Digestion

Digestion is a damage type dealt by some engulfing attacks.

Effects

Player

Against the player, digestion causes delayed instadeath, and mostly affects those with high (bad) armor class. Digestion can be completely prevented by wearing a ring of slow digestion, which causes monsters trying to digest you to instead regurgitate you. The following monsters digest:

• Lurker above
• Purple worm
• Trapper

The number of monster hits before being totally digested is $8 + \frac{Con}{3} + d(\frac{25 - monsterLvl}{2} + 1) - AC$

Monsters

Digestion attacks instantly kill monsters of large size or smaller ("Burrrrp!"). Larger monsters are unaffected.

Strategy

Lurkers and trappers are quite slow at speed 3, meaning even a normal-speed player can hit them four times for every digestion hit. Even purple worms are not particularly fast at speed 9, giving players 1-2 blows per digestion hit. Moreover, being engulfed guarantees that your melee attacks and spells will hit the engulfing monster, meaning that even a character with modest damage output can finish them off long before the instadeath occurs.

Digestion attacks are of particular concern to characters with pets. As a single hit from a lowly trapper can fell an Archon, a character relying primarily on their pets to do damage (e.g. a pacifist) wants to be particularly cautious of all digesters. Conversely, a purple worm can make a very powerful pet: they can rapidly gain levels by swallowing wraiths whole, and can instantly eliminate most high-threat monsters. While trappers and lurkers above are theoretically capable of doing so as well, their low speed and tendency to hide makes them impractical as pets.

History

Until NetHack 3.6.2, if your life was saved from some other death while being digested, you would die on the next hit from the digestion attack. This was a bug.

Messages

"The <monster> digests you!"

You take damage from digestion.

"The <monster> thoroughly digests you!"

You take damage from digestion. You will die in 2 more hits.

"The <monster> utterly digests you!"

You take damage from digestion. You will die in 1 more hit.

"The <monster> totally digests you!"

You die.

"You get regurgitated! Obviously the <monster> doesn't like your taste."

You were expelled due to a worn ring of slow digestion.

This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.

It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.2. Information on this page may be out of date.

Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-362}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.