If you get a full identify insight (either exclusively from a throne, or from any source) but everything in your main inventory is already fully identified, all items you are carrying in containers recursively get fully identified as well.

Gifts from your god (including gifts not from sacrifice, such as spellbooks) should have their blessedness identified, since your god is very explicitly blessing them.

Eating a mimic corpse typically makes you mimic some object besides a pile of gold, giving you an opportunity to identify it if you don’t already know it. You get the message “You can’t resist the temptation to mimic a [object]” with that object’s randomized description being appended if it was previously unknown.

The odds of getting an object you haven’t discovered are controlled by your Luck.

• If Luck is 0, you mimic the first random object type the game picks.
• If Luck is positive, the game rerolls up to Luck times to try and find an unidentified object type.
• If Luck is negative, the game rerolls up to Luck times to try and find an identified object type.

Jumping boots auto-identify once you have used them to jump (though this doesn’t actually solve the problem of trying #jump with every new pair of boots you try on).

Items (perhaps only heavily randomized object classes, so NOT armor) can be inspected somehow, or else come pre-inspected, and your character is able to conclude that the item is one of a small set of possible things from that object class. The number of these possible things can depend on role, and the “fakes” are randomized every game. This approach is very similar to the one used in the roguelike Golden Krone Hotel.

Example: a character inspects a potion and confirms that it is either healing, acid, or sleeping. All potions with this appearance will provide the same three possibilities. It’s actually acid, but without other identification methods, or ruling out healing and sleeping, it can’t be discerned which of the three it is.

Has some problems with the interface; a character shouldn’t inspect everything and then have to type-name it. Perhaps this could be automated somehow.

Make the identification game less regimented. Currently, a rational spoiled player (who will not take the risks associated with direct use-ID) is restricted to indirect use-ID (and monster use-ID) of most objects until such time as they can find a general, book, or scroll shop, at which point they can price-ID the scroll of identify and other items. Once identify is known (and could be blessed), the good items (as determined by price ID) can be fully identified. This is problematic because it’s not at all a gradual process, and it feels like it should be.

Some ideas have been floated to remove price ID outright (presumably, a shopkeeper would pay the same amount for each item of an object class as they currently do with amulets). This has some advantages; price ID is tedious, encourages stashing to some extent (because stashing near a shop where you can ID new things is good), and roguelike players who don’t primarily play NetHack tend to hate its price ID system. In this case, either the scroll of identify should start out identified for all characters, so that identification doesn’t take forever to get off the ground, or some other mechanic should be added so identify is easy to pick out for spoiled players (such as retaining price-ID for only that scroll).

A designer may not want to get rid of the price identification system entirely. But there are some options for amending it. Overall, it should become less regimented and predictable, and less necessary of a strategy. NetHack’s entire idea of price tiers doesn’t appear to be based on much of anything, and having items organized into tiers makes it easy to disregard entire sets of items once their base prices are known. Ideas include:

• Change price ID so that each item is assigned to a “band” of possible prices. There are four price bands, and each item class has its base price randomized based on its band. The price bands show up on unidentified items, e.g. “an expensive scroll labeled KIRJE”. Some items might fall into more than one price band.
• Implement price tiers (e.g. all scrolls cost either 100, 150, 200, or 300), and items are placed into 1-3 possible tiers at the start of the game.
• Fuzz the prices of items so that it’s not possible to definitively say what an item is, only that it’s cheap or expensive.
  • One way to do this is to scatter the base price of each previously tiered item each game on an interval so that it overlaps with the intervals from other previous tiers, perhaps a random number from 1/2 the original price to 2x the original price.
  • Or fuzzing is done on a per-shopkeeper basis. Each shopkeeper sees each type of object as having a different base cost, based on hashing their monster ID. Asidonhopo sells a scroll of fire with a base cost of 86; Enniscorthy sells it with a base cost of 103.
  • Or, do away with tiers entirely and simply scatter the base costs permanently. A ring of free action might be 240 or 260 base, because it’s on the higher end of usefulness in the former 200 tier. Some fuzzing would probably be needed here to keep things from being unambiguously identified.

Make scrolls and spellbooks in particular partially identifiable outside of a shop without having to formally identify them or guess based on frequency (which are currently the ‘‘only’’ ways to identify them outside of a shop). Ideas:

• Higher level spellbooks could be heavier. D&D does this. However, unless the game shows the weights of items to the player, it will be tedious for the player to figure out the exact weight of a book by picking up and dropping items of known weights.
• Make spellbook appearances more complex based on level. A simple color indicates a 1-2 level book, an unusual color or appearance indicates a 3-4 level book, a very odd or ridiculous appearance or material indicates a 5-6 level book, and a completely over-the-top appearance indicates a level 7+ book. (Example: “red”, “steel”, “bone”, “jewel-encrusted”). Shuffling of the random appearances would need to be changed so that the books retain an appearance in their original bracket.
• Make scroll label length (or, more complicated, its number of syllables) roughly correlate to its cost. The correlation could be fuzzed a bit, so MAPIRO MAHAMA DIROMAT is probably a 300 zorkmid scroll, but is certainly no less than 200, and NR 9 is probably something really cheap, but might be 100 zorkmid.
• When you read a spellbook, you are given a menu with three options:
  • Give the book a cursory glance-over. This can fail with low Int/XL but is fairly unlikely and has very minor failure effects. If successful, it identifies the spell level of the book. Takes 1/10 the usual spell study time.
  • Briefly study the book but don’t try to learn its spell. This can fail with mediocre Int/XL but will be reliable at high ones. Moderate failure effects. If successful, it identifies the spell contained in the book. Takes 1/3 the regular spell study time.
  • Study the book normally with normal failure effects and normal spell study time. Learns the spell if successful.

Probing will reveal the contents of tins it hits (and mark the tins as identified so they stay revealed).

Remove the scroll and spellbook of identify, and in place of them add in items that work like a touchstone: each such item is useful at identifying the type of items of a particular object class, like touchstones are for gems. Also like touchstones, certain roles and races have affinities or advantages with various of these identifier items.

Magically identifying an iron safe (if you manage to pick one up, that is) allows you to open it, because you identify the combination.

An alternative proposal rather than having a scroll of knowledge (which tells you the randomized appearance of an item type in your game) as its own item, or the same effect as something you can get with a confused identify scroll: have the Oracle sell reverse-identification as a service. This would require some cap on the amount of times to prevent you from learning every important item, perhaps 5 or 7 plus a small random factor per game.

Take a page out of Brogue’s book for streamlining weapon identification: after a certain number of attacks, hits, or kills with a weapon, the weapon’s enchantment (but nothing else about it) becomes identified.

Possibly, it could take less time to identify a weapon the higher the absolute value of the enchantment. It should be pretty easy to tell that a weapon is really bad or good, compared to middling.

Behavior is undefined regarding stacking. E.g. if you drop 9 of your 10 daggers, use the other one a bunch, and come back to pick up the 9, should they still stack together? If not, it would make using stackable weapons very annoying. If you use the one dagger enough to identify it, should the others automatically become identified? Only if you try to stack them together? Not at all?

Engraving with a wand of probing should produce the same “You probe beneath the floor” effect that you get when zapping probing at the floor, and should likewise automatically identify the wand.

You can apply a scroll of amnesia to an item to unidentify that one item. This consumes the scroll.

All arrows created by the Longbow of Diana come pre-identified so you can readily see their enchantment.

Wizard mode command #wizforget, which unidentifies all carried items to the greatest extent possible.

Everything in wizkit.txt that the player gets in a wizard mode game is automatically identified at the game start.

Wishing for “identification” gives you a full inventory identification.

Create an option that allows the player to specify a single particular set of potion types, then provide a fairly accessible thing in the game that allows potions to be distinguished as either in that set or not in that set.

Do away with all non-randomized object descriptions (things like “high boots” for jackboots).

As a prayer boon, when you have a certain amount of unidentified objects in your inventory, your god can grant you identification.

Make indirect identification more common and reliable through the game, but make the scroll of identify less likely to identify multiple items and impossible to identify your entire inventory. Thrones can still identify your whole inventory as a random effect.

A fairly accessible way to roughly determine the magnitude of the enchantment on an object, but not the sign of the enchantment, without resorting to magical identification. Possibly tiered in a system with levels of 0/1-3/4-5/6+.

For all “matched pairs” of scrolls and spellbooks (remove curse, fire and fireball, identify, etc), identifying the scroll automatically identifies the spellbook. Possibly vice versa instead, where learning the spellbook automatically identifies the scroll, or both.

You can pay the Oracle to identify a single item for you, but this can only be done about 3-5 times per game, after which she refuses to do it any more. She says something on your last identification indicating that you can’t do it any more.

A much more fleshed out interaction system for sapient monsters. It is initiated by chatting, which opens up a menu offering four key verbs: Ask, Tell, Show, and Give.

Ask is used to gain information from a monster; this could be a whole bunch of things, from rumors to identification to information about the dungeon. Each type of monster you can ask things of has a limited knowledge base, and this knowledge base may contain some inaccurate information. Especially interesting is the possibility that you can ask someone for identification, and they tell you what they think it is - which could be right or wrong, but a good clue either way. You can also ask someone to join you, and pay them some gold to tame them for a certain amount of time.

Tell is currently a less developed part of this idea; the only thing suggested so far is that you can tell a creature about traps you’ve discovered, which will make those traps known to the creature. You can also use “tell calm” on your pets to make them refrain from attacking peacefuls.

Show lets you select any item from your inventory to show to the monster. This can be used for intimidation (e.g. showing a stack of iron skull caps to a goblin).

Give lets you give items to a monster, which in some cases, depending on the AI, lets you test the effects of items.

Note that a potential pitfall of such a system is that if it’s complex enough to do interesting things with, it is probably going to be hard to use without spoilers. And if it’s uncomplex enough, it runs the risk of most possible responses being “I don’t know/care about that”, which also makes it hard to use without spoilers. A middle ground between these is likely to require an enormous amount of work.

The scroll of remove curse auto-identifies if it removes a visible curse from one or more objects (i.e. the player can compare his inventory before and after reading it and see that the curse is gone).

Some random graffiti is not rumors; it contains helpful in-game information. Things like “NR 9 is a scroll of earth” (giving object identifications), or “The Big Room is on level 12”.

When dipping an oilskin sack in water, give a unique message “The water runs off the [bag/oilskin sack], leaving it dry.”, which unambiguously identifies the oilskin sack.

Wand of identify: a non-directional wand that will always identify one item when zapped.

If you try to buy a high level spellbook in a shop while outwardly looking unqualified (low XL, low Int, Barbarian), the shopkeeper raises an eyebrow and condescendingly asks you if you’re sure you can read it. This can help you informally identify high level spellbooks.

Assuming that shopkeeper identification services have been implemented: Shopkeepers of stores besides general stores will identify any item that can be sold by their shop for a fixed price. General store shopkeepers either don’t identify anything, or can identify everything for you with an exponentially increasing price.

Something would have to be done to avoid trivial item identification of items that shopkeepers sell only one or two of in a class (e.g. showing a bunch of potions to a delicatessen shopkeeper, they reject most of the potions as ones they wouldn’t sell, and informally identifying the potion of fruit juice by not rejecting it). Perhaps they should only offer identification for items for which they sell the entire object class.

Make all unidentified objects of the same object class cost the same (rather high) amount until you know what it is, at which point it can be bought and sold for its correct price.

Allow multiple randomized item descriptions to correspond to the same actual item identity (e.g. a yellow potion and a red potion might both be healing).

God gifts come pre-identified: artifacts automatically become known (so that you get “the Giantslayer” rather than “a long sword named Giantslayer”; non-artifacts automatically become type-identified. At the same time, it may be useful to newer players to not hide the artifact’s base type, so perhaps the artifact should not become learned (though identifying its enchantment, etc is still fine).

Make blessed identify give no more type-identification than uncursed identify, but it will identify the beatitude and spe of all its items. Uncursed identify will identify the beatitude and spe of some, but not all, items; the rest will only be type-identified.

Some weapons’ unidentified appearances are shared with other weapons, so characters who start the game without knowledge of many weapons have to play a bit of an ID game with them. For instance, scimitar and katana could just be changed to “curved sword”. This has problems, though: it doesn’t translate very well to tiles (tiles of weapons sharing a description would have to be made identical), and it’s vulnerable to weight-ID if two weapons with different weights share the same description.

Shopkeepers type-identify any item they sell you. (This allows the player to type-identify an item by selling it and buying it back.)

The Oracle sells type-identification of any one carried item for a fee.

An addendum to ideas where the player starts the game with some random object types identified, without actually starting with such objects. Use a different ID state for these types, so the player will recognize them when they come across those items, but they can’t startscum for “good” discoveries by checking the discoveries list at the start of the game.

New type of book “encyclopedia”:

• Appears as a “hardback book” when unidentified, base price 300.
• Nonmagical and always polypiles into a blank spellbook.
• When read, it adds the appearance of some unknown magical items (1d4 if blessed, 1d3 if uncursed, 1 if cursed, plus 1 if you are an Archeologist) to your discovery list.
• It doesn’t disappear when read, but will set a flag that prevents its effects from happening again. This flag will be cleared when creating a bones file.
• Archeologists start with a special blessed encyclopedia (using a different flag), which is their research (the starting one comes pre-read and isn’t useful to this character). Reading an unread archeologist encyclopedia gives the message “These seem to be an archeologist’s notes. You pore over them intently.”, and type-IDs two unknown scrolls, rings, amulets, and wands, and puts two blessed scrolls of magic mapping into your inventory.
• The Archeologist home level contains another encyclopedia.
• There has to be an incentive for archeologists carrying around their encyclopedia so it doesn’t just get discarded as dead weight. A flavorful way to do this would be to award them extra experience points (say, double or triple) when they learn new object types while carrying an encyclopedia.

Amulets can be flushed down toilets to identify them.

A number of ways for weapon enchantment to be learned without formal identification.

• Rubbing it on a blessed touchstone
• Making a number of successful hits with it
• SLASH’EM’s weapon practice technique
• Making a number of attempted hits with it (they don’t have to hit)

Roles which are good with melee weapons (Bar, Val, Kni?, Cav?) should be able to see the enchantment of their weapon after using it for a while, or perhaps right when wielding it. Alternatively, seeing the enchantment of a weapon should be based on skill: basic will reveal enchantment on 1% of hits, skilled on 10%, expert as soon as you wield the weapon.

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