Should wands of secret door detection be renamed?

The name "secret door detection" is misleading because the wand detects a lot more than just secret doors. It had me confused for the longest time. How about "wand of secret detection?"

If you were going to rename it, I would say "wand of detect unseen" like the spell that does the same thing.

On Thursday, October 7, 2021, 09:34:55 PM GMT+1, HMM ***@***.***> wrote:  

The name "secret door detection" Is misleading because the wand detects a lot more than just secret doors. I had me confused for the longest time. How about "wand of secret detection?"

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+1 for "wand of detect unseen". Seems to be most logical, and will prevent confusion that it for doors only.

There are many intentional differences in spell and wand/scroll/potion names, such as force bolt vs striking, knock vs opening, and detect treasure vs object detection so duplicating "detect unseen" probably wouldn't be first choice if renaming gets done. "Secret detection" sounds a little clunky but might be viable.

I'm not sure why the different names were originally chosen. Possibly to allow shorter wishes for them; when the name portion [striking] is distinct, the object class portion [wand of] can be omitted and still get the intended item rather than just the first match (old days) or a random choice among multiple matches (current).

I suspect that secret door detection existed first, then its functionality got extended when or after spells in general and the detect unseen spell in particular were introduced. But it may have found traps and hidden monsters from the start; limiting it to exposing secret doors wouldn't have been a very useful item.

The wand seems to have found traps and hidden monsters already in hack 1.0 if I read the code correctly. https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Source:Hack_1.0/hack.search.c#line32

So it was misnomed from the start. Maybe just "wand of detection" would also be a name to consider.

That's pretty good, descriptive, and would still go nicely with the spell name detect unseen

On Friday, October 8, 2021, 03:45:52 PM GMT+1, Patric Mueller ***@***.***> wrote:  

The wand seems to have found traps and hidden monsters already in hack 1.0 if I read the code correctly. https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Source:Hack_1.0/hack.search.c#line32

So it was misnomed from the start. Maybe just "wand of detection" would also be a name to consider.

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This is not in the scope of the issue, but to chime in anyway, it's kind of annoying that this wand (and the spell) don't produce any messages when a trap / secret door / hiding monster / whatever is clearly detected and rendered on the map.