Interesting *Slay Animal* sword...

[CunningGabe]

On DL6 I just picked up a Sabre of *Slay Animal* (1d7) (+1,-9565) (+1). In addition to hitting monsters for large negative amounts of damage (haha), it increases my intelligence by 1 and slows my metabolism.

I have to imagine that the huge negative to-dam is a bug. I'm playing the most recent nightly build. Would any other information be useful to track this down?

[Daven_26d1]

This looks like what's known as integer overflow; if you can't reproduce it consistently, or at least find more common evidence of it occurring, then I wouldn't worry about it too much. TBH its hard to consistently reproduce "random" events unless you happened to make a copy of your savefile just before you generated the floor, playing out the exact same moves would then allow someone to debug the event properly.

This sort of thing can occasionally happen because of a few wrong bits in memory or the savefile, which can potentially happen from time-to-time even with bug-free code - if there was such a thing! You are playing the nightlies though, so a subtle bug may well have been introduced very recently.

I forget exactly how bonuses are generated in Angband, but it might also be possible to generate a sword with such a huge bonus that it actually becomes a negative number; this is pretty unlikely seeming, because it would take a +55970 sword to give that magnitude of overflow; unless you are also a lottery winner?

[Dragonboneman]

What actually happens if you hit something with that sword?
Does it do normal damage?
Or "negative damage" - ie healing?
Or does it simply cause the space-time continuum to implode?

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by CunningGabe

On DL6 I just picked up a Sabre of *Slay Animal* (1d7) (+1,-9565) (+1). In addition to hitting monsters for large negative amounts of damage (haha), it increases my intelligence by 1 and slows my metabolism.

I have to imagine that the huge negative to-dam is a bug. I'm playing the most recent nightly build. Would any other information be useful to track this down?

Thanks! I have been tweaking that area of code recently so I'll have to take a look at what I messed up.

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by CunningGabe

On DL6 I just picked up a Sabre of *Slay Animal* (1d7) (+1,-9565) (+1). In addition to hitting monsters for large negative amounts of damage (haha), it increases my intelligence by 1 and slows my metabolism.

I have to imagine that the huge negative to-dam is a bug. I'm playing the most recent nightly build. Would any other information be useful to track this down?

I just found a (blessed) Mace with (+2,+22656) in the Temple, selling for a cool $2.7m. I really have no idea where I've gone wrong on this one.