Talk:Pacifist

How do you handle the giant mimics in Sokoban if you only have a cat, but no conflict, charm monster or stethoscope? Other critters interfere if I engrave Elbereth gazillions of times around the mimic to protect my pet. I'd like to avoid "come back later". -Tjr 22:21, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

In the end, I left my pet on another floor, Elbereth-lured the giant mimic near the stairs, went around a corner for it to re-cloak, Elbereth-locked off everything, engraved those gazillions of Elbereths around the mimic, and whacked it as many times as a wizard mode test had determined safe. Finally, I fetched my pet and let it finish off the mimic. Same story with the second mimic. -Tjr 00:58, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

What if lost pet?

What can I do if I have lost my pet, say, to a trap? Usually, I starve or die to a wimpy monster. Only very rarely do I already have things such as controlled polymorph (for the eggs), a scroll of taming, or see a randomly generated domestic animal soon enough during my initial Sokoban dive. Locking off monsters with Elbereth + gold works only that good - I (level 1) have to be able to take a hit, sometimes monsters are too numerous or slow to let me through, and werecreatures end the game right away. How do you handle the situation? -Tjr 11:36, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Try going to the mines first instead of Sokoban. You're more likely to encounter a pet along the way. Minetown in particular often has a 2x2 room with two cats. Once you have multiple pets, losing one is not fatal. (It helps to be a gnomish healer, or at least a gnomish wizard - being a gnome makes the mines massively easier.) In fact, one of your main priorities from turn one should be to get another pet ASAP. If you really lost your pet to the proverbial first turn rock trap, there have been reports of petless pacifists on r.g.r.n., but it's way hard. djao 04:17, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Nutrition

I don't think the section on nutrition belongs here. None of the items discussed here are specific to pacifists. The entire section should be moved to the nutrition article. The only thing that belongs is the healer-specific advice regarding stone-to-flesh, and this can surely fit somewhere else (like in the Oracle discussion). If I don't get any comments within a few days, then I'll go ahead and move it.

At best (worst?), pacifists have only two liabilities with respect to nutrition, and both of them are extremely minor compared with all of the other problems that pacifists face. Problem number 1 is that your pet is doing all of the killing, so it is more likely to reach corpses first. (But this, by itself, is no harder than say the vegetarian conduct, and any difference between pacifists and non-pacifists is only a matter of degree.) Problem number two is that you have to keep your pet close to you, which means that it is impossible to explore fast until you get a magic whistle. Problem number two is a genuine problem, but much of the advice given in the Nutrition section does not apply to this situation -- for example, a fast-paced strategy is completely impossible without a whistle, and by the time you get a whistle or a ring of slow digestion or the ability to control polymorph, you're not generally worried about food. djao 04:17, 3 July 2009 (UTC)