Kitten

f kitten
Difficulty	3
Attacks	Bite 1d6

f kitten
Difficulty	3
Attacks	Bite 1d6
Base level	2
Base experience	20
Speed	18
Base AC	6
Base MR	0
Alignment	0 (neutral)
Frequency (by normal means)	1 (Very rare)
Genocidable	Yes
Weight	150
Nutritional value	150
Size	Small
Resistances	None
Resistances conveyed	Intrinsic aggravate monster
A kitten: has no hands. is an animal. is carnivorous. can be tamed by feeding. wanders randomly. can be seen through infravision.
Reference	monst.c#line345

A kitten, f, is a type of monster that appears in NetHack. It is a small and carnivorous domestic feline that can be seen via infravision. Kittens can be tamed by throwing any type of meat or rations that they can eat at them, and can be pacified by throwing veggy food at them.

A kitten has a single bite attack.

Eating a kitten corpse or tin will confer the aggravate monster intrinsic, unless the character is an orc or a Caveman.

Chatting to a kitten will give various responses, depending on its tameness and condition.

Generation

Randomly generated kittens may generate as peaceful towards neutral characters. A kitten can grow up into a housecat.

The kitten is one of the most commonplace starting pets in NetHack - many roles can start with a kitten as their default pet, with the Caveman, Ranger and Samurai receiving a little dog instead, and the Knight receiving a saddled pony. The Wizard always starts with a kitten as their default pet.

A tame kitten can be created via the spell of create familiar, with a default ¹⁄₆ chance if no preferred pet type is set.

Strategy

As hostile monsters, kittens can be annoying or even threatening to early characters that do not have a spare food item to throw in order to get them off their back - cream pies, eggs, and melons are not suitable choices, since they will splatter on the kitten's face. Veggy food such as lichen corpses will reliably pacify a hostile kitten without giving up a food source.

Once a character finds their footing and establishes a basic kit, they may want to keep a veggy food item such as an apple or pear around to pacify kittens and other domestic carnivores they do not want to fight or keep as pets - running across a named kitten is a potential sign of a bones level. Kittens may also be worth taming to polymorph for players with interest in exotic pets.

As pets

The starting kitten that many characters enter the dungeon with can be invaluable in the early stages of the game: they move at 18 speed and have a bite attack that can weaken or make quick work of early hostiles, and lucky kittens that do not trigger counterattacks can easily survive fights. Conversely, kittens are not smart enough to avoid monsters with passive attacks, such as acid blobs or floating eyes, and starting pets are weaker than their wild counterparts within the dungeon. They are also extremely vulnerable to traps such as falling rock traps and rolling boulder traps, and many are killed by one within the first hundred turns of a game.

Chatting with a tamed kitten can provide an idea of how it is feeling.

Below is a table describing how much weight in objects a domestic carnivore at a particular stage of growth can carry, which is generally applicable for credit cloning and otherwise ripping off shopkeepers - remember that cats and dogs can only pick up a single object at a time:

Pet type	Corpse wt	Can carry unassisted	in uncursed bag of holding	in blessed bag of holding
kitten/little dog	150	51	72	144
housecat/dog	200 / 400	68 / 137	106 / 244	212 / 488
large cat/large dog	250 / 800	1000	1970	3940

History

The kitten first appears in NetHack 3.0.0, where it is introduced as an alternate starting pet option to the little dog: the Caveman will always start with a little dog, the Wizard will always start with a kitten, and other roles will randomly receive one of either. NetHack 3.0.8 allows an option of either pet to be set for characters in other roles. The Samurai's default little dog is introduced in NetHack 3.1.0, while NetHack 3.3.0 adds the default little dog for Rangers and establishes the saddled pony as the Knight's starting pet.

In NetHack 3.4.3 and earlier versions, including some variants based on those versions, kittens are capable of picking up item stacks so long as that stack does not exceed their carrying capacity.

Origin

A juvenile cat is generally referred to as a kitten: while this applies primarily to the domestic cat, young animals of other species are also sometimes called kittens, such as rabbits, rats or badgers. After being born, kittens are fully dependent on their mothers for survival, and normally do not open their eyes for seven to ten days. After about two weeks, kittens develop quickly and begin to explore the world outside their nest. After a further three to four weeks, they begin to eat solid food and grow baby teeth. Domestic kittens are highly social animals and usually enjoy human companionship.

Messages

<The kitten> yowls.

Your tame kitten is caught in a trap, confused, scared, or at low tameness.

<The kitten> whimpers.

A leashed tame kitten is near a square with a trap.

<The kitten> meows.

A tame kitten is currently hungry.

<The kitten> purrs.

A tame kitten will become hungry in 1000 turns or less.

<The kitten> snarls.

You chatted to a peaceful kitten.

<The kitten> growls!

You chatted to a hostile kitten.

Variants

SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM, kittens and their other growth stages have their frequency raised to 7, and they do not randomly generate in Gehennom.

A kitten is generated on the first map of the Mall at level creation.

UnNetHack

In UnNetHack, a kitten is generated on the second map of the Town branch's shop-filled floor at level creation.

Kittens appear among the random f that are part of the second quest monster class for Cavepeople and make up ⁶⁄₁₇₅ of the monsters randomly generated on the Caveman quest.

TNNT (the game)

In TNNT (the game), the robotfindskitten special level has a kitten hidden among one of several random glyphs that print random descriptions upon interacting by bumping into them - one of the TNNT achievements is obtained by finding this kitten, which generates as peaceful for characters observing petless conduct, and will otherwise be tame.

Kittens named Micka and Poes each have a ¹⁄₅ chance of being generated within the DevTeam Office rooms behind secret doors at level creation.

One of the TNNT achievements requires the hero's starting pet to survive to its last growth stage, e.g. the starting kitten has to become a large cat.

SlashTHEM

In addition to SLASH'EM details, SlashTHEM also includes the Town branch and the map containing the kitten.

Kittens appear among the random f that are part of the second quest monster class for Cavepeople and make up ⁶⁄₁₇₅ (3%) of the monsters randomly generated on the Caveman quest, as in UnNetHack. Kittens also appear among the random f that are part of the first quest monster class for Zookeepers and make up ²⁴⁄₁₇₅ (14%) of the monsters randomly generated on the Zookeeper quest.

Hack'EM

In Hack'EM, kittens and their other growth stages that can generate randomly (i.e. excluding the fat cat) have their frequency raised to 3 rather than 7, and can randomly generate in Gehennom - all other SLASH'EM details apply. Hack'EM also includes the Town branch, which both includes the map that appears in SlashTHEM and UnNetHack and the Mall maps from SLASH'EM.

Encyclopedia entry

Well-known quadruped domestic animal from the family of
predatory felines (_Felis ochreata domestica_), with a thick,
soft pelt; often kept as a pet. Various folklores have the
cat associated with magic and the gods of ancient Egypt.
 
So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people
awakened at dawn - behold! Every cat was back at his
accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped,
yellow and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did
the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content.

[ The Cats of Ulthar, by H.P. Lovecraft ]