Giant beetle
a giant beetle 
| |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 6 |
| Attacks |
Bite 3d6 |
| Base level | 5 |
| Base experience | 56 |
| Speed | 6 |
| Base AC | 4 |
| Base MR | 0 |
| Alignment | 0 (neutral) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | 3 (Rare) |
| Genocidable | Yes |
| Weight | 10 |
| Nutritional value | 10 |
| Size | Large |
| Resistances | Poison |
| Resistances conveyed |
Poison (33%) |
|
A giant beetle:
| |
| Reference | monst.c#line128 |
A giant beetle, a, is a type of monster that appears in NetHack. It is the slowest of the insects, but also has the strongest single attack among them.
A giant beetle has a strong bite attack, and possesses poison resistance.
A giant beetle corpse is poisonous to eat, but eating a giant beetle corpse or tin has a 1⁄3 chance of granting poison resistance.
The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that it is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate this information.
Giant beetles now weigh 200 and provide 50 nutrition.Generation
Randomly generated giant beetles are always created hostile.
Hostile giant beetles can be generated by the summon insects monster spell.[1]
Giant beetles appear among the a that are part of the first quest monster class for Valkyries and make up 24⁄175 of the monsters that are randomly generated on the Valkyrie quest.
Strategy
Despite moving at only 6 speed compared to other insects, giant beetles hit fairly hard with their bite attack, making lingering near one dangerous for a character with low HP or AC. Their low speed can still be taken advantage of to bring them down, ideally at a distance. Giant beetle corpses are a decent source of poison resistance for characters who lack the intrinsic, but have an external source on hand and/or a tinning kit to make them safe to eat.
On some systems, dark gray items and creatures will be monsters as blue instead. This makes it easy to confuse giant beetles with their much more dangerous cousins, soldier ants.
History
The giant beetle first appears in Hack for PDP-11, which is based on Jay Fenlason's Hack, and is included in the initial bestiary for Hack 1.0. From these early versions to NetHack 2.3e, the giant beetle uses the b glyph and it more similar to the modern soldier ant. NetHack 3.0.0 introduces the ant or other insect monster class, moving the giant ant to a and introducing the soldier ant alongside it.
Encyclopaedia entry
[ The Creator ] has an inordinate fondness for beetles.
The common name for the insects with wings shaped like
shields (_Coleoptera_), one of the ten sub-species into
which the insects are divided. They are characterized by
the shields (the front pair of wings) under which the back
wings are folded.
