Special room

Not to be confused with themed room.

A special room is different from the normal rooms of the randomly-generated Dungeons of Doom. For example, it might contain a shop or a collection of monsters. They typically appear in random rooms-and-corridors levels in the Dungeons of Doom, never in mazes or cavern levels, although many special levels also contain special rooms.

NetHack attempts to generate most special rooms in the order they appear in the below table. Rooms lower on the table can only be generated if all rooms higher on the table failed to generate. For example, a temple is created with probability 1/5 from level 9 onwards in an ordinary rooms-and-corridors level in the main dungeon, provided the level does not already have a shop, a throne room, a leprechaun hall or a zoo.

Vaults are an exception: they are generated independently of other special rooms.

Name	Min DL	Frequency	Generation restrictions
Shop	2	3/DL	Must be above Medusa's Island, room must have 1 door and no stairs
Throne room	5	1/6
Leprechaun hall	6	1/8	Leprechauns must not be genocided/extinct
Zoo	7	1/7
Temple	9	1/5
Beehive	10	1/5	Killer bees must not be genocided/extinct
Graveyard	12	1/6
Anthole	13	1/8	Ants must not be genocided/extinct
Barracks	15	1/4	Soldiers must not be extinct
Swamp	16	1/6
Cockatrice nest	17	1/8	Cockatrices must not be genocided/extinct
Vault	1		(Generated independently of other special rooms)

Variants

Many variants add new special rooms or change the behavior of these existing special rooms.

External links

• More information at http://www.steelypips.org/nethack/343/room-343.html