[Duh I should RTFM, was] Feature: designate valuable item

[Chicken]

It seems like playing this game involves a lot of picking up a bunch of stuff, then dropping everything but some items you want to keep. So I pick up a bunch of orc piles, hit drop ), then type abcd to exclude the weapons/alts I'm presently keeping.

Playing also involves a lot of paranoia that you might accidentally have dropped that priceless +8 orange crystal scale mail of Many Cool Things in the ziggurat. Or just fear that you dropped your platemail and a monster is going to come in and find you naked with no time to dress.

It doesn't seem like this is high strategy though. So what I'd like is on the inventory and drop screens you have a key you can press, like "P", that designates that the item letter to follow is now, as Gollum would put it, a Precious Item.

So JUST ONCE I go through and Pa Pb Pc Pd, getting for each one a message (upon pressing P) "Designate or undesignate which item as precious?" followed by a message like "Your +9 demon trident of electrocution has been marked as a precious item". Then I go through the dungeon, pick up 25 weapons, and if I don't want to keep any of them I just hit d ( enter. When I've hit d (, all the weapons BUT a-d are highlighted for dropping.

If I try to go through and manually mark to drop a Precious Item ( d a ) I get a message "Your +9 demon trident of electrocution has been marked as a precious item. Type P to unprotect before dropping."

I think the result of this flow is that you could drop whole caches of crap with scarcely a moment's thought, taking time only to mark a few favorite finds as precious.

[jejorda2]

Read the section of the manual on inscriptions. You can use { to inscribe items (or maybe it's }.)
=d will keep you from dropping it when you type d! to drop potions or d) to drop weapons (maybe it's ()
!d will prompt you to drop it even if you drop it by letter
*d also prompts about dropping. I'm not sure exactly when. It's probably "stronger" than !d.

What is and isn't precious changes based on where you are going and what else you have, so going through the stuff item by item makes sense to me. Just turn off auto pickup when you get to the point where most stuff isn't worth more that what you have.

[Wahaha]

Yeah so inscribing !d is possible but why are you picking up a bunch of junk in the first place? Pressing , opens a list of items under you and you select what you want to pick up, unless this isn't the default, in which case it's an option in the ini file.