Amoeboid

The amoeboids are the blobs, puddings, and oozes:

• b acid blob
• b quivering blob
• b gelatinous cube
• P gray ooze
• P brown pudding
• P black pudding
• P green slime

While "amoeboid" is not itself a monster class, all amoeboids belong to one of two monster classes—the blobs (b) or the puddings (P). Thus, genociding all amoeboids takes two class genocides. Most members of the classes are not especially dangerous, however, so exterminating them all is probably unnecessary.

Common traits

Amoeboids correspond to the "ooze" creature type in Dungeons & Dragons, lacking recognizable body features like heads and limbs. They are mindless and have no eyes, yet have no apparent trouble sensing the player's location. All amoeboids are breathless.

Many amoeboids are made of substances that can rust, corrode, or rot adventurers' equipped weapons or armor, by means of active and passive attacks. The green slime can go one step further and turn adventurers themselves into slime. While the gelatinous cube by itself cannot seriously harm adventurers or their equipment, its paralysis attacks and its appetite for anything made of organic material—comestibles, scrolls, spellbooks, armor made of wood or leather, and so on—make it no less of a nuisance to players.

The acid blob and all puddings are amorphous, so they can pass under closed doors. Quivering blobs and gelatinous cubes apparently have enough of a definite shape that they cannot.

Remains

All blobs leave corpses that are considered vegan.

All members of the pudding class (including the gray ooze and green slime) leave globs instead of corpses. Like corpses, globs can be eaten and cause food poisoning if they become tainted. Unlike corpses, globs cannot be sacrificed or revived by undead turning. All globs are fleshy, so eating them violates the vegetarian and vegan conducts; since puddings no longer leave corpses, they will never leave random death drops.

All amoeboids, with the exception of the quivering blob, have acidic bodies, so they resist petrification and can be eaten to stop it. You would probably not want to eat a glob of green slime, however, unless you had no other alternative.

History

Globs were added in NetHack 3.6.0 as a countermeasure against pudding farming. In variants based on older versions, puddings may still drop corpses.

Encyclopedia entry

"Blob", "pudding", and "ooze" share the same entry:

These giant amoeboid creatures look like nothing more than
puddles of slime, but they both live and move, feeding on
metal or wood as well as the occasional dungeon explorer to
supplement their diet.

But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead
as the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed
tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy
speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the
pallid abyss vapor. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster
than any subway train -- a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic
bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes
forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the
tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic
penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its
kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.

[ At the Mountains of Madness, by H.P. Lovecraft ]

See also

• Amoeboid (SLASH'EM)

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