Lightning

Lightning occurs in NetHack in several places.

Causes

Lightning may occur either as a ray or as a localized attack on a single square. Lightning rays can come from:

• Zapped or broken wand of lightning
• Blue dragon or Chromatic Dragon breath attack
• Sent by a god through an altar in a temple, should you attack that temple's priest

Localized lightning attacks can come from:

• Attacks of grid bugs, shocking spheres, energy vortices, and electric eels
• Passive attacks of energy vortices
• The wielded weapon Mjollnir
• In the clouds on the Plane of Air
• Sitting on a throne (rare)
• Trapped chests
• Divine wrath

Effects

Lightning attacks can cause trouble in three ways:

• Substantial direct damage
• The victim is blinded (if the attack was in ray form)
• There is a small chance that wands and rings in your inventory will be destroyed (except for thrones, passive attacks, and divine wrath).

The two properties that will protect you are shock resistance, which prevents the damage, and reflection, which prevents the damage and protects your inventory. Neither of these things prevents blindness.

The destruction of wands and rings very rarely happens unless the lightning attack was in ray form. It never results from sitting on a throne, a passive monster attack, or divine wrath. The wand of lightning and ring of shock resistance are immune to this.

Divine wrath is different in that it will cause Instadeath rather than a finite amount of damage unless one is resistant.

SLASH'EM

SLASH'EM has a spell of lightning that produces a lightning ray when cast. SLASH'EM also has several more monsters with electrical attacks:

• static blob
• spark bug, arc bug, and lightning bug
• sapphire golem with a lightning breath weapon, and crystal golem with a random breath weapon similar to the Chromatic Dragon's

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