Talk:Planetar and Solar

The article claims these monsters cannot be encountered before the Amulet. However, I encountered a planetar once in Vlad's tower. I'm not changing the article because I'm not an expert on SLASH'EM -Tjr 20:49, January 1, 2010 (UTC)

You're right, that would be possible, just as it's possible to encounter an Archon in Vlad's Tower in vanilla NetHack. I still don't think it would be possible to see a Solar there though - with a difficulty of 49, a level 30 character would have to be at level 58 to see one, which is generally the level of Moloch's Sanctum in SLASH'EM. I changed the article to reflect that you can see them there, and also possibly in Frankenstein's Lab (I know I've seen devas there, it's also not Gehennom). -Ion frigate 05:16, January 2, 2010 (UTC)

Capitalization

I'm not going to just move it back without discussing, but Archon, Angel, Planetar and Solar are all capitalized in the source code. They do not have the "proper name" attribute (which is for monsters whose names omit the definite article), but they are capitalized. A similar example is the Norn; it's actually just "Norn" in the source code, without being called a proper name. See SLASH'EM 0.0.7E7F2/monst.c#line1970 -Ion frigate 05:37, February 24, 2010 (UTC)

On the one hand, you have a point. On the other hand, archon, angel, planetar, and solar are all not proper nouns in the English language sense. Instead, they all fall under "common names of plants and animals except proper nouns and adjectives" and should be lower-cased. So both sides can be argued. The style guide is silent on this. I'm not going to insist on it either way, but I do very much like it consistent. -Tjr 22:53, February 25, 2010 (UTC)

If you don't mind, I'm going to change it back, so that it's consistent with the in-game messages one sees when meeting them; you see "The Archon hits!", not the "The archon hits!" I think the capitalization comes from the D&D source actually, even though they aren't capitalized in normal English. -Ion frigate 01:01, February 26, 2010 (UTC)

Taming Solars other than from figurines (without being lawful)

I just accidentally tamed a hostile Solar somehow and I'm not really sure how.

So on my current game I wished for a blessed figurine which yielded me only a peaceful Solar, unfortunately. I proceeded casting drain life to see if I could lower it's levels to try and make casting Charm Monster with my level 30 Doppelganger Wizard easier, but eventhough they are not Drain Resistant he must have been generated with some item that made him resistant, so that didn't quite work. He proceeded to spam summon nasties, and those I could tame by spamming charm monster (this went on for a while), but after quite some time I noticed none of the new pets was attacking the Solar, just the newly summoned monsters. So I threw a potion of paralysis at him, stabbed him a few times with Magicbane, and after a while stabbing him with little damage dealt, I decided to turn into a basilisk and just stone him. As soon as I turned into a basilisk, though, it became tame (didn't even get peaceful, it went straight from hostile to tame). I'm still baffled to what exactly happened there, but somebody might wanna try tinkering around with the source code or doing some wizmode tests (I'm a bit of a NetHack noob, this is my first character with a decent chance of ascending, after I discovered reverse genociding gypsies to get hundreds of wishes). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 187.75.53.112 (talk • contribs)

You're sure you didn't just tame him with the spell and not notice? They don't go from peaceful to tame anyways; charm monster will only make untamable monsters like humans or demons (if you aren't a demon) peaceful. They're not immune to charm monster or level drain, just extremely resistant. At level 30, you have at worst a 1% chance of being able to affect a Solar due to base MR being 80, and max level being 49. IIRC a figurine creates a monster at level (base-1), so you should've had a 12% chance of succeeding. Next time don't anger him and just continually cast charm monster. Or, to make it dirt simple, turn into a genetic engineer, polymorph the solar, tame whatever it turns into, and then blast it with magic missile (if you can, it might have kept the shield) until it reverts to a tame Solar. -- Qazmlpok 00:26, May 17, 2010 (UTC)

(EDIT:For some reason I can't get my reply indent to increase, either by pressing Tab or using the "increase indent function. First time I attempt to comment something on a wiki, so I'm not too familiar with it.) I did spam charm monster a lot of times and I'm almost positive I used farlook on him before turning into a basilisk and it didn't show him as tame. Besides, with my character's AC, enchantments, intrinsics and regeneration rate, only the Archon was capable of effectively damaging me, all the other monsters summoned either missed me completely or dealt too low a damage for my regeneration speed, and my health was getting beaten up progressively until I paralyzed the Solar, after which my HP became pretty much stable again. Also, the summon nasties spamming stopped immediately after I paralyzed him, as well, and the level was not even close to crammed up with monsters at that time. Unless of course it did get tamed with a charm monster without me noticing, something else was spamming summon nasties and got killed coincidentally at the same time I paralyzed the Solar. Still a bit puzzling nonetheless.

Anyway, good to know there's a chance of taming them with charm monster. From what I read in the article I misundertood that one would have to drain some of their levels beforehand. And eventhough I had read about the genetic engineer trick I totally forgot about it at the time, I hope I'll remember it next time. Thanks for the help.