# Fishing pole

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Name

fishing pole

Appearance

fishing pole

Damage vs. small

1d2

Damage vs. large

1d6

To-hit bonus

+0

Weapon skill

polearm

Size

one-handed

Base price

50 zm(+10/positive enchant)

Weight

30

Material

iron

A fishing pole is a new weapon-tool in SLASH'EM, which can be used as a polearm weapon. Its main use is to fish. Applying a fishing pole will prompt you for a location. The range of a fishing pole is the same as pounding with a regular polearm, but without a minimum range.

Contents

1 Fishing

1.1 Dry Land
1.2 Sinks and Toilets

2 Strategy

2.1 Combat

3 References

Fishing
Applying a fishing pole on a water square may have the following effects&nbsp;: 

You hook yourself, dealing yourself 10-19 points of damage.
You hook an item on the target square, retrieving it.
You may "snag some garbage from the water", which gives you an uncursed +0 pair of low boots. This can only occur once.
You catch tonight's dinner, a cram ration.
Dry Land
Note that you may still apply a fishing pole to a square when that square is on dry land.
Usually, there is no need to do this, as most items may simply be picked up.
However, if the item is at the bottom of a spiked pit, it might be safer to fish for the item than to try your luck with  poisonous spikes. Also, for vampire players with their intrinsic flight, this is one of the few ways available to them to pick up items in the bottom of a pit.

Sinks and Toilets
You may use a fishing pole on sinks and toilets, although this has no special use:

You hook yourself, dealing yourself 10-19 points of damage.
You hook an item on the target square, retrieving it.
You pull a sewer rat out of the sink, "Eek! There's a sewer rat there!"
Generally speaking, it is much faster and safer to simply walk over to the plumbing and pick up the item.

Strategy
A potentially powerful, albeit slow, use for the fishing pole is to catch a large number of cram rations. Once you've caught as many as you can carry, you can sell them at shops to get gold or credit. Also, keep in mind that you will catch cram rations frequently enough that you will never starve while fishing (unless you're a vampire).

Combat
Fishing poles are not very damaging as weapons.
However, since they are light and have no minimum range, you may consider keeping one around instead of another polearm.
Since they are fairly rare, you will want to abstain from trying for better than +5/+6, lest your only pole evaporate.

References

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"Someone familiar with SLASH'EM should add references"