An apple is a fruit suitable for vegans and vegetarians. Pets that are herbivorous will consider it a treat, and it can be used to tame horses.
Healers and Monks start with at least 5 apples, and Knights start with at least 10 apples.
Strategy[]
Apples do not give much nutrition. Eat your rations first and save your apples for other uses, such as taming or feeding pets.
Healers, Knights, and Monks might need to eat their apples before they can find other food.
Messages[]
Some YAFMs appear if you eat an apple in NetHack upon a Unix or Mac OS system. No extra messages appear on other systems. See eat.c#line1423.
| Message | Effect |
|---|---|
| "Core dumped." (Unix, not hallucinating) | No effect
When a Unix program performs an illegal operation, the kernel shuts down the program. The program often dumps a core file for loading into debuggers. This message can scare a player into thinking that NetHack had suddenly crashed and exited. The joke here is that the hero has only discarded an inedible apple core. |
| "Segmentation fault -- core dumped." (75/100 chance) "Bus error -- core dumped." (24/100 chance) |
No effect
These error messages are more realistic - the typical "core dumped" error on Unix comes with the cause of the crash. |
| "Delicious! Must be a Macintosh!" (Mac OS) | No effect
Apple Computer named their Macintosh computers after a real type of apple. |
In no case does the game actually crash.
Encyclopaedia entry[]
NEWTONIAN, adj. Pertaining to a philosophy of the universe
invented by Newton, who discovered that an apple will fall
to the ground, but was unable to say why. His successors
and disciples have advanced so far as to be able to say
when.
[ The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce ]
Other Reading[]
Joke Unix documentation from which the "core dumped" messages appear to be derived. This appears to be a Usenet post, but Google Groups doesn't seem to have this one.