# Amulet of magical breathing

" 

Name

amulet of magical breathing

Appearance

random

Base price

150 zm

Weight

20

An amulet of magical breathing grants extrinsic breathlessness to its wearer.

Contents

1 Effects
2 Generation
3 Identification
4 Messages
5 Strategy

Effects
The amulet allows you to travel underwater safely, although your items will still become wet. You cannot choke over your food, and you are immune to the effects of poison clouds from a green dragon's breath, scroll of stinking cloud, or the lava on the Plane of Fire.
Wearing this amulet protects from drowning attacks.  Relatedly, you won't get the bonus 1000 experience points for killing sea monsters with this attack while wearing it.[1]
Less helpfully, when you are unbreathing, water is considered a safe teleport location. This means that while wearing this amulet, uncontrolled teleportation can land you in water, making all your stuff wet.

Generation
Amulets comprise 1% of all randomly-generated items in the main dungeon, 1% in containers, and 4% in Gehennom. There is a 6.5% chance that a randomly-generated amulet will be an amulet of magical breathing.

Identification
This amulet can be easily identified by falling into water; if you don't attempt to crawl out, the amulet must be magical breathing. As always, items in your inventory are susceptible to water damage when you enter water, so be sure to drop vulnerable items first.
If you don't want to bother with skinny-dipping, allow yourself to be engulfed by a fog cloud instead. The amulet of magical breathing negates the fog cloud's physical damage and produces the alternate message "You are laden with moisture and find it mildly uncomfortable".
An alternative and rarely used method to identify an amulet of magical breathing is to wear it and overeat. If you vomit, then the amulet was magical breathing, and if not, you're most likely dead (unless the amulet happens to be life saving).

Messages
You fall into the water. You sink like a rock. But you aren't drowning. You touch bottom.
You fell into the water while wearing the amulet.
You stuff yourself and then vomit voluminously.
You were saved from choking by the amulet.
These are the same messages given when polymorphed into a naturally breathless monster.

Strategy
This amulet can save you from drowning yourself and from being drowned. It is thus a good thing to be wearing while fighting sea monsters toe-to-toe.
It can also be used to substitute for a tinning kit: whereas tinning a corpse reduces its nutrition to a manageable amount (thus allowing you to safely eat several large corpses in a row, such as giants), this amulet lets you eat any sized corpse without worrying about choking, and vomiting does not affect your chances of getting intrinsics from corpses. This amulet can also be helpful if dealing with several trolls, by eating them. Be aware, though, that using an amulet of magical breathing in this way often results in your character becoming satiated, which abuses your dexterity.
If flying monsters die over a body of water, or if you lose projectile weapons by hitting a creature flying over the water, you may retrieve the items while wearing this amulet. Of course, the items could simply be teleported out of the water with a wand of teleportation, but there's no telling where they'll end up. They could also be snatched up with a bullwhip while levitating, if not too heavy.
If you polymorph into a metallivore, eating an amulet of magical breathing has a chance of conferring magical breathing as an intrinsic. This has the slight disadvantage water will become an eligible spot to place you when you level teleport, possibly wetting your inventory.
Levitation and water walking boots don't work on the Plane of Water, making this amulet the most reliable way to cross between bubbles. Self-polymorph is dangerous, as it may time out unexpectedly, or end prematurely due to something like a psi bolt from the Wizard of Yendor.

This page is based on a spoiler by Dylan O'Donnell. The original license is:
Redistribution, copying, and editing of these spoilers, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

The original contributors to any spoiler must continue to be credited.
Any modifications to the spoiler must be acknowledged and credited.

This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.
It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.1. Information on this page may be out of date.
Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-361}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.

↑ src/exper.c in NetHack 3.6.4, line 119