Undead
Undead in NetHack are a class of unliving monsters. They include the following monster classes:
Undead take extra d4 from blessed items, and vampires and shades take an extra d20 from silver weapons. Drinking holy water also harms them; however, unholy water actually exercises their constitution. Undead deal double damage in the hour of midnight.
Priests and knights can turn undead, which can make them flee or destroy the low-level ones completely. A wand of undead turning or spell of turn undead can damage them and make them flee.
Undead are immune to level drain, such as from the Staff of Aesculapius. They are also all immune to cold (except vampires), sleep, and poison. All undead are naturally immune to death rays.
Reading the Book of the Dead while cursed will summon hostile undead. The blessed book will pacify them, and tame them wherever possible if you are chaotic. If nothing else helps, the Sunsword does double damage against undead.
Undead and garlic
All undead dislike garlic and will avoid it where they can.
Internals
Whether a monster is undead is determined by whether it has the monster attribute M2_UNDEAD. Currently this is completely coincident with the monster classes enumerated above.
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 Information on this page may be out of date.
Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-343}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.
