Stoning resistance

Stoning resistance is a resistance property in NetHack that protects a hero or monster against the effects of stoning.

Description

Stoning resistance prevents the hero and monsters that have the property from being affected by the stoning attacks and properties of the following monsters:

• Cockatrices and chickatrices, who can turn victims to stone with their touch attacks and hissing, bare-skin contact with their bodies, bare-skin contact with their corpses or flesh from their tins, and consuming or being hit by their eggs
• Medusa, who can turn victims to stone with her passive gaze attack (for the hero only), as well as stoning anyone that consumes her corpse or tin

Sources

Stoning resistance can be obtained extrinsically by wearing either yellow dragon scales or yellow dragon scale mail.

Stoning resistance also occurs intrinsically in the following monsters, with an asterisk (*) denoting invalid polymorph forms:

• All quest nemeses*
• All acidic monsters
  • b acid blobs and b gelatinous cubes
  • j spotted jellies and j ochre jellies
  • D yellow dragons, D baby yellow dragons and the D Chromatic Dragon*
  • F green molds
  • N black nagas and N black naga hatchlings
  • all P
• all monsters capable of stoning:
  • c chickatrices and c cockatrices
  • @ Medusa*, who is special-cased to resist all forms of stoning except her reflected gaze
• g gargoyles and g winged gargoyles
• all v
• all y
• all E
• W wraiths
• X xorns
• Z skeletons
•   ghosts* and   shades*
• ' stone golems - other golems that are petrified will turn into stone golems
• & sandestins*, & Juiblex*, & Death*, & Pestilence*, & Famine*, & mail daemons*, and & djinn*
• : lizards, whose meat can cure delayed stoning

A hero that fully eats a corpse or tin from any of the monsters listed above has a chance of gaining temporary stoning resistance if they do not have the property at all, which depends on that monster's level: this temporary stoning resistance lasts for 3-18 turns, and will not expire while the hero is eating something that causes stoning until that meal is finished. Additionally, a hero that polymorphs into any of the listed monsters without asterisks will gain stoning resistance for the duration of that polymorph.

Strategy

Turning into a monster with stoning resistance, or else eating the corpse of one, is a viable method to either prevent stoning when dealing with severe stoning dangers (e.g. groups of several footrices) or else to abort delayed stoning inflicted on the hero—lizard corpses are the best options in both scenarios, since they can be bitten into the immediately cure stoning and finishing off a corpse will have a chance of preventing further stoning for a few turns. Stoning-resistant monsters can also wield footrice corpses if they have weapon attacks, so beware if such a hostile monster picks one up!

History

Stoning resistance is formally defined in NetHack 3.3.0. From this version to NetHack 3.6.7, including some variants based on those versions, monsters that are flagged as granting stoning resistance when their corpse or tin is eaten do not grant the property, since there is no actual feature implemented that reads the appropriate flag.

NetHack 5.0.0 implements such a feature in granting temporary stoning resistance to a hero that consumes those monsters via commit 071d79dc, commit e96d4ea9 and commit 05cf9480—this version also adds stoning resistance to yellow dragon scales and yellow dragon scale mail via commit ef1eeed7, which adds secondary properties to most forms of dragon armor. Additionally, a bug in commit a311f4b4–which enables stoning resistance and other properties to be gained from carrying certain artifacts–causes the game to not check the hero's current form for stoning resistance when they touch a footrice corpse, which is fixed via commit 76b5bbe6.

Messages

This tastes just like chicken!

You ate a footrice corpse while you had stoning resistance.

You feel less concerned about becoming petrified.

You obtained temporary stoning resistance by eating a monster's corpse or tin.

You no longer feel secure from petrification.

Your temporary stoning resistance expired.

Variants

Some NetHack variants implement other sources of stoning resistance, which may or may not include the ability to gain temporary stoning resistance from eating corpses or tins.

dNetHack

In dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack, Monks gain intrinsic stoning resistance at experience level 27.

FIQHack

In FIQHack, yellow dragon scales and yellow dragon scale mail grant stoning resistance as well as acid resistance while worn.