Gas spore

From NetHackWiki
(Redirected from Gas spores)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
e gas spore Gas spore.png
Difficulty 2
Attacks

On-death explosion 4d6 physical

Base level 1
Base experience 12
Speed 3
Base AC 10
Base MR 0
Alignment 0 (neutral)
Frequency (by normal means) 1 (Very rare)
Genocidable Yes
Weight 10
Nutritional value 10
Size Small
Resistances None
Resistances conveyed None

A gas spore:

Reference NetHack 5.0.0 - include/monsters.h, line 325

A gas spore, e, is a type of monster that appears in NetHack. The gas spore is a sphere monster that is mindless, limbless and unbreathing like most of the other monsters in the monster class, but it is not visible via infravision. Gas spores are often the first sphere monster that a hero encounters.

A gas spore cannot attack on its own, but has an on-death explosion attack that triggers when it is killed by HP loss: this explosion covers a 3x3 range centered on its square, creates noise in a radius around that square depending on the damage inflicted, and deals 4-24 damage to any hero or other monsters caught in the blast[1][2][3][4][5]—this abuses strength for a hero caught in the explosion.[6]

If the gas spore is killed by engulfing, less noise is created and the damage from the on-death explosion will only affect the engulfer.[7][8] Monsters have a chance of resisting the explosion's damage dependent on their MR score, and resisting will half the damage taken.[9] If a hero is caught in the explosion while being held by another monster, that monster takes doubled damage.[10][11] Forms of instant death that ignore HP, such as stoning and disintegration, will not cause the gas spore to explode this way.

A hero killing a gas spore directly will be 'credited' for any monsters hit or killed by its explosion, including penalties for angering peaceful monsters or killing peacefuls and pets.[12] Monsters will not attack a gas spore unless they are capable of surviving the explosion, i.e. they have more current HP than the maximum amount of damage it can deal.

A hero that is polymorphed into a gas spore will be rendered incapable of attacking normally, with a 2⁄3 chance of exploding upon losing all their HP in that form: this explosion behaves the same as that of other gas spores and will always return to their normal form (even if they have an applicable source of unchanging).[13]

Generation

Randomly-generated gas spores are always created hostile.

A gas spore never leaves a corpse upon death.

Strategy

It is perfectly fine to simply avoid gas spores altogether, as they are incapable of attacking you themselves. However, other monsters may accidentally cause a gas spore explosion with ranged attacks or an attack prompted by conflict—pets in particular will begin attacking gas spores once they are high enough level, which may endanger you if you are adjacent to the spore and do not have enough HP to reliably survive the explosion.

The best strategy when faced with a gas spore that you can reasonably fight (or else cannot avoid) is to step back and use whatever ranged attacks you have at your disposal: this includes offensive spells, arrows, darts, and even throwing rocks, junk or non-projectile weapons. If you have no other options and possess any combination of 25+ HP, good AC and a means of mitigating strength abuse, you can take a chance and dispatch the spore with melee attacks while making sure that no peaceful or tame monsters are within the explosion range.

Early-game Healers can use gas spores to train their weapon skills, such as the knife (via the starting scalpel) or the more common dagger, using a stethoscope to monitor the gas spore's HP and allow it to heal back up before attacking it again. While any role can do this, Healers are the only one guaranteed to start with the stethoscope.

Explosions

As noted above, your character is considered responsible for any damage done to monsters by a gas spore's explosion that they caused. This has a number of repercussions, depending on the monster:

  • Pets killed by the gas spore explosion are treated as if you had killed them directly, i.e. -15 alignment and -1 luck.
  • Peaceful monsters become angry, incurring a -1 penalty to alignment record, and you incur a -5 alignment penalty if the explosion kills a peaceful monster without angering it. On top of early alignment penalties hampering your odds of survival, shopkeepera, aligned priests in temples and the Minetown Watch will cause you plenty of grief if you anger them in particular—avoid engaging gas spores in peaceful-populated areas unless you can ensure strong peaceful monsters are not adjacent.
  • However, other hostile monsters can also be killed by the explosion—as you gain experience for each kill, this can possibly net a quick level or two if the opportunity arises, and due to how damage is handled it may even prevent the explosion from being fatal for the hero in some corner cases.[14]

Lure gas spores away from rooms of sleeping monsters that you want to approach using stealth (such as the Sokoban zoo), and avoid attacking gas spores or other exploding monsters in such rooms if there are still sleeping monsters around. Alternately, directing gas spores into leprechaun halls or barracks is sometimes a fun (if risky) maneuver.

Protection racket

Gas spores are one of many threats to a protection racket that may warrant gaining a couple of levels prior to entering the Gnomish Mines for increased HP to survive their explosions with—you can then level drain yourself if possible once you successfully reach the Minetown temple.

History

The gas spore first appears in NetHack-- 3.0.10, and makes its vanilla NetHack debut in NetHack 3.3.0.

From NetHack 3.3.0 to NetHack 3.6.7, including some variants based on those versions, gas spores are subject multiple notable bugs.

  • In versions up to NetHack 3.3.1:
    • Gas spore explosions ignore half physical damage. This is partly fixed in NetHack 3.4.0 via commit d6d445d5, but introduces a different bug—if a hero that has half physical damage is caught in a gas spore's explosion, the property halves the damage dealt to all monsters caught in the explosion instead of solely the hero's damage. This second bug is fixed in NetHack 3.4.1 via commit 6cdf9285 so that half physical damage is only applied to the hero in those cases.
  • Monsters with digestion attacks that engulfed a gas spore are not subjected to an explosion—this is fixed in NetHack 3.4.0 via commit cad85663 so that the digesting monster takes damage from doing so.
  • In versions up to NetHack 3.4.3:
  • In versions up to NetHack 3.6.0:
    • A hero killed by the explosion of an unseen gas spore has their cause of death livelogged as "killed by a died"—this is fixed in NetHack 3.6.1 via commit 9114a334.
    • A hero surviving a gas spore's explosion by having enough hit points leaves a stale pointer to "gas spore's explosion" as the cause of death if the hero would not have survived. If that hero is subsequently killed specifically by opening a drawbridge, this does not assign a new cause of death since one is already present, resulting in the logged cause of death being "crushed to death by a gas spore's explosion". This is partly fixed via commit 0ad33783.
      • A secondary bug related to this involves multiple explosions being caused by a chain reaction of gas spores, resulting in an empty cause of death value—this is fixed via commit c0588269.
  • In versions up to NetHack 3.6.7:
    • The hero is credited and/or blamed for damage caused by an exploding gas spore if it was killed using the #wizkill extended command in wizard mode. This is fixed for NetHack 5.0.0 via commit a962a4f6.
    • If a gas spore is killed by an unsolid engulfing monster, the explosion that occurs acts as if the gas spore was not engulfed and hits a 3x3 range centered on the square of the engulfing monster—furthermore, that explosion damages all monsters but the one that had engulfed the gas spore. This is fixed for NetHack 5.0.0 via commit 695c6ef3.

Origin

The gas spore originates from Dungeons & Dragons, where it is depicted as a type of spherical floating fungus with a central false "eye" and ten rhizome growths on its top, giving it a very close resemblance to the beholder that causes it to be mistaken for the monster from a distance—some variants of NetHack allude to this similarity in one way or another. The rhizome growths serve as feeding organs, and are used to extract lichen and mold from walls, leaves from trees, and scum from the surface of ponds.

Gas spores are hollow, but their interiors contain a large number of spores kept under high pressure. A gas spore that is hit anywhere except the rhizome growths and damaged at all will explode, releasing poisonous gas and a large amount of spores within 20 feet of itself—it can also spread its spores by making contact with the exposed flesh of any warm-blooded creature that is at least gnome-sized, and will die immediately after doing so. Anyone that a gas spore infects will die if they do not obtain a cure within 24 hours—the corpse of a victim that succumbs to this infection then sprouts several tiny gas spores, which reach maturity within seven days.

Gas spores that grow upon the corpses of dead beholders are known to carry the memories of their host, which a humanoid infected by the spore can access. This may be a basis for in-universe beliefs that the spores first appeared as a result of parasitic fungi that fed off dead beholders and became infected with aberrant magic, adapting the ability to quickly sprout from any infected corpse after a long period.

Messages

Main article: Death explosion messages

Variants

SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM, 37 gas spores are generated within the Neutral Quest during initial level creation, and more of them may be among the random e that are placed alongside them. They share the same exact glyph as the Beholder, e, which can prove deadly to a hero that mistakes the Beholder for a gas spore and fails to blind themselves against its gaze attacks.

This information also applies to SlashTHEM and Hack'EM.

UnNetHack

In UnNetHack, a hero or monster reading a cursed or uncursed scroll of stinking cloud while confused will generate up to 3 gas spores adjacent to them.

One type of random vault that can be encountered is a "room with sessile growths", which may contain several gas spores.

dNetHack

In dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack, beholders that are randomly generated outside the Chaos Temple Quest are always accompanied by up to four gas spores.

xNetHack

In xNetHack, pets will not attack a gas spore if the hero is adjacent to it.

xNetHack also adds the "sessile growth" random vault as a themed room, and includes an additional themed room that is mostly or entirely filled with gas spores.

SpliceHack

In SpliceHack, reading a scroll of elementalism while confused has a 1⁄4 chance of summoning gas spores, which are tame if the scroll was blessed and read by a hero and will otherwise be hostile.

Encyclopedia entry

The attack by those who want to die
-- this is the attack against which you cannot prepare a perfect defense.
                               --Human aphorism

[ The Dosadi Experiment, by Frank Herbert ]

References

  1. ↑ src/explode.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 198: start of explode() function
  2. ↑ src/explode.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 355-L363
  3. ↑ src/explode.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 645-L650
  4. ↑ src/explode.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 690-L695
  5. ↑ src/mon.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 3199-L3235
  6. ↑ src/explode.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 678
  7. ↑ src/explode.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 217: inside_engulfer boolean
  8. ↑ src/explode.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 473-L476
  9. ↑ src/explode.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 534-L539
  10. ↑ src/explode.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 540-L544: damage for monster grabbing a hero caught in explosion
  11. ↑ src/explode.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 620-L625: damage for hero grabbing a monster caught in explosion
  12. ↑ src/explode.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 582-L585
  13. ↑ src/mhitu.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 2522-L2532: hero goes boom
  14. ↑ src/explode.c in NetHack 5.0.0, line 591: hero is saved for last when calculating explosion damage
Retrieved from "https://nethackwiki.com/index.php?title=Gas_spore&oldid=204673"