Resistance

Resistances protect you against several harmful effects that you may encounter in the dungeon. A resistance can be either intrinsic, meaning a natural resistance, or extrinsic, meaning a resistance gained by wearing or wielding a certain item. Many intrinsic resistances can only be gained by polymorphing into a certain creature, which is not very convenient.

Intrinsic resistances

One of the most common ways to gain intrinsic resistances is through the eating corpses. Of special note are dragon corpses, as they are guaranteed to give resistances based on their color as specified below, with the exception of yellow, gray and silver. Other monsters also provide intrinsic resistances if their corpses are eaten, details of which can be found in the individual monster descriptions.

Extrinsic resistances

Extrinsic resistance is obtained, by definition, through items. Dragon scale mail and the lower dragon scales provide reliable methods for many resistances. Artifacts also often provide resistances, some of which are hard to obtain otherwise.

Summary

A non-exhaustive table of the resistances and methods to obtain them is as follows:

Resistance	Dragon corpse	Dragon scales	Item	Polymorph form
Acid resistance	None	Yellow	Alchemy smock	Any acidic-corpse monster (e.g. acid blob)
Cold resistance	White	White	Many	Many "cold" monsters
Disintegration resistance	Black	Black	None	Only (baby) black dragons
Fire resistance	Red	Red	Many	Many "hot" monsters
Magic resistance	None	Gray	Cloak of magic resistance Many Quest artifacts
Poison resistance	Green	Green	Ring of poison resistance	Many "poisonous" monsters
Shock resistance	Blue	Blue
Sleep resistance	Orange	Orange
Hallucination resistance	None	None	Grayswandir
Level drain resistance	None	None	Excalibur The Staff of Aesculapius Stormbringer	Any undead
Stoning resistance	None	None		Stone based creatures (e.g. gargoyles, stone golems)
Sliming resistance	None	None		Green slime