Cockatrice nest

A cockatrice nest is a special room that has been filled with cockatrices. Fortunately for you, the cockatrices start asleep and will not immediately bother you. You may also find statues of player monsters in there, each containing 0-4 random items.

Generation

It has a 1/8 chance of being generated from dungeon levels 17 onward; however, it will only generate if no other special room has generated on the level, meaning its actual chance is around 1 in 44 on a level with no shops.

It will not be generated if cockatrices are genocided or extinct.

Messages

You enter a disgusting nest!

You entered the nest.

Strategy

This is a dangerous room if handled incorrectly. Getting surrounded by several cockatrices can result in a much higher likelihood that you begin the stoning process every turn. A stack of lizard corpses is the most common preventative; you can also polymorph into something stoning resistant.

Stealth should allow you to avoid waking them up, so you can fight them one at a time. In addition, if you have stealth and there is more than one row of cockatrices, a cockatrice nest can be used as an avenue to train the polearm skill by hitting the second row without waking the first, leaving the footrice being hit without a means to escape. See Leprechaun hall for details.

Instead of killing them all immediately, you may want to leave all or some of them alone, in order to keep around a source of cockatrice corpses.

A sufficiently powerful melee character has a reasonable chance of being able to clear a cockatrice nest without the stoning process starting; the cockatrices will die in only a few hits, giving them few chances to hit back due to their slow speed. Thus, if you have no other options (or are feeling brave), it isn't necessarily going to be fatal to clear the nest without precautions. You should ensure that you have at least one lizard corpse, or else the ability to pray safely, though, in case something goes wrong.