Dog
d little dog 
| |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 3 |
| Attacks |
Bite 1d6 |
| Base level | 2 |
| Base experience | 22 |
| Speed | 18 |
| Base AC | 6 |
| Base MR | 0 |
| Alignment | 0 (neutral) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | Very rare |
| Genocidable | Yes |
| Weight | 150 |
| Nutritional value | 150 |
| Size | Small |
| Resistances | None |
| Resistances conveyed |
Intrinsic aggravate monster
|
d dog 
| |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 5 |
| Attacks |
Bite 1d6 |
| Base level | 4 |
| Base experience | 44 |
| Speed | 18 |
| Base AC | 5 |
| Base MR | 0 |
| Alignment | 0 (neutral) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | Very rare |
| Genocidable | Yes |
| Weight | 400 |
| Nutritional value | 200 |
| Size | Medium |
| Resistances | None |
| Resistances conveyed |
Intrinsic aggravate monster
|
d large dog 
| |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 7 |
| Attacks |
Bite 2d4 |
| Base level | 6 |
| Base experience | 76 |
| Speed | 15 |
| Base AC | 4 |
| Base MR | 0 |
| Alignment | 0 (neutral) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | Very rare |
| Genocidable | Yes |
| Weight | 800 |
| Nutritional value | 250 |
| Size | Medium |
| Resistances | None |
| Resistances conveyed |
Intrinsic aggravate monster
|
Little dogs, dogs, and large dogs (all d) are carnivorous domestic animals and can be tamed with tripe, food rations, fortune cookies, or edible corpses if they are fresh.
Eating a the corpse of a domestic dog is considered cannibalism unless you are an orc or a caveman. This will greatly upset your god: "You feel that eating the little dog was a bad idea." While you should not sacrifice a former pet, offering a dog corpse is otherwise safe.
Types of dog
Little dog
The little dog is one of the most famous NetHack monsters - it has served as the starting pet for the player ever since Hack 1.0, although in recent times you also have the option of starting with a kitten for a starting pet (knights will get a pony instead). They are capable of growing up into dogs.
The little dog and his more experienced brethren are sometimes better fighters than newly started characters and can be used to fight for you in the early stages of the game. Nevertheless, they may be more vulnerable than newly started characters against passive attacks, such as acidic monsters or floating eyes. They also are extremely vulnerable to falling rock traps and rolling boulder traps and many have been lost within the first hundred turns of a game to this.
Dog
The dog is a grown-up little dog and is therefore usually encountered as a player's pet. They are capable of growing up into large dogs.
As with their brethren, they are excellent fighters to have as companions to early game characters, but remain vulnerable to passive attacks. They may have trouble with watch captains in minetown, although regular watchmen shouldn't pose too much trouble.
Large dog
The large dog is a grown-up dog and is therefore usually encountered as a player's pet (especially with early game characters, as they are easy to obtain by training their little dog).
As with their brethren, they are excellent fighters to have as companions to early game characters, but remain vulnerable to passive attacks. Eventually, it may be worthwhile to attempt to upgrade your large dog to another monster using a polymorph trap, especially if you have more than one pet.
Pet dogs
Dogs are the iconic NetHack pet. The little dog even made Gamespy's top 10 list of video game sidekicks. Many roles begin the game with one.
Taming wild dogs is usually easy, just throw it a piece of meat-based food - meat stick, meat ring, meatball or tripe ration. Corpses of any consistency do not count as suitable meat products.
Beware as all other food (including eggs that dogs normally devour) will not be eaten and instead hit the dog and anger it.
As an additional challenge, if it is night and the moon is full, dogs are harder to tame with meat and there is only a 1 in 6 chance of success.
All meat foods can be used to train your dog to fetch.
You can #chat with your dog to get an idea of how it is feeling:
- at night when the moon is full, it will always howl.
- it will whine if it is hungry, caught in a trap, confused, fleeing, or tameness is getting low.
- if the dog is leashed, and there is a trap nearby, it will whine without you #chatting to it. This works even if the trap is undetected.
- if it will be hungry soon (1000 turns or less), it will bark.
- the rest of the time it will yip.
Encyclopedia entry
A domestic animal, the _tame dog_ (_Canis familiaris_), of which numerous breeds exist. The male is called a dog, while the female is called a bitch. Because of its known loyalty to man and gentleness with children, it is the world's most popular domestic animal. It can easily be trained to perform various tasks.
