Housecat

f housecat
Difficulty	5
Attacks	Bite 1d6 physical

f housecat
Difficulty	5
Attacks	Bite 1d6 physical
Base level	4
Base experience	44
Speed	16
Base AC	5
Base MR	0
Alignment	0 (neutral)
Frequency (by normal means)	1 (Very rare)
Genocidable	Yes
Weight	200
Nutritional value	200
Size	Small
Resistances	None
Resistances conveyed	Intrinsic aggravate monster
A housecat: has no hands. is an animal. is carnivorous. can be tamed by feeding. has infravision. can be seen through infravision.
Reference	NetHack 3.6.7 - src/monst.c, line 355

A housecat, f, is a type of monster that appears in NetHack. The housecat is a small and carnivorous feline animal that can be seen via infravision. Housecats are domestic, and the hero can tame them by throwing any type of meat or rations at them that they can eat, and can pacify them by throwing veggy food at them.

A housecat has a single bite attack.

A hero eating a housecat corpse or tin will gain the aggravate monster intrinsic upon finishing the meal, unless they are an orc or a Caveperson.

Chatting to a housecat will give various responses, depending on its tameness and condition.

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that the information below is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate it.

Per commit 7817e69c, housecats and other felines have infravision.

Generation

Randomly generated housecats may be created as peaceful towards neutral heroes. A kitten can grow up into a housecat, and a housecat can grow up into a large cat.

A quantum mechanic has a ¹⁄₂₀ chance of being generated with a large box that contains "Schroedinger's Cat": opening the box has an equal probability of revealing either a live peaceful housecat named "Schroedinger's Cat", which will be placed near the box if there is room on the level, and otherwise reveals a housecat corpse named "Schroedinger's Cat". The state of the cat within the box is not determined until the box is opened, and both the cat and corpse are otherwise completely normal—see the article on Schroedinger's Cat for more specific information.

Strategy

As hostile monsters, housecats can be annoying or even threatening to early characters that lack suitable spare food item to pacify them with: remember that cream pies, eggs and melons will splatter on their face. Veggy food such as lichen corpses will reliably pacify a hostile housecat without giving up a food source. Running across a named housecat is one of many signs that you might be on a bones level—taming them can help with sorting through bones items and even assist with the ghost of their former owner and, in certain cases, the monster that killed them.

Once a hero 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 housecats and other domestic carnivores they do not want to fight or keep as pets. Housecats may also be sought out to polymorph by players interested in exotic pets.

As pets

Chatting with a tamed housecat can provide 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 housecat first appears in NetHack 3.0.0.

Origin

The cat (Felis catus), commonly referred to as the domestic cat or house cat, is a small carnivorous mammal that is the only domesticated species of the family Felidae. Advances in archaeology and genetics have shown that the domestication of cats date as far back as around 7500 BC in the Near East. Cats are commonly kept as house pets and farm animals, but feral cats that avoid human contact can also be found. The cat's retractable claws are adapted to killing small prey like mice and rats, and it has a strong and flexible body, quick reflexes, and sharp teeth, along with a well-developed sense of smell and night vision. Valued by humans for companionship and its ability to kill vermin, the cat is a social species, but a solitary hunter.

Cat communication includes vocalizations like meowing, purring, trilling, hissing, growling, and grunting as well as cat body language. It can hear sounds too faint or too high in frequency for human ears, such as those made by small mammals. Domestic cats are bred and shown at events as registered pedigreed cats, a hobby known as cat fancy. Animal population control of cats may be achieved by spaying and neutering, but their proliferation and the abandonment of pets has resulted in large numbers of feral cats worldwide, contributing to the extinction of bird, mammal, and reptile species.

As of 2017, the domestic cat was the second most popular pet in the United States, with 95.6 million cats owned and around 42 million households owning at least one cat. In the United Kingdom, 26% of adults have a cat, with an estimated population of 10.9 million pet cats as of 2020. As of 2021, there were an estimated 220 million owned and 480 million stray cats in the world.

Messages

<The housecat> yowls.

Your tame housecat is caught in a trap, confused, scared, or at low tameness.

<The housecat> whimpers.

A leashed tame housecat is near a square with a trap.

<The housecat> meows.

A tame housecat is currently hungry.

<The housecat> mews.

A tame housecat will become hungry in 1000 turns or less.

<The housecat> purrs.

You chatted to a tame housecat, and none of the above conditions apply.

<The housecat> snarls.

You chatted to a peaceful housecat.

<The housecat> growls!

You chatted to a hostile housecat.

Variants

SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM, housecats and their other growth stages have their frequency raised to 7. They also do not randomly generate in Gehennom.

All of the above information also applies to SlashTHEM.

UnNetHack

In UnNetHack, housecats appear among the random f that are part of the second quest monster class for Cavepeople and make up ⁶⁄₁₇₅ (3%) of the monsters randomly generated on the Caveman quest.

dNetHack

In dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack, housecats are chaotic and their bite attack is slightly weaker, though they are given an additional 1-damage claw attack. They can also squeeze through iron bars.

The Cartouche of the Cat Lord is a ward that can pacify hostile housecats which see it, returning them to full health if successful. The Toustefna is a stave that can scare off housecats if carved into a wood weapon placed on the hero's square.

SlashTHEM

In SlashTHEM, in addition to SLASH'EM details, housecats appear among the random f that are part of the second quest monster class for Cavepeople and make up ⁶⁄₁₇₅ (3%) of the monsters randomly generated on the Caveman quest, as in UnNetHack. Housecats also appear among the random f that are part of the first quest monster class for Zookeepers and make up ²⁴⁄₁₇₅ (14%) of the monsters randomly generated on the Zookeeper quest.

Hack'EM

In Hack'EM, housecats and their other growth stages that can generate randomly (i.e. excluding the fat cat) have their frequency raised to 3 rather than 7, and can randomly generate in Gehennom.

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.

[ The Cats of Ulthar, by H.P. Lovecraft ]