Applying a pick-axe to iron bars allows you to try to pry them apart, but this has an equal chance of destroying the pick or the bars.

Unenchanted pick-axes always miss when used as a weapon, so that you can be sure that you will not accidentally hit a monster with one and break weaponless conduct.

Strip pick-axes of their weapon-tool status: they no longer deal damage as a weapon, and are not normally wielded. They’re just a tool that will dig in a specified direction. The purpose is to prevent people from accidentally attacking with the pick.

Dwarvish shopkeepers never ask you to leave your pick-axe outside if you are also a dwarf, because they understand the deep cultural offensiveness of asking a dwarf to set aside their pick.

You can twoweapon pick-axes to dig super fast.

Applying an axe or pick-axe, and then specifying a direction where there is a monster, makes you swing the implement through the air, because applying tools is not intended for attacking, and it helps avoid weaponless conduct breaking.

Alternatively, when autodig is off and a digging tool wielded, you must use F to attack monsters.

Mines’ End variant that is an actual mine, with many twisty corridors dug out of the rock, and many unmined gems in the rock. The luckstone is unmined, in one of several possible spaces, not adjacent to any corridors but not too far away from them, and certainly not as far away as in the Wine Cellar. A pickaxe will be guaranteed somewhere on this level.

Rename mattocks to ‘cutter mattock’ and pick-axe to ‘pick’ to make them less ambiguous.

Wands of striking and digging tools deal double damage to all stony monsters like earth elementals, clay golems, stone golems, xorns, and gargoyles.

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