Alternate method to remove cursed items (SPOILER ALERT)

[SilverNexus]

I remember messing around with one of the characters on my private server, deliberately putting on cursed items (e.g. an amulet), and did not have any scrolls of remove curse to use. So, as a burst of whim, I decided to try to burn a cursed amulet with a flint and steel.

It worked. And continued to work in similar situations.

It makes me wonder if flint and steel should only be able to burn certain material types. Things like cauldrons (a different scenario, but applies in the flint and steel context) should be immune to a little spark. (It could, however, heat up the cauldron and potentially cause fire damage to the player if he/she touches it too soon after heating it.)

Since flint and steel is a standard item in several beginner locations, it makes cursed items almost un-hindering entirely.

[mwedel]

Most things are burnable - as such, they get destroyed by things like fireballs, burning hands, and flint and steel.

Perhaps a reasonable check is that you can't try to use flint and steel on items that are equipped, or if you do, you take some amount of damage (lets face it, if you are trying to burn off a suit of leather armor, that is going to be painful).

At high levels, may be the case that the damage sustained isn't a really big deal, but then at high levels, the cost of a remove curse scroll probably isn't a really big deal either.

[SilverNexus]

Perhaps a reasonable check is that you can't try to use flint and steel on items that are equipped, or if you do, you take some amount of damage (lets face it, if you are trying to burn off a suit of leather armor, that is going to be painful).

And perhaps small equipped items like amulets/rings would be hard to burn because they are small and easy to miss (especially rings, as you would need to aim the spark at your hand while it is holding either the flint or the steel).
Metal items would inflict more damage than nonmetal items (since the metal would remain resilient longer than things like leather).
And, of course, there would have to be a message to the player if they performed such an act; something like "You light the %s with the flint and steel, but burn yourself because you are still wearing the item!"

If I were to code a patch for this, I have no idea where I'd look to find the pertinent code, though. Its somewhere (obviously), and it would be likely in a file relating to items, but beyond that, it could be numerous places.

Such a patch would have to check the item being burned to see if it is equipped, and apply damage according to something, probably its slot and/or weight. Then it would print the alternate message if the item is equipped. If the player is killed by the attack (by trying to burn plate mail or something of the like), there would have to be an owner to the attack.

...fire damage...

Upon further thought, aren't fireborn and Quetzalcoatls immune/highly resistant to fire? <checks the wiki, suspicions confirmed; serpentmen have 30 fire resistance as well> High fire resistance would negate the penalty of burning the item. But, at the same time, it would make those races more appealing to experienced players starting anew (since almost everyone plays as a dragon these days, myself included). At the same time, trolls and wraiths would be less appealing to the same players, as they have a fire vulnerability.

[Ryo]

Hello.

If I were to code a patch for this, I have no idea where I'd look to find the pertinent code, though. Its somewhere (obviously), and it would be likely in a file relating to items, but beyond that, it could be numerous places.

You probably want to look into the save_throw_object() function, located in server/attack.c

It is responsible for removing a burnt object, things like that.

So a check for "applied" should probably be done there


Feel free to ask for more pointers as needed.

[SilverNexus]

I'm finally getting around to doing this.
Unfortunately, I am unsure how to check if the item being destroyed is applied. There is nothing in the object structure that I saw that indicates the item is applied. I didn't see any easy way to find the equipped item from the player-side, either. I might be able to iterate through the linked list of applied items to find the one being destroyed, but that seems clunky and hackish. Is there a better way?

[SilverNexus]

Never mind. I figured it out: FLAG_APPLIED.

Feature implemented in r19146.