Black pudding

From NetHackWiki
Revision as of 01:19, 7 September 2021 by Umbire the Phantom (talk | contribs) (Strategy)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

The black pudding, P, is an amoeboid monster that appear in NetHack. Its most noteworthy characteristic, shared with the brown pudding, is its ability to divide when hit by an iron item; this leaves two puddings, each with half the health of the original. Unlike the brown pudding, the black pudding also has a passive corrosion attack that degrades the iron weapon, as well as a damaging and corrosive bite.

The black pudding is considered a fleshy monster, and is not vegetarian. This is a pun on the British and Irish blood sausage called "black pudding"—note also the sausage-like tile used in the default graphical tileset.

Generation

Kicking a sink has a chance of generating a black pudding; only one can be produced per sink.

Strategy

Black puddings can be encountered early in the game via sinks, and their low speed makes their powerful bite easily avoidable, providing a tempting source of experience for early characters - especially those with ranged attacks. However, in addition to taking damage and possibly injuring your leg, this may also summon a foocubus, whose interference could leave you unarmored and vulnerable to the pudding's bite as well as other nearby monsters.

Characters fighting black puddings in general should protect their armor and weapons. Rustproof any iron armor and weapons you plan to use for the long-term, and consider using a cloak or robe to cover your body armor. You can also step away and remove the armor in question if this would not impact your AC too much, or else wear a substitute junk item (e.g. a non-cursed +0 orcish helm) if possible. As for weapons, you can also use disposable projectiles such as rocks or darts, or non-iron weapons such as elven daggers or a silver saber.

When a pudding splits, the current HP are divided equally between the two new puddings, so each split produces weaker ones until the pudding dies from hitpoint loss; if things threaten to get out of hand, kill the newer puddings first before they have time to regenerate.

If you have a pudding pet and a polymorph trap, you can split it, yielding more pets to polymorph. As the name is also cloned, you might want to rename them. When doing this, take care to use a Puddingbane, lest you kill your pet(s) and suffer the penalty; see Abuse for the ramifications of attacking and splitting your pet.

History

In NetHack 3.4.3 and earlier versions, killing black puddings left normal corpses (which could be eaten to provide useful intrinsics or sacrificed for a variety of gains) and death drops, leading to the infamous practice of pudding farming. However, Nethack 3.6.0 eliminated the ability of puddings to drop corpses, making this practice ineffective and pointless. See that article for more information.

In NetHack 3.6.0, globs could not give resistances when eaten; this was fixed in 3.6.1.

SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM and Slash'EM Extended, black puddings never leave death drops, but they still drop normal corpses which can provide poison resistance (22%), cold resistance (22%) and shock resistance (22%). Pudding farming is still viable for sacrifice fodder and the aforementioned intrinsics.

Encyclopedia entry

See the encyclopedia entry for amoeboid.

See also


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

It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.4. Information on this page may be out of date.

Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-364}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.