Death drop
In NetHack, when the player kills a monster, it may sometimes leave behind a random item that it did not already have when alive; these items are known as death drops.
Description
If a monster is neither corpseless nor a Keystone Kop (of any rank), it has a 1/6 chance of leaving a random item upon death.[1] Death drops can be left even if the corpse failed to generate, but any circumstances that explicitly prevent the monster from leaving a corpse will prevent a death drop as well (e.g. stoning, drawbridge, disintegration, digestion, undead on a graveyard level, and a few others).[2] There is also a penalty against small monsters, who can only leave food rations, leashes, figurines, or items that weigh at most three units. The game only tries to generate the item once; if it isn't eligible (as per above), no death drop is left.
Death drops use the normal object generation mechanism, so the object class of the dropped item depends on which level the monster was killed in. [3] See Object#Item generation for a table of object class probabilities.
Cloned monsters (such as gremlins that have multiplied) cannot leave death drops, nor can any monster occupying the player's square (such as engulfers or mounts).[4]
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.
As of commit 39a7dc1c, monsters no longer death-drop comestibles other than their corpse, unless they are of a type that collects food (M2_COLLECT).
Special drops
Some monsters additionally always leave behind certain non-random body parts:[5]
| Monster | Item |
|---|---|
| dragon | dragon scales (1/3 chance, 1/20 if revived) |
| unicorn | unicorn horn (1/2 chance if revived) |
| long worm | worm tooth |
| iron golem | 2d6 iron chains |
| glass golem | 2d4 worthless pieces of glass |
| clay golem | 49 + 1d20 (avg. 59.5) rocks |
| stone golem | statue of a stone golem |
| wood golem | 2d4 quarterstaffs |
| leather golem | 2d4 leather armors |
| gold golem | 100-200 gold pieces (Luck-weighted) |
| paper golem | 1d4 blank scrolls |
| gray ooze | a small glob |
| brown pudding | |
| black pudding | |
| green slime |
See also
References
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 Information on this page may be out of date.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.
