Pudding or ooze
The pudding or ooze is a monster class that appears in NetHack, and is represented by the uppercase P glyph (P). Puddings and oozes are designated internally by the macro S_PUDDING.[1]
The class contains the following monsters:[2]
Contents
Common traits
Puddings and oozes are neutral, amorphous and omnivorous amoeboids - as amoeboid monsters, they are unbreathing and lack limbs, eyes or a head. Each pudding or ooze is generally slower-moving than an unhasted and unburdened character, and their bodies are acidic, granting them acid resistance and stoning resistance; they also have cold resistance and poison resistance as well.
Most of the puddings and oozes use bite attacks and are capable of inducing erosion in certain materials, either actively with their bites or passively via contact with their bodies. The green slime is the exception in both cases: it uses a touch attack and does not affect the materials of weapons or worn armor in favor of turning a character themselves into slime.
Generation
Randomly generated puddings and oozes are always created hostile.
Puddings and oozes leave behind globs instead of corpses as a death drop - globs are fleshy and acidic comestibles that cannot be revived or sacrificed, take much longer to decay (though they still become tainted and cause food poisoning as normal), and can merge with other globs of the same material.
History
The pudding and ooze monster class first appears in NetHack 3.0.0, which introduces the gray ooze and both puddings. The green slime is introduced in NetHack 3.3.0.
The pudding and ooze globs first appear in NetHack 3.6.0.
Origin
The pudding or ooze monster class corresponds to the "ooze" creature type in Dungeons & Dragons, with similar abilities to erode and eat through certain types of material.
Variants
In variants based on NetHack 3.4.3 and previous versions, puddings and oozes may still drop corpses.
SLASH'EM
SLASH'EM introduces three new monsters to the monster class:
SLASH'EM is based on versions of NetHack prior to 3.6.0, meaning that puddings and other monsters in the class still leave behind corpses.
Encyclopedia entry
These giant amoeboid creatures look like nothing more than puddles of slime, but they both live and move, feeding on metal or wood as well as the occasional dungeon explorer to supplement their diet.
But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train -- a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.
