DESCRIPTION

You quickly analyze the method of construction and material composition of a given object, structure, or construct. The size of the target that you can analyze depends on what kind of thing you target:

• A structure (such as a building, castle, or monument) can be as large as two 10-foot cubes per caster level.
• A single object (such as a weapon or piece of furniture) can be up to 5 cubic feet per caster level in volume.
• A construct can be of any size, though the spell fails if its Hit Dice exceeds twice your caster level.
  

The spell grants you a +10 insight bonus on any Craft, Knowledge, or Spellcraft checks regarding the target’s construction, such as its historical or religious significance, flaws in its creation, the cultural style of its architecture, or its special abilities (in the case of a construct). You can make all of these checks as part of casting the spell, and can even use analyze construction to retry a failed Knowledge or Spellcraft check (though additional castings of this spell do not allow for further retries). If the target is a magic item or has magical auras on it, you can identify its magical properties as if you had studied the target for three rounds with an identify spell (though you do not gain the additional bonus to Spellcraft checks that identify would normally provide). You also glean the following information automatically:

• What materials the target is made of.
• How old the target is, from the point of its completion.
• Its current hit points, hardness, and damage reduction (if applicable).
• If the target is a golem, you learn what spells bypass its normal spell immunities and what effects those spells have on the creature.

Analyze construction does not allow you to learn something that is totally unknown to civilization, such as the fact that a given ruin was constructed by a not-yet-discovered ancient religious order, or identifying a material that has not yet been found before (though subsequent castings on other targets may discover they are made by the same people or made of the same unnamed material). This spell cannot identify most properties of an artifact, but it can at least determine its material make, if it is made of known materials.