Another
exciting and whacked-out
Dungeon feature in
NetHack. When you come to a sink, you can basically do three things with it:
quaff from it,
kick it, or drop a
ring in it.
Quaffing from a sink is not quite as dangerous as quaffing from a fountain, but it's close. There is an 11/20 chance of nothing special happening, but 9/20 is a substantial risk. The effects and messages are as follows, each at a 1 in 20 chance except for the first, which is at 11/20:
- "You take a sip of water."
"You hear snatches of song from the sewers."
"You hear clanking from the pipes."No effect.
- "This water contains toxic wastes!"
You are affected by a polymorph and all that entails.
- "Gaggg...this tastes like sewage! You vomit."
You vomit, losing 11 to 30 nutrition points among other effects.
- "The water moves as though of its own will!"
Uh-oh...you summoned a water elemental. Hope you can handle it. They are fairly slow, so it might be better to run.
- "You find a ring in the sink!"
Always nice.
- "Some liquid flows from the faucet."
You get a random potion effect. This can be very dangerous, as you might expect.
- "Eek! There's a sewer rat in the sink!"
A sewer rat is summoned next to you.
- "Yuk! This water tastes awful."
You gain 1 experience point (don't ask me, I don't know).
- "You take a sip of scalding hot water."
If you have intrinsic fire resistance, no effect ("It seems quite tasty."). Otherwise, you lose 1d6 hp.
As far as
kicking sinks, there is a 4/5 chance of nothing happening and a 1/5 chance of something interesting. Of the interesting things, there is a 1/3 chance of generating a
black pudding and a 1/3 chance of
summoning a
succubus or
incubus ("The
dishwasher returns!"). If neither of these occurs, there's another 1/3 chance of the sink coughing up some
sludge and a
ring. Each of these can only occur once from a given sink. If none of these happen, your
foot gets hurt, at a cost of 5
hit points on top of the side effects for
wounded legs.
Sinks in general are infamous for swallowing rings. In NetHack, if you drop a ring on the square that a sink is on, you'll get an odd message and the ring will probably be lost (95% chance). The messages give clues to what the ring was, and they aren't too difficult to figure out; refer to the individual ring writeups for each message. For example, dropping a ring of increase accuracy results in "The water flow hits the drain", a ring of increase damage gives "The water's force seems greater now", and a ring of cold resistance gives "the cold water faucet flashes brightly for a moment." The ring of searching and the ring of slow digestion will never be lost in the sink (the former says "You thought your ring got lost in the sink, but here it is!", the latter says "the ring is regurgitated!").
Dropping rings in sinks is one way to identify them, but it works best when you have duplicates because the ring is nearly always lost.
Floating over a sink while levitating causes you to crash-land immediately. Figures.