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.

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 main form of combat is to create phials of potion (where 1 potion splits into many phials), which can be tossed at enemies to cause potion effects on them. The main potions used are things like acid, paralysis, (lit) oil, and confusion.
  • Phials come in all the same types as normal potions but have somewhat weaker effects.
  • You can dip a stack of empty phials into a potion to fill them with that potion (up to some maximum).
  • Thrown phials have the same exact splash damage effect on things as throwing the potion would produce, but drinking it is a small enough dose to only cause the splash damage effects to the drinker. Requires some balance so that splash damage is useful against monsters but not useful for the player to drink for beneficial phials.
  • Phials can be dipped into potions, but nothing can be dipped into phials.
• The quest artifact is the Philosopher’s Stone.
  • The quest leader is Nicolas Flamel and the nemesis is an Avatar of Death (like Death, but weaker).
  • Fun possibilities for transmuting materials here if the object materials patch is in effect.
  • Its base item type could be a ruby (but perhaps not because dnethack makes the Heart of Ahriman a ruby) or a garnet, based on its color in Harry Potter, or an opal.
• Can also create alchemic gizmos: smoke bombs from potions of blindness, firebombs from potions of oil, all lighter and more numerous and useful than the base potions.
• Start with all potions identified.
• Could start with an alchemy kit, which is a rare tool find for other roles. NeroOneTrueKing proposed a set of mechanics for an alchemy kit:
  • Has 3 compartments. The first accepts only potions/phials of polymorph (or perhaps it just has charges and you can recharge it by using potions of polymorph).
  • The other compartments must each only contain items of the same material.
  • A success chance is displayed based on the amount of polymorph potion available, the weight ratio of the two compartments, and the materials themselves (metal can transform into metal relatively easily).
  • A successful use swaps all of the materials of the two compartments.
• Needs mechanics such that in an Alchemist’s hands, no potion is useless.

The invoke effect of the Philosopher’s Stone is heavily debated.

• It creates potions of the Elixir of Life. This potion cures disease and restores lost attributes, but most importantly it grants temporary intrinsic lifesaving. If you die with intrinsic lifesaving, you lose the remaining time for the intrinsic.
• Creating potions is way too powerful since the player will be able to bank them, so nerf this: perhaps you can only get Elixir of Life by dipping the Stone into a potion of full healing, or something. Or Elixir goes bad after a while and reverts to water, making it usable for before a fight but not for stashing.
• The Elixir should not be more powerful than a potion of full healing, or the invoke effect of the Staff of Aesculapius - healers should be the best at actual healing. Probably, getting lifesaved from intrinsic lifesaving will only restore enough HP to stay alive a little longer.
• The Elixir gives a large temporary boost to HP regeneration.
• No Elixir of Life; it instead turns potions of sickness into (extra? full?) healing.
• The Stone can turn metal objects into gold or can turn rocks into gold pieces when rubbed on them.
• When dipped into gain level or gain energy, transforms the potion into polymorph.

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 it 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:

• Flask, holds multiple quaffs of a single potion type (so that holy water can’t be mass-created but other potions can).
• Mortar and pestle, can grind gems / other things into dust which can be used to make potions.
• Alembic, can distill potions from things in the dungeon such as corpses.
• Recipe books/scrolls, which tell the reader how to create a certain potion through alchemy, and identifies the result potion or even all potions involved.

Allow sinks to be catalysts for alchemizing things. (Or possibly add a “cauldron” as a new piece of dungeon furniture, but that’s iffier.)

• You can dip potions into sinks to pour them down the drain, experiencing the vapor effects in a safe way. (Pouring polymorph down the sink of course polymorphs the sink.) This requires vapor effects to be implemented for many of the potions that don’t currently have any.
• If you don’t pour the potion down the drain, you instead mix it with the fluid from the tap, which is usually water but can already be a random potion.
• Possibly, doing alchemy in/on a sink is more efficient. There are many possible forms this could take, such as:
  • Potions not diluting when you mix them.
  • Reduced or zero chance of an alchemic blast.
  • You can get results from mixing potions that you can’t otherwise. (Flavor for this is weak. Is the character heating them somehow with the hot water?)

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.

• Intended as a balance fix for the player’s current ability to make stacks and stacks of full healing, gain ability, or gain level potions, and promote use of found potions instead of diluting them.
• Significantly, potions of holy water mostly work like they do now - the holy water does not mix with anything and is consumed, while the dipped item becomes blessed - but you can only dip a singular item into the holy water, including other potions. This loss of the ability to mass-produce holy water creates a significant balance change.
  • Or it could sometimes make two holy waters, but be biased against it, and allow both waters to become uncursed in the process.
  • Still unbalanced, since holy water can otherwise be mass produced through water prayers and blessed confused remove curse.
• Undiluted potions can be duplicated by dipping them in normal water, e.g. one potion of gain level + one water = 2 diluted potions of gain level.
  • Diluted potions may need to have weaker effects to compensate for this, or undiluted potions stronger effects.
  • Or potions in general should become rarer, and possibly generate diluted.

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 temporary sleep resistance and, while the sleep resistance is still active, a small bonus towards the odds of learning a spell from a book successfully.

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 spilled 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.

Getting hit in the head by a potion deals a small amount of damage (unless wearing a helmet). Death reason if this kills you is “hit in the head by a potion”.

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:

• Dipping an eroded item in a healing potion repairs erosion on it; 1 level for regular healing, 2 for extra healing, and 3 for full healing. Restore ability will repair all erosion as well.
• Dipping a negatively enchanted item in a restore ability potion reverts it to +0 if the potion is blessed, adds 1 point if uncursed, and does nothing if cursed.
• Dipping an enchantable item in a gain ability potion enchants it (by 1 point, always).
• Dipping an uncharged item (possibly excluding rings) into restore ability has the same effect as uncursed charging it. (Blessed charging cannot be reproduced this way, even if the potion is blessed).

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:

• Wraith corpse → potion of gain level. (Does not always succeed, to compensate for the fact that a wraith corpse doesn’t always grant a level. Maybe it even has a lower success rate than getting a level from a corpse.)
• Newt corpse → potion of gain energy.
• Floating eye corpse → potion of levitation or possibly monster detection.

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”:

• Potions of saltwater behave exactly like potions of water, except that they cannot be used to bless or curse things. Holy (and unholy) water must be pure.
• All in-game sources of water except for magic fountains (possibly regular fountains as well, but they might be too plentiful) are saltwater. Diluting potions in them will yield only potions of saltwater.
• Can also get pure water if a unicorn horn dip would already result in water.
• Not specified what cancelling potions should do. Possibly most potions just cancel to saltwater, juice or sickness. It’s weird because flavor-wise it shouldn’t produce anything but pure water, but it obviously won’t fix the current problem if you merely have to cancel potions instead of diluting them.
• If called murky water instead of saltwater, the “murky” randomized potion appearance should change.

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 (\) 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.

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 “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.