# Silver bullet

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Name

silver bullet

Appearance

silver bullet

Damage vs. small

1d20 +1d20

Damage vs. large

1d30 +1d20

To-hit bonus

+0

Weapon skill

firearms

Size

one-handed

Base price

15 zm(+10/positive enchant)

Weight

1

Material

silver

A silver bullet is a projectile used in firearms in SLASH'EM.  It is identical to a bullet in most respects, except that it does extra damage against silver-hating monsters.

Contents

1 Mechanics
2 Generation
3 Strategy
4 Origin

Mechanics
Silver bullets function identically to silver bullets, except that they also do silver damage to silver-hating monsters.  Similar to silver arrows in vanilla NetHack before 3.6.0, they do not do silver damage when wielded against monsters, nor when thrown at them.

Generation
Silver bullets are not randomly generated, but may occasionally be found in shops.  Unlike ordinary bullets, they are not found on members of the Yendorian army.
Undead slayers will sometimes start with a pistol and a stack of silver bullets.

Strategy
Silver bullets are far too rare for long-term use.  However, undead slayers who start with them will definitely want to consider using them against early lycanthropes: unlike in vanilla, lycanthropes in their animal form will revert to their human form upon death, meaning that the player often has to kill them several times to banish them permanently.  The high base damage of a bullet combined with the silver damage is very helpful in this situation.

Origin
In modern folklore, many stories of vampires and werewolves speak of a silver bullet as being one of the few weapons that can permanently kill these creatures.  From these tales, the term has colloquially come to refer to a seemingly "magic" solution to a difficult problem, such as a cure to a disease.
Real-life experiments with bullets cast from silver have shown them to not be particularly more or less effective than ordinary bullets. The high cost of silver as compared to lead means that they have never been produced in any real volume.