Pet (SLASH'EM)

This article is about SLASH'EM. For pets in vanilla NetHack, see pet.

Pets in SLASH'EM are much like pets in vanilla. They fight on your side, they eat (or starve), they bring objects to you, they respond to whistles and track abuse.

This wiki page summarizes the situation with pets in SLASH'EM. Specifically, SLASH'EM does provide more domestic monsters to tame, more varieties of food to tame them with, and they appear in the dungeon more often.

The wiki markup [[pet (SLASH'EM)|]] will expand to [[pet (SLASH'EM)|pet]] and produce a link to this page.

What is a pet?

SLASH'EM provides two other types of tame monsters, the tame minion and the spell being. Gods dispatch tame minions; the spells of flame sphere and freeze sphere create spell beings. To be consistent with Eva Myers' spoiler, we will apply the term "pet" to the exclusion of tame minions and spell beings.

All other sources of tame monsters provide pets. You start the game with a one pet; the spell of create familiar produces a pet; a monster made tame through feeding, thus becomes a pet.

In the source code, pets have an attached struct edog (identical to that of vanilla NetHack, defined at edog.h).

Basic features of pets

(These features are almost the same as those for vanilla pets...)

1. Attacking in melee - A pet may use its melee attacks against a hostile or peaceful monster.
   • Most pets have some discretion and will not attack if the target monster has at least two more monster levels than the pet.
   • If the pet's attack hits and both parties survive, and if the target monster has not moved this turn, then there is a 3/4 chance that the target monster retaliates with melee attacks against the pet.
2. Interacting with objects - A pet will seek objects, either to eat them, or to bring them to you.
   • A pet will rank all of the objects within a rectangle of radius 5 around the pet. It will prefer the object with the highest rank, and break ties by choosing the closer object. Then it will decide whether to seek this goal object or follow the player.
   • You may feed treats to your pet to encourage it to bring objects closer to you. The effect of the reward will diminish as the pet drops more objects.
3. Avoiding objects of wrong beatitude - Most pets will avoid cursed objects. Pet demons and pet undead will instead avoid squares that contain blessed objects. A pet will normally not seek or enter squares that contain such objects. However, a pet may enter that square to eat if the pet is hungry or to eat a treat or "reluctantly" if the square blocks the pet's path. Even so, a pet will not pick up the cursed (blessed) objects on that square.

There exists a port of the pet ranged patch (by D. Shaligram, ported by Jean-Yves Moyen) that would allow pets to also attack with ranged attacks.

Food for pets

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

"Document the rank of each food item (rations, holy wafers, ...) in SLASH'EM, so that one may know how to tame a carnivore or herbivore."

Domestic monsters

These monsters have the M2_DOMESTIC flag. You may domesticate (tame) these monsters by throwing acceptable food at them. If you throw the wrong kind of food, then these monsters become peaceful.

The table also contains the monster level and monster frequency (in the L:F column), and some basic stats about each monster. Remember that lower AC is better. As for speed, a koala (4) has one move per three turns, a lamb (12) has one move per one turn, a warhorse (24) has two moves per one turn. (Information is from src/monst.c, SLASH'EM 0.0.8E0F1.)

Monster	L:F	Speed [AC] Attacks	Diet
c chicken	2:1	15 [8] bite 1d3	herbivore
c cockatoo	3:1	15 [6] bite 1d4	herbivore
c parrot	7:1	15 [6] bite 2d6	herbivore
d little dog	2:7	18 [6] bite 1d6	carnivore
d dog	4:7	16 [5] bite 1d6	carnivore
d large dog	6:7	15 [4] bite 2d4	carnivore
d pit bull	11:1	15 [4] bite 4d4	carnivore
f kitten	2:7	18 [6] bite 1d6	carnivore
f housecat	4:7	16 [5] bite 1d6	carnivore
f large cat	6:7	15 [4] bite 2d4	carnivore
q lamb	1:2	12 [10] butt 1d2, kick 1d2	herbivore
q sheep	3:2	12 [8] butt 1d4, kick 1d3	herbivore
q goat	4:1	12 [6] butt 2d4, kick 1d4, kick 1d4	herbivore
q cow	7:2	9 [7] butt 1d8, kick 2d4	herbivore
q bull	10:1	15 [5] butt 2d8, kick 2d4	herbivore
u pony	3:2	16 [6] kick 1d6, bite 1d2	herbivore
u horse	5:2	20 [5] kick 1d8, bite 1d3	herbivore
u warhorse	7:2	24 [4] kick 1d10, bite 1d4	herbivore
z koala	7:2	4 [9] touch (calm) 0d0	eucalyptus leaf
z wombat	5:1	12 [5] kick 1d6, bite 1d6	herbivore

Monsters that want specific food

These monsters want a specific food item. If you throw that item to them, then they become tame. Otherwise, nothing happens (and the monster does not become peaceful). Once the monster is tame, it reverts to a normal carnivorous or herbivorous diet, except that the specific food item counts as a treat.

The specific food item will be a cheese (for rats), a carrot (for rabbits) or a banana (for primates). There are four types of rat on this list; cheese will not tame a rabid rat, a hellrat or the Rat King. Yes, rabid rabbits are on this list.

Monster	L:F	Speed [AC] Attacks	Diet
r sewer rat	0:1	12 [7] bite 1d3	carnivore, wants cheese
r black rat	0:0	15 [7] bite 1d3	carnivore, wants cheese
r giant rat	1:2	10 [7] bite 1d3	carnivore, wants cheese
r pack rat	0:0	12 [7] bite 1d3, touch (steals item) 1d1	carnivore, wants cheese
r rabbit	0:2	15 [7] bite 1d3	herbivore, wants carrot
r rabid rabbit	3:1	18 [7] bite 2d4	herbivore, wants carrot
Y monkey	2:1	12 [6] claw (steals item) 0d0, bite 1d3	omnivore, wants banana
Y ape	4:2	12 [6] claw 1d3, claw 1d3, bite 1d6	omnivore, wants banana
Y yeti	5:2	15 [6] claw 1d6, claw 1d6, bite 1d4	carnivore, wants banana
Y carnivorous ape	6:1	12 [6] claw 1d4, claw 1d4, crushing bearhug 1d8	carnivore, wants banana
Y sasquatch	7:1	15 [6] claw 1d6, claw 1d6, kick 1d8	omnivore, wants banana
Y zruty	9:2	8 [3] claw 3d4, claw 3d4, bite 3d6	carnivore, wants banana

Links

• Other types of tame monsters:
  • tame minion
  • spell being
• How To Acquire Pets In Nethack 3.4.3 And Slash'EM 7E6F3 ("by Eva Myers, with helpful contributions from J. Ali Harlow")