Manes
i manes 
| |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 3 |
| Attacks |
Claw 1d3, claw 1d3, bite 1d4 |
| Base level | 1 |
| Base experience | 8 |
| Speed | 3 |
| Base AC | 7 |
| Base MR | 0 |
| Alignment | -7 (chaotic) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | 1 (Very rare) |
| Genocidable | Yes |
| Weight | 100 |
| Nutritional value | 100 |
| Size | Small |
| Resistances | Sleep, poison |
| Resistances conveyed |
None |
|
A manes:
| |
| Reference | monst.c#line498 |
A manes, i, is a type of monster that appears in NetHack. The manes is a nonliving monster that is the most basic form of minor demon a player character can encounter. A manes has infravision, can be seen via infravision and will follow you to other levels if it is adjacent.
A manes has two claw attacks and a bite attack, and possesses sleep resistance and poison resistance.
Manes are poisonous to eat, which primarily comes up if they are digested by another monster.
Contents
Generation
Randomly-generated manes are always created hostile, and frequently appear in large groups. A manes can grow up into a lemure.[1]
Manes appear among the random i that are part of the first quest monster class for Knights and make up 24⁄175 of the monsters that are randomly generated on the Knight quest. They also appear among the random i that are generated on each floor of the Wizard quest at level creation.
A manes never leaves a corpse upon death.
Strategy
Manes are described as "the gnats of the dungeon" in their encyclopedia entry for good reason: they are very weak individually and move at a sluggish 3 speed, though their attacks can pile up damage against early characters with low HP or AC, since they can roll upwards of 10 damage per round of attacks. This makes swarms of manes potentially deadly if a character is careless and/or gets overwhelmed by the speed system not distributing actions in their favor.
Manes swarms are likely the first set of monsters where running through a corridor or door is employed as a tactic, since funneling them throw narrow areas makes dispatching them much easier. Most characters can also make the swarms much easier by gaining a few levels worth of HP, using ranged attacks, attaining reliable accuracy with their primary weapon(s), and/or shoring up their AC.
History
The manes first appears in NetHack 3.0.0
Origin
Manes (MAH-nays) are the spirits of the dead in Roman mythology - the word manes is Latin, and has a singular form manis that is not used for the meaning specific to these spirits[2] - in English, the word has no singular, and so NetHack just uses manes for the singular as well. Compare lemure.
Variants
SLASH'EM
In SLASH'EM, manes hit as a +1 weapon but are otherwise unchanged. This property could theoretically make them useful pets for hitting monsters with the opposite property, but the difficulty of taming them combined with their slow speed means that even pacifists will likely look for better options.
Encyclopedia entry
The gnats of the dungeon, these swarming monsters are rarely seen alone.
