Junk

Items in NetHack are generally persistent, i.e. they don't spontaneously vanish. Over the course of a long game, this results in many useless items piling up around the dungeons. This is collectively known as junk.

Useless items
Most items serve at least some purpose, or are a small benefit in the early game, but later become obsolete. By the time your character is ready to ascend, nearly all items are junk.

Dealing with junk
Most players are content to leave junk items where they are, but careful or tidy players like to ensure items like stray weapons are not available for any passing monsters to use. Some ways of getting rid of junk:


 * Polymorph it.
 * Put it in a chest and forget about it.
 * Put it in a chest and polymorph the chest into a single item.
 * Throw it into water or lava.
 * Polymorph into a metallivore and eat it.

One particularly unwise method of getting rid of junk is to zap a wand of teleport down on a pile of it. This will result in the junk being randomly distributed across every square on the level.

Iron chains
from misc-343.txt

Iron chains are the least useful items in the game since they perform no function as individual objects, have no value to sell to shopkeepers, aren't heavy enough to be a decent weapon, and will always polypile into another chain. Here are several somewhat trivial uses for these objects:

your pet or polymorph it into a monster worthy of sacrificing. get killed by a rust monster. Get an amusing message. "good" will be cursed/stolen. "Darn, that's not an altar."
 * Throw or kick them as missiles.
 * Food for rock moles (a pet or polyself).
 * Leave them in the path of hostile metallivores as a distraction.
 * Polypile enough of them to make another iron golem. Turn it into
 * Polypile enough of them to get another iron golem. Tame it and watch it
 * Use them to mark the vibrating square.
 * Carry them in your main inventory to lower the chance that something
 * Leave a bones file that will annoy others (using ASCII):