Engulfing

An engulfing attack is one in which you are surrounded by the monster, whether being swallowed whole by it (in the case of e.g. purple worms and trappers) or simply being drawn into it (vortices and air elementals).

Monsters with engulfing attacks:

• ochre jelly
• fog cloud
• trapper
• lurker above
• dust vortex
• ice vortex
• energy vortex
• steam vortex
• fire vortex
• purple worm
• air elemental
• Juiblex

Several types of damage can result from being engulfed:

• Digestion - monsters that have swallowed you whole will digest you slowly over the course of several turns. A ring of slow digestion protects against this ("Obviously the purple worm doesn't like your taste.").
• Physical - possessed by fog clouds ("You are laden with moisture and can barely breathe") and air elementals ("You are pummeled with debris!").
• Fire, cold, shock, blinding - these result from the vortices.
• Disease - Juiblex's speciality.

To be expelled and escape from an engulfed state, you can wait it out (which may kill you first), kill the engulfing monster (best done with e.g. a wand of death), zap a wand of digging or spell of dig (which also sets the monster to one hit point and in a state where you can kill it with one hit, but only works on ochre jellies, purple worms, trappers, lurkers above and Juiblex) or wand of opening or spell of knock, ring the charged Bell of Opening, scare the monster with a tooled horn or drum (other methods rely on line-of-sight and thus do not work when engulfed), polymorph yourself into something too large to be engulfed (Size Huge or larger) or zap a wand of slow monster or spell of slow monster, which only works on vortices and air elementals. A magic missile will kill the thing engulfing you.

On levels that allow teleport, you can also teleport yourself out by the usual methods. On a non-teleport level, you can teleport the engulfing monster instead (on levels that allow self-teleport, you will teleport with the monster).

If you have any free time while engulfed, you might try searching or engraving.

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

It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.4.3. Information on this page may be out of date.

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