Floating eye

e floating eye
Difficulty	3
Attacks	Paralysis (passive)

e floating eye
Difficulty	3
Attacks	Paralysis (passive)
Base level	2
Base experience	17
Speed	1
Base AC	9
Base MR	10
Alignment	0 (neutral)
Frequency (by normal means)	Very common
Genocidable	Yes
Weight	10
Nutritional value	10
Size	Small
Resistances	None
Resistances conveyed	Telepathy
A floating eye: can fly. can survive underwater. cannot pick up items. has no limbs. has no head. does not eat. (*) is neither male nor female. is normally generated hostile. can be seen through infravision.
Reference	monst.c#line322

A floating eye, e, can be one of the most dangerous NetHack monsters if handled incorrectly — it possesses a passive paralysis gaze attack.

The DevTeam does not consider the lack of any warnings about hitting a floating eye to be a bug.[1]

The paralysis

The length of paralysis depends on your wisdom and LEV (the floating eye's level (typically 2 or 3)). You are paralysed for LEV*d70 turns if your wisdom is greater than 12. Otherwise, there is a 75% chance of the same length of paralysis and a 25% chance of being paralysed for exactly 127 turns. Either way, you will be paralyzed for many turns, during which you are likely to be killed by even the weakest monsters such as newts or grid bugs.

Because of this, floating eyes are the cause of many YASDs. Nonetheless, if you avoid hitting them in melee they are entirely harmless, although they are not, strictly speaking, peaceful.

Dealing with a floating eye

To kill a floating eye, it is best to use ranged weapons, polearms, or spells. If you do not have a powerful ranged attack, throw junk weapons or rocks. If you are in a room with the floating eye (rather than a corridor) and no other monsters are around, you can keep throwing your melee weapon at it and waiting for it to move so that you can retrieve your weapon. Finally, if wasting turns is not an issue, you can place yourself between the floating eye and an obstacle of some sort (locked door, boulder, a passive creature, et cetera) so the paralysis will cause no lasting damage other than wasting turns.

Floating eyes cannot harm you if you are blind. Thus you may kill them in melee if you just first blind yourself, for example by wearing a blindfold or towel. Blinding the floating eye is also effective, but there is a 1/500 chance of a -1 Luck penalty for hitting a blind floating eye. Another way is zapping it with a Wand of make invisible or otherwise make it invisible.

You can apply a mirror to paralyse a floating eye, but this is not particularly useful as it will still be able to paralyse you. (They say that a mirror will freeze a floating eye but you can still see it, from rumors.tru.)

If you have a source of reflection or wear a ring of free action, floating eyes will be unable to paralyse you.

Floating eyes can also be cancelled with a wand or book of cancellation.

Eating a floating eye corpse

Eating a floating eye corpse always conveys telepathy. The intrinsic telepathy acquired in this manner is permament, but one can lose it by murdering as a human or lawful, or having a gremlin steal it.

Upon getting the intrinsic power, the message You feel a strange mental acuity shows.

Encyclopedia entry

Floating eyes, not surprisingly, are large, floating eyeballs
which drift about the dungeon.  Though not dangerous in and
of themselves, their power to paralyse those who gaze at
their large eye in combat is widely feared.  Many are the
tales of those who struck a floating eye, were paralysed by
its mystic powers, and then nibbled to death by some other
creature that lurked around nearby.