Monster starting inventory

In NetHack, certain types of monsters may be created with objects in their starting inventory appropriate to their species - a monster's starting inventory may also contain a random offensive item, miscellaneous item, and/or defensive item.

The items that spiders and snakes are generated with during initial level creation are not part of their starting inventory, as they are created for the monsters to hide under.

Description

Monster starting inventory is distributed to each applicable monster at level creation, as well as each time a new monster is created. Monsters generated in bones files will have whatever inventory they were carrying at the time of its creation; monsters created by reverse genocide always have empty starting inventories.

A pretty comprehensive spoiler can be found here.

Weapons

If a generated monster has a weapon attack, isn't being generated on the Rogue level, and doesn't have special rules according to its species, a die - usually a d14 - is rolled. This default die changes depending on the monster's flags: two sides are subtracted if the monster is defined in monst.c as either a lord or nasty, and four are subtracted if the monster is defined as a prince. These subtractions also overlap, e.g. a hypothetical monster that is defined as a "prince" and "nasty" would use a d8.

The monster may receive a weapon based on the result of this roll and whether or not it is strong:

roll	strong	not strong
1	battle-axe	3-14 darts
2	two-handed sword	crossbow, 3-14 bolts
3	bow, 3-14 arrows
4	long sword	3-5 daggers
5	lucern hammer	aklys
6+	nothing

A user has suggested improving this page or section as follows:

"List the species-specific rules for monster weapons. If this would be too long, maybe pare it down to the "important" ones."

Armor

In addition to any other items, monsters can also get armor. This includes all mercenaries - members of the Yendorian army, guards, watchmen, watch captains - and mummies.

For mercenaries, armor items spawned are based on a complex mechanism to approximate the target AC of the given creature:

(crystal) plate mail splint mail banded mail ring mail (studded) leather armor

helmet dented pot small shield large shield

low boots high boots leather gloves leather cloak

For mummies, there is a unique ⁶⁄₇ chance for a generated mummy to have a mummy wrapping.

Death drops

Monsters killed by the player will drop their inventory, along with random objects that are generated upon their death. Some monsters also leave behind certain non-random body parts, such as unicorn horns or dragon scales.

Strategy

Monster starting inventory can provide valuable hints at the true identities of objects with randomized appearances.

References

• Makemon.c#line1017 a few special cases
• Makemon.c#m_initweap mostly weapons and elven items
• Makemon.c#m_initinv armor and most other objects
• Muse.c#rnd_defensive_item magical defensive item
• Muse.c#rnd_misc_item magical "misc item"
• Muse.c#rnd_offensive_item magical offensive item
• Mplayer.c#mk_mplayer player monsters