Kitten
f kitten 
| |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 3 |
| Attacks |
Bite 1d6 |
| Base level | 2 |
| Base experience | 20 |
| Speed | 18 |
| Base AC | 6 |
| Base MR | 0 |
| Alignment | 0 (neutral) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | 1 (Very rare) |
| Genocidable | Yes |
| Weight | 150 |
| Nutritional value | 150 |
| Size | Small |
| Resistances | None |
| Resistances conveyed |
Intrinsic aggravate monster |
|
A kitten:
| |
| Reference | monst.c#line345 |
A kitten, f, is a type of monster that appears in NetHack. It is a small and carnivorous domestic feline that can be seen via infravision. Kittens can be tamed by throwing any type of meat or rations that they can eat at them, and can be pacified by throwing veggy food at them.
A kitten has a single bite attack.
Eating a kitten corpse or tin will confer the aggravate monster intrinsic, unless the character is an orc or a Caveman.
Chatting to a kitten will give various responses, depending on its tameness and condition.
Generation
Randomly generated kittens may generate as peaceful towards neutral characters. A kitten can grow up into a housecat.
The kitten is one of the most commonplace starting pets in NetHack - many roles can start with a kitten as their default pet, with the Caveman, Ranger and Samurai receiving a little dog instead, and the Knight receiving a saddled pony. The Wizard always starts with a kitten as their default pet.
A tame kitten can be created via the spell of create familiar with a 1⁄6 chance.
Strategy
As hostile monsters, kittens can be annoying or even threatening to early characters that do not have a spare food item to throw in order to get them off their back - cream pies and eggs are not suitable choices, since they will splatter on the kitten's face. Veggy food such as lichen corpses will reliably pacify a hostile kitten without giving up a food source.
Once a character finds their footing and establishes a basic kit, they may want to keep a veggy food item such as an apple or pear around to pacify kittens and other domestic carnivores they do not want to fight or keep as pets - running across a named kitten is a potential sign of a bones level. Kittens may also be worth taming to polymorph for players with interest in exotic pets.
As pets
The starting kitten that many characters enter the dungeon with can be invaluable in the early stages of the game: they move at 18 speed and have a bite attack that can weaken or make quick work of early hostiles, and lucky kittens that do not trigger counterattacks can easily survive fights. Conversely, kittens are not smart enough to avoid monsters with passive attacks, such as acid blobs or floating eyes, and starting pets are weaker than their wild counterparts within the dungeon. They are also extremely vulnerable to traps such as falling rock traps and rolling boulder traps, and many are killed by one within the first hundred turns of a game.
You can chat with a tamed kitten to get an idea of how it is feeling.
Below is a table describing how much weight in objects a domestic carnivore at a particular stage of growth can carry, which is generally applicable for credit cloning and otherwise ripping off shopkeepers - remember that cats and dogs can only pick up a single object at a time:
| Pet type | Corpse wt | Can carry unassisted | in uncursed bag of holding | in blessed bag of holding |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| kitten/little dog | 150 | 51 | 72 | 144 |
| housecat/dog | 200 / 400 | 68 / 137 | 106 / 244 | 212 / 488 |
| large cat/large dog | 250 / 800 | 1000 | 1970 | 3940 |
History
The kitten first appears in NetHack 3.0.0, where it is introduced as an alternate starting pet option to the little dog: the Caveman will always start with a little dog, the Wizard will always start with a kitten, and other roles will randomly receive one of either. NetHack 3.0.8 allows an option of either pet to be set for characters in other roles. The Samurai's default little dog is introduced in NetHack 3.1.0, while NetHack 3.3.0 adds the default little dog for Rangers and establishes the saddled pony as the Knight's starting pet.
In NetHack 3.4.3 and earlier versions, including some variants based on those versions, kittens are capable of picking up item stacks so long as that stack does not exceed their carrying capacity.
Messages
- <The kitten> yowls.
- Your tame kitten is caught in a trap, confused, scared, or at low tameness.[1]
- <The kitten> whimpers.
- A leashed tame kitten is near a square with a trap.[2]
- <The kitten> meows.
- A tame kitten is currently hungry.[3]
- <The kitten> purrs.
- A tame kitten will become hungry in 1000 turns or less.[4]
- <The kitten> snarls.
- You chatted to a peaceful kitten.[5]
- <The kitten> growls!
- You chatted to a hostile kitten.[6]
Encyclopedia entry
Well-known quadruped domestic animal from the family of
predatory felines (_Felis ochreata domestica_), with a thick,
soft pelt; often kept as a pet. Various folklores have the
cat associated with magic and the gods of ancient Egypt.
So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people
awakened at dawn - behold! Every cat was back at his
accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped,
yellow and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did
the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content.
