatically sacrifices as much of its lifetime as needed to “top up” the rest of the stack. That is, if the lifetime is 400, a candle with 50 turns remaining will merge with a candle with 375 turns remaining, making a stack of 2 candles with 25 turns remaining; when those 25 turns are up, it becomes a stack of 1 candle with 400 turns remaining.

Special candle found generated in Gehennom. While one is lit on a level, it suppresses spawn rates and makes the difficulty about what it is now (without the candle lit monsters will generate at a much higher difficulty). They should be fairly nonrenewable, perhaps wishable but not polymorphable. This limits your duration of time in “easy Gehennom” before it gets harder. The candles work the same outside Gehennom, but are less useful (maybe they specifically suppress demon spawns).

TDTTOE: If it’s possible to fooproof arbitrary items, fireproof candles are unlightable.

Attempting to light a cursed lamp or candle may burn your finger, dealing a little bit of damage: “Ouch! You burnt your finger!” (No damage if you are fire resistant).

Lit candles get snuffed when you move next to an unseen secret door, trap door or hole: “A draft blows out your candle.”

Dropping a lit candle on a coaligned altar gives you some message about your standing with your god and your ability to pray safely. The candle is consumed in the process, and possibly the beatitude matters (with a cursed candle plus an angry god ending in a fiery explosion). Some unspecified bad thing happens if you try this on a crossaligned altar.

The Candelabrum refuses to light if it has fewer than 7 candles.

Squares containing burning candles ignite flammable monsters (such as golems) that move onto them. However, such monsters should stay away from spaces they can see have a burning candle.

Applying or invoking the Candelabrum with insufficient candles prompts you to attach more candles to it rather than lighting it.

Make candle stacking for more light actually useful and realistic: the number of candles required for another square of radius increases quadratically instead of exponentially, so 1 candle gives radius 2, 4 give radius 3, 9 give radius 4, 16 give radius 5, etc.

Later extended into a more general idea allowing light sources of any type to stack: candles each give 5 lumens (because a single candle’s light reaches up to sqrt(5) squares from the center), lamps give 10 lumens, potions of oil 2, and the full Candelabrum gives 20. To compute your total light radius, add up all the lumens and take the square root. (Note that this exact formula might scale too fast: 4 candles equals the Candelabrum).

Candle additions:

• Wielding a candle should give it a light radius of 3 (at the obvious expense of not having a weapon).
• Hitting enemies with a lit candle (thrown or melee) should have an 80% chance of extinguishing the flame and a 20% chance of lighting them on fire, doing 2d3 fire damage.
• A lit candle should be able to be applied to an adjacent burnable object (door, tree, wood golem, paper golem) to light it on fire.