Plus sign

plus sign This is a plus sign. It's about a foot tall, and about a foot wide. It's sort of heavy. Type: usable Cannot be traded or discarded Quest Item (In-game plural: plus signs)

View metadata Item number: 818 Description ID: 79993334 View in-game: view refreshedit data

Obtained From

The Enormous Greater-Than Sign

Typographical Clutter (one time drop)

Obsoleted Areas/Methods

The Enormous Greater-Than Sign

Plus? Plus what?

When Used

• From inventory, before The Oracle's major consultation:

You have no idea what this thing is for.

• From inventory, after consultation:

Following The Oracle's advice, you treat the plus sign as a book, and read it. It describes, in great detail, a place called the Dungeons of Doom. The first chapter teaches you that the Enormous Greater-Than Sign is actually the stairway leading to these dungeons, and the rest of the book teaches you how to recognize the items and monsters contained within its halls. After you're done reading the book, it vanishes in a puff of obsolescence. You dig through your inventory and identify all of the crap you already picked up down there: You acquire some small boxes You acquire some large boxes You acquire some magic whistles You acquire some baby killer bees You acquire some clumps of royal jelly You acquire some mind flayer corpses You acquire some cornuthaums You acquire some vorpal blades You acquire some piles of gold coins You acquire some rings of aggravate monster

Notes

• Grants access to The Dungeons of Doom.
• The items given are converted from the items sourced from the Enormous Greater-Than Sign.
• The conversion into new items is done according to some random function; a Percent-Sign that drops from a lowercase a will not automatically turn into royal jelly, for example.
• Items from the Enormous Greater-Than Sign not in main inventory (Display Case, Hagnk's, Closet) are not converted – according to a bug report response, this is intended behavior to let players amass a collection of unconverted items if they so wish.

References

• In NetHack, a plus sign represents a spellbook (or a closed door).
• In the use text, "a puff of obsolescence" alludes to the message received in NetHack after using a throne, namely "The throne vanishes in a puff of logic", which refers in turn to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.