Dynamite in SLASH’EM should be changed so that it uses a digging explosion, and carves out tiles in its blast radius, rather than just a really powerful fiery explosion that doesn’t affect terrain. It should probably also create pits randomly in the blast radius.

Also, Archeologists should start with some dynamite (though perhaps they, or at least Lawful ones, ought to get alignment.penalties for using it, since blowing up your dig site is poor archeological practice).

The “Construction Patch”:

• When digging out stone (not necessarily walls) with a pick, rocks may fall on your head with a lowish chance, about 10% per dug square. These deal the least damage if you are wearing a dwarven helm, and a little less than normal if you are wearing some other hard helm. Dwarvish characters have a high chance of dodging the falling debris entirely. Possibly also allow a boulder falling on your head from digging similar to when monsters tunnel.
• You can apply rocks at an adjacent floor square to build a wall. It takes 50 rocks, or 25 if there is a boulder in that square. (If the space is marked as being wall-nondiggable, this either doesn’t work, or flips the space to being diggable.) It takes 1 turn per rock to build it. In the process it creates an immovable object or dungeon feature called “partially-built wall” on that space, which tracks how many rocks are part of it. If you move onto the space, you can dismantle the wall and retrieve the rocks.
• You can apply rocks at an adjacent pool or moat to attempt to fill it. The more rocks, the higher the chance of filling it. This takes only 1 turn.
• Stone to fleshing diggable wall turns it into huge chunks of meat.
• Force bolts from striking wands or the spell scatter rocks off diggable walls they hit, and in roughly 5 shots the wall is destroyed.
• Digging a pit or hole puts a pile of rocks on a random adjacent square.
• When you dig a hole and fall down to the next level, you are usually accompanied by a shower of rocks falling on and around you. Dwarves are more adept at dodging and getting hit by fewer rocks.
• When using a pick to dig a square of natural stone where the four orthogonally adjacent squares are all dug out already, you are asked if you want to carve out a boulder. If you say yes, a boulder is deposited on the new space.

Note that the two boulder-creation methods above run the risk of being exploited for abusable quantities of food if you have stone to flesh available, and the stone-to-flesh-walls method explicitly invokes this.

When digging a pit, there is a (10 - (Luck/2))% chance that you break through to the floor below, creating a hole instead and falling through.

Cantrips are level 0 spells that cost d2 or d3 power to cast. In order not to let them be unbalancing, they don’t train skill and are mostly useless, except in certain circumstances or for low-Pw spellcasters who can’t do much of the bigger stuff yet. ais523 suggests that good candidates for cantrips might be things that have little combat use, and whose effects could be duplicated by backtracking or other tedious things, but would be useful to avoid boredom. Given their cheapness, they should probably not train skills, and may not even need spell schools.

Most ideas for cantrips seem to be a little too powerful and would do better off as normal spells (and may be listed as independent YANIs for normal spells); however, those that seem like they would fit are listed here.

• Increase the odds of monsters dropping a corpse in the next few turns.
• Create an empty unlocked chest. (This would need some restriction so you can’t farm and sell them; perhaps you can only create up to 10 or 20 chests per game with this.)
• Mark a map square with a symbol, perhaps a comma, that is no different from normal floor but shows up on #overview and the normal map view.
• Deal some small damage, such as d5 or d6, to a nearby creature. (Acid Bubble from D&D is a nice corresponding cantrip.)
• Dig out a single square.
• Create a cancelled hostile yellow light. It cannot explode at you since it is cancelled, so it becomes an autonomous light source of radius 1, which can’t follow you down levels like a pet can. Killing it should not grant you any experience; otherwise this would be easily farmable.
• Light a radius 2 or 3 area permanently, like a weak form of the spell of light.
• Mage hand: you indicate a direction and the nearest item on the floor in that direction, assuming it’s under 100 weight or so, is brought to you and is placed in your inventory. This can be used > to get things out of pits.
• Create an illusion of yourself at your spot. The illusion never moves. Monsters that see it assume it is you and will attack whichever one is nearer (the illusion is instantly destroyed if attacked).

You can twoweapon pick-axes to dig super fast.

Force bolt will dig one space if cast at skilled or expert and it hits a diggable wall.

Digless conduct: never dig any tile by any means (digging implements, wand of digging, spell of dig). Monsters digging don’t break the conduct.

Shovel, a tool that can be used to dig walls, but only deals 1d2 damage in combat (because it’s a pure tool, not a weapon-tool) and doesn’t count as hitting with a weapon if used in combat.

Digging down on a sink does not automatically stop when it becomes a fountain. Some of the time, it goes straight to creating pools, the “Water gushes forth” effect (as if it had momentarily become a fountain then you kept digging), and disappears.

Vaults on deeper levels have walls that take multiple digging actions to dig through, like shop walls do.

Using digging to escape from an engulfer no longer leaves it teetering on the brink of death at 1 HP. Instead it cuts the engulfer’s HP in half. For unsolid or amorphous engulfers (e.g. Juiblex), it does even less damage than that. It still lets you escape in all cases though.

Sokoban is undiggable until the level is solved.

Vaults with undiggable walls. You must teleport into them. (The guard will appear inside the vault and teleport you out once you drop your gold.)

Random piles of loot can sometimes generate buried in the floor or behind walls on spaces not adjoining any walkable spaces. Nearby engravings are generated to indicate that there is something in the vicinity. Archeologists get an alignment bonus for digging out these items.

Shopkeepers charge a hefty fee for digging pits in their floor, hundreds or thousands of zorkmids. The shopkeeper will warn you when you start digging.

Digging through a vault wall counts as 5 tiles (for digging time or wand of digging purposes), and dulls your digging tool’s enchantment by 3.

When you kill a demon lord, its lair becomes diggable.

If you have enough Str, you can dig with your bare hands, but it takes much longer and may incur HP damage.

When you or a monster digs a hole to a level below, rocks/boulders are created on the square you fall into.

Digging downwards destroys any existing engraving on the square.

Vomiting on an altar should offend its god, as should digging on it.

A digging ray shot into amorphous engulfers (such as green slimes or gelatinous cubes in some variants) splits them instead of reducing their HP to 1. This automatically makes you not engulfed anymore. (Does not change the effect on things like purple worms. Not specified what should happen with unsolid engulfers like vortices and air elementals.)

If a scurrier selects , or . when asked what to eat, they attempt to chew through the floor.

Higher pickaxe skill increases digging speed.

If you have autodig enabled and a digging-capable pet is next to a wall or rock square you move into, it will dig that square out for you.