Potion of vorpality: consuming it grants you a short duration of a new “vorpal” intrinsic. While you are vorpal, any melee attack you make with a bladed weapon acts like Vorpal Blade in that you may decapitate a monster you hit with it.
You should be able to wish for a “shattered” potion, which gives you a potion which immediately splashes all over you. This is primarily so if you inconveniently get a djinni from a potion like full healing, you can still use the wish to get the effects of full healing.
Sharply reduce the chance of thrown potions (and only potions) missing monsters, in order to make throwing them a more viable strategy; currently most thrown potions miss and shatter at the target monster’s feet.
Remove scrolls and potions from dragons’ starting inventory, because they are incapable of using them and it’s odd that they get offensive and defensive items they can’t use.
If you totally destroy a container by forcing it with a blunt weapon, and one or more potions shatter as a result, they should cause vapor effects around the chest’s area (which will always affect you, of course).
If a potionless conduct is implemented, this should break the conduct.
A potion of magic resistance, which conveys magic resistance intrinsically for some temporary, but fairly long-lasting, duration.
It should be possible to build up a resistance to a potion by drinking or inhaling fumes from it too frequently, making it work less effectively on you or not at all. This goes for both negative potions, which is good because monsters can’t use them as effectively against you, but also positive ones, which is bad because you will stop getting as much benefit out of them.
Replace the scrolls of enchant armor and weapon with a potion of enchantment. You enchant weapons and armor the same way, by dipping them into the potion. The existing confused effects of the scrolls to erodeproof could probably be replaced by using a cursed potion of enchantment.
Replace the wand of teleportation with a potion of teleportation (leave the ring and scroll, and possibly the spell of teleport away, as-is). You could still teleport monsters, but possibly not objects any more, by throwing the potion of teleportation which would then randomly teleport everything that it gets on or which breathes its vapors.
This also is intended to make the Astral Plane more difficult by removing easy zaps and snaps of the wand, making it a much more limited resource.
There should be a way for the player to throw a potion in such a way that it deliberately smashes on the ground at a monster’s feet, rather than hitting the monster.
A potion that is not primarily intended to be quaffed, but rather to be hurled at enemies to make a guaranteed explosion. The potion of oil already behaves like this, but it is fairly weak; this potion should be a solid option for area-of-effect damage.
Potion of hazardous waste: never randomly generated, but can be created as a possible byproduct of random alchemy. Its effects are unspecified.
Potionless conduct, which prohibits the hero from using or breaking a potion (i.e. quaffing them, dipping things into them, throwing them; also breaking them with a force bolt). Monsters throwing potions at you or breaking potions with force bolts do not break the conduct even if you breathe the vapors, which does mean there’s some possibility for abuse in putting a potion on the ground and giving a nearby intelligent monster a wand of striking, but the alternative is too strict.
New type of potion “unstable potion”, which is a possible result from alchemy. After a certain timeout, it “stabilizes” into some other potion type. Not specified what happens if you drink it while it’s unstable.
In variants that have randomized alchemy recipes (rather than fixed, as is the case in vanilla): Randomly generated potions can sometimes be “labeled”, and labeled potions can be read. The label will say one of three things, albeit the text will be garbled like graffiti:
Labeled potions never stack with unlabeled potions, even if they are otherwise identical and would merge into one stack.
Water damage will always remove the label from a potion. Possibly there should be some way to non-damagingly get rid of the label, such as using the #rub command to rub your hands on the potion.
There are a couple possibilities for the internal implementation of the label:
Potion of dragon breath: when quaffed, it enables you to use the breath attacks of a specific type of dragon without being polymorphed into that dragon, either for a limited time or for a limited amount of uses or both.
The potion can be crafted by dipping any type of dragon scales in a potion of acid, which destroys the scales and turns the potion into dragon breath. It could be randomly generated, or never generate and rely on the player to make it.
Jar of honey. This would be either a food item or a potion, and can be applied to smear it on yourself or on your armor like grease. You can also remove it like grease, unless the jar was cursed.
While you are honeyed, monsters generate more frequently, and bees and bears are especially likely to generate. It might also automatically steal noncursed weapons you are hit with in melee, flavored as them getting stuck in the honey.
You should be able to #tip potions onto your own square or onto an adjacent square. When tipped, it causes vapor effects to all monsters in the 3x3 area around that square, including yourself, and also causes “potion on skin” effects to the monster it was tipped onto. Some potions may not have such an effect beyond their vapors, but ones like polymorph, acid, and healing ought to.
Among other things, this provides a way to administer polymorph or healing potions to a pet without attacking it with a wielded potion.
Cloudy and white potions, in addition to milky potions, sometimes contain a ghost.
A potion of growth (or “embiggening”), which lets you temporarily lift boulders, and a potion of shrinkage, which lets you get through narrow diagonal gaps if you would normally be unable to.
Throwing “attack” potions (sleep, paralysis, blindness, etc) should either always hit the target, or hit the floor at the target’s feet (causing vapor effects) if it fails the to-hit roll.
Add “royal blue” as one of the randomized potion descriptions, for two reasons: 1) so that the monarch of a throne room can be given a royal blue potion as a pun, 2) so that there can be a potion that uses the “blue” color, which currently none do.
Allow for gas clouds of different types (confusion gas, sleep gas, hallucination gas, etc) by passing an additional argument to create_gas_cloud.
Clouds of sleep gas would immediately have a use in Nazgul and orange dragon breath attacks, which are already described as such. They might also be useful for sleeping gas traps, which would emit an actual cloud of sleep gas. Depending on implementation, the sleep gas cloud could have only a chance of inducing sleep rather than always knocking you out, which could make it tactically interesting to navigate/teleport/etc rather than just getting put to sleep and having the cloud gone by the time you wake up.
Potions that boil or shatter (but not freeze) should release a cloud of gas that causes the potion’s vapor effects to creatures caught in the cloud, replacing the existing system where vapor effects can happen at an unclear distance from the site of the potion.
You can dip oil into booze or vice versa to create a new type of potion (“potion of firebomb” or “potion of molotov cocktail”) that is never randomly generated, which is primarily intended to be lit and thrown like oil, but results in a much more powerful fireball than oil alone would produce.
Effects when drinking this potion are unspecified. Since oil has minimal effect when you drink it, it likely just works like booze or diluted booze.
If you have a dented pot, you can pour a potion into it and have a pet drink the potion.
Wearing rings that correspond in appearance to wands double, augment, or otherwise enhance those wands’ effects, including possibly turning a beam into a cone shaped blast.
This could also extend to drinking potions with matching appearances to worn rings, such as drinking a ruby or emerald potion while wearing a ruby or emerald ring.
Add a potion of milk, working along the same lines as milk in Minecraft, which cancels potion effects (or since not many potions have lasting effects that you’d want to cancel, it cancels various temporary good and bad status effects in general, like confusion, stunning, and invisibility, but not nausea since drinking milk usually makes nausea worse in real life.
Add a minetown variant called “Wine Town”. It would largely follow the regular Minetown precedents of having the Watch, a temple, a (high probability of a) general store, but would also have at least 2 potion stores, a couple random potions of booze lying around, and a large “drinking hall” room.
Add a #pour command, which allows you to pour a potion on your own or an adjacent space. This allows you to do things like pour healing potions on your pet rather than smashing them with it, possibly pouring acid and other harmful potions on adjacent monsters, pouring water on fire elementals and other fiery monsters, etc.
Dipping ammo in various potions can endow it with a permanent object property related to the potion.
An Alchemist role, revolving around potions and alchemy, and likely requiring overhauls of several systems.
The invoke effect of the Philosopher’s Stone is heavily debated.
A really great Alchemist implementation would probably involve a full alchemy overhaul which adds herbs and fungi, harvesting ingredients from corpses, cooking, and interesting ways to combine everything. The challenge with making this is how to make the other stuff useful for other roles and not just the alchemist, and at the same time not overcomplicating the game with the new additions.
Several new objects for aiding in alchemy:
Allow sinks to be catalysts for alchemizing things. (Or possibly add a “cauldron” as a new piece of dungeon furniture, but that’s iffier.)
A radically different system from how alchemy currently works, known as “1 + 1 = 2”: no matter how many potions are in the stacks being dipped, only one from each stack is consumed, and two alchemized potions are always produced (unless they explode).
Beverage tins, which contain a potion instead of meat from a monster. Randomly generated ones always have potions with the “bubbly”, “fizzy” or “effervescent” appearance.
When you eat such a tin, it “opens with a loud hiss!”, making noise in some radius. It always takes 1 turn to open regardless of beatitude. Then you are shown its appearance. If you are not blind, you see it directly (“It contains a bubbly liquid”); if you are blind but have identified the potion, you recognize the potion by the smell; otherwise you get a generic “It feels like some liquid is inside”. Then you’re prompted to drink it, like with any other tin. If you do, you experience the same effects as you would from a potion of the corresponding beatitude.
Tinning kits could possibly convert potions into homemade beverage tins, but there needs to be some sort of downside which hasn’t yet been proposed. As it stands, you would be able to convert a 20-weight potion into a 10-weight unbreakable potion. The existing downsides are that it expends a tinning kit charge and the resulting potion can’t be dipped, alchemized with, or thrown, but for the sort of potions one would want to turn into tins, these aren’t really downsides.
Potion of coffee, a nonmagical potion which confers some of the following variously proposed effects:
New monster “vapor cloud”, similar to the fog cloud, except it is made up of potion vapors and instead of doing damage, it causes the uncursed vapor effect of potions to happen to you when engulfed. (There probably has to be something preventing a vapor cloud of paralysis from paralyzing you eternally.)
When it moves over a potion, it consumes the (topmost if there are multiple) potion and changes. With 50% probability, it either switches to the potion consumed, or rolls for alchemy as if combining its existing potion cloud with the new potion (probably rerolling events like turning to water, evaporating, and blowing up in an alchemic blast, though it would be funny if it blew itself up).
Hostile vapor clouds will intentionally seek out harmful potions to consume and will avoid beneficial potions.
Dipping Frost Brand into water potions (or possibly any freezing-eligible potion, which is most of them) should freeze and shatter the potion. Likewise for Fire Brand, which should boil potions and ignite (but not explode) oil it’s dipped into.
A potion or spell of free action, which gives it as a temporary intrinsic, and exists solely for the rare case where you are in a demonic or vampiric form and the ring of free action is silver.
Potion of acid resistance, which true to its name confers temporary intrinsic acid resistance.
Shallow water shouldn’t be a free and easy method of diluting potions infinitely. Instead, it should have a chance of contaminating or polluting the potion (or turning it to a potion of sickness), where polluted potions can’t just be re-dipped to dilute them to water or cancelled back to water. Or instead of dealing with polluted potions, just have a chance of losing the potion entirely.
If you eat a corpse of a monster that drank a potion just before dying, you have a chance of getting some effect from the potion too.
Eating too much food can give you a ‘hiccuping’ intrinsic, where you sporadically hiccup and wake up monsters. Drinking more than two potions of booze in quick succession can also do this. You can cure the intrinsic by drinking a fizzy potion.
A flask item that you can dip into a potion to fill it with that potion, protecting it from fire and cold damage while still allowing you to drink it at a moment’s notice. When you drink from it, it becomes empty and can be reused with more potions. It could be either in the tool object class or the potion object class.
Ghosts and djinni can emerge from any bottle, not just potions with the randomized smoky and milky appearance. The rate at which they emerge is cut accordingly.
Potion of astral vision, which confers temporary astral vision. To give this some use, also add some sort of being that appears on the Astral Plane and is only visible with astral vision.
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.
Potion of marksmanship: grants a temporary +10 increase in accuracy, but only for ranged combat.
Shopkeepers offer a lower sell price for a diluted potion, though they still sell the potion at full price.
Potion of regeneration. Grants some medium duration (maybe fifty to a hundred turns) of temporary intrinsic hungerless regeneration. Can be brewed using healing potions, perhaps, but should be fairly rare in terms of random generation.
Potion of bug repellent; is poisonous or otherwise harmful to drink, but if you smash it over yourself, all insects (classes a, s, and x) will flee from you.
Love potion, an item that can tame monsters it is thrown at. Not specified what the effects of the player or monsters drinking it would be, or whether hostile monsters would throw it at you.
Squirt gun: a weapon which can be loaded with a potion (using up the potion), giving it ammo for 5-10 shots. When you fire it, a liquid projectile flies through the air, and causes potion effects (identical to those of throwing a whole potion) to whatever monster it hits.
It would be silly to define a separate liquid projectile object for each type of potion; probably the best implementation would be to have a single “splash of potion” object and use some field on the object, like corpsenm, to track what sort of potion it is.
Loading water into the squirt gun can be used to discipline pets.
Make potions lighter, on the order of 5-10 aum, on the basis that potions are one-time use and one-time use objects shouldn’t be heavier than many pieces of armor, and also on the realism basis that at their current weight, they’re a few liters of liquid. The counterargument is that if potions are lightweight, there’s less to prevent the hero from scooping up everything in the dungeon as they go.
A potion or spell of searching: it doesn’t give you the regular searching intrinsic, but rather it detects any traps you move adjacent to with a 100% chance (regular searching isn’t guaranteed to find these, and this effect won’t find other things that searching is able to find).
Alternatively, just make it give you temporary intrinsic searching as currently implemented, but make it so that timing-out intrinsic searching (available only from this) is guaranteed to find everything.
Less useful potions (useful enough to throw at monsters, but not usually to drink) sometimes generate in small stacks, so they can be thrown without worrying about stashing them as much. It would help if potions were made somewhat lighter.
Add a potion of resistance, which provides a cocktail of basic resistances (things like fire, cold, shock, sleep, and poison) for a limited time. In order to make this more useful and not just yet another candidate for stashing away, possibly all roles start with it identified.
Cursed or unlucky wishes for scrolls, potions, or spellbooks may give you the blank counterpart instead of what you wanted.
Assuming empty potion bottles are somehow implemented so as not to be game-breaking: they should weigh 1 or 2 aum, and can be dipped in sinks to fill them from the faucet. This usually fills them with water, but can have other sink effects such as getting a random potion from the faucet instead.
Traps that shoot out potions. Generate with a variety of negative potions such as sleep, acid, lit oil, hallucination. (Or possibly, they only generate with 1 or 2 potions, because then the player will go over and untrap it for any remaining potions.)
Would work best if the trap struct contained an object pointer for ammunition, as described in #768.
Dipping a unicorn horn into a potion of a type it normally “cures” will do nothing if the potion is cursed.
Placing potions in an ice box makes them instantly freeze and shatter.
There should be three ways to interact with potions: drinking them, getting them splashed on the exterior of your body (e.g. having them thrown at you and hit you), and inhaling their vapors. These should all be fully symmetric between the player and monsters and have noticeable effects for most if not all potions.
The key missing one to implement is the “topical” potion effects. Currently, the only potion with topical effects is acid, and thrown potions only do vapor effects to the monster they hit, which is often weak and ineffective. Topical effects would probably be best implemented as working the same as quaffing the potion, or a bit weaker. This would also be useful for buffing potions that monsters throw at the hero: the vapor effects of, say, a potion of blindness are so short that it doesn’t make much sense for the monster to throw it rather than doing something else, but if blindness splashing in your eyes causes a significantly longer duration, it makes more sense.
If you try to drink a potion underwater, it will first go through the normal dilution routine. This means that an undiluted potion will become diluted (but will generally be fine to drink), a diluted potion will become water (and thus useless), and a potion of acid will blow up in your face.
Potion of elixir, which heals more HP than healing, but less than extra healing. It also recovers the same amount of Pw and restores 1 ability point in all attributes. HP and Pw maximums do not get raised.
Potion of honey; nonmagical but provides a lot more nutrition than juice. Can be obtained from bees somehow, possibly by dipping royal jelly into a potion of fruit juice or potion of water.
Assuming the game supports creating temporary regions of non-poisonous gas clouds: New “smoke bomb” potion. It makes you choke/vomit when quaffed. Intended to be thrown; where it shatters, most of the surrounding terrain will be transformed into cloud.
Vanilla has since added non-poisonous gas clouds (for things such as mist from zapping fire over water), and this effect could work just as well by breaking a smoky potion, instead of adding a new object.
Potion of training: gives you a temporary multiplier to your experience point gains (lasts for the next N monsters, not the next N turns). Might also give you a temporary multiplier to skill training point gains.
Blessed harmful potions give resistance to that effect.
Give potions more side dipping effects:
Alchemic golem, which is basically made out of potions. Its melee attacks expose you to random potion or potion vapor effects. Killing it drops a few random potions and causes more random vapor effects. It can spontaneously explode when it hits something, with a greater chance when you hit it in melee. The explosion obviously also causes multiple random vapor effects to the area, and scatters potions around (by throwing them, so they tend to smash if they hit anything).
F corpses can be dipped into potions to make different potions: juice + violet fungus = booze, juice + yellow mold = sickness, water + green mold = acid. (Note the existence of the Brewing Patch, which dissolves most F in juice to produce confusion, hallucination, booze, sleeping, and healing.)
Later suggested recipes which involve dipping a corpse in acid to dissolve it:
When potions break on the ground, they leave puddles of that potion. Pets can drink this puddle to get the effects. They also give effects (vapor effects, plus acid burning) to any monster standing in them, which is nice because it makes it harder for the player to stand in one place and fight a horde of enemies. Not defined what should happen if multiple potions mix in one spot - alchemize perhaps.
You have a small Dexterity-based chance of catching a potion thrown at you instead of having it break on you (this chance is zero if you cannot see the thrower.)
Potion that keeps your HP from dropping below 1 for a limited time.
Potion of antivenom/antidote which cancels out any Str loss from poison. (Not really that useful if poison is simple Str loss; blessed restore ability is superior, but if poison is an actual status effect, it would be more useful.)
Potion throwing is a skill, and enhancing it will let you get stronger effects out of thrown potions. Later game monsters may throw potions with this skill enhanced. If traps throw potions, they always do so at Unskilled.
Dipping eucalyptus leaves in water gives you a potion of tea.
Make more potions effective for throwing at monsters, first by making the vapor effects hit more than just whoever they were thrown at (i.e. splash effects), and then by making more potions have a vapor effect that affects monsters.
Saltwater or murky water, intended as a nerf for “just dilute most potions”:
Alternatively, don’t actually make saltwater a separate potion; just use saltwater as a flavor reason for why the player can’t intentionally dilute potions to water. (Can use a separate flavor argument, that potions are generally corked while not used, to explain away the lack of dilution for water damage.) Also, make most potions cancel into non-water base potions (such as confusion and hallucination to booze), with the notable exception of polymorph. It’s also harder or impossible to get water from random alchemy or polymorph.
A third option is naming blessing-capable potions “purified water” and leaving the mundane potion of water as it is. Things such as unicorn horns can neutralize toxins but can’t actually remove them, so the resulting water isn’t purified.
Potions that you can drink from multiple times.
Ovens, a dungeon feature (orange \) that you can use to cook food, light items on fire, and test potions in a safe, controlled manner like you can with rings and sinks. This happens by putting the potion in the oven and it produces some cosmetic message that can be used to identify it.
There should be a potion equivalent of extra healing for magic power, or else some consumable way to recover 20-40 power in one go; the normal potion of gain energy is currently more useful for raising maximum power than it is for restoring it. This new thing need not be more effective than gain energy is at raising maximum energy. (Perhaps make it the “potion of restore energy”, which does not raise maximum at all.)
Add a silvery potion, either as a random appearance or a dedicated potion like dNetHack’s potion of silver starlight, which will silver ammunition dipped into it, perhaps temporarily. It might also silver other weapons (spears, daggers) or other items. Random appearances have the possible problems of the potion potentially having a defined dip effect already (polymorph, for example), and it potentially not appearing in the game if there are extra random appearances.
Dipping fragile silver items, like silver arrows, into a potion of acid could create a silvery potion.
