Sasquatch
Y sasquatch 
| |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 9 |
| Attacks |
Claw 1d6, Claw 1d6, Kick 1d8 |
| Base level | 7 |
| Base experience | 95 |
| Speed | 15 |
| Base AC | 6 |
| Base MR | 0 |
| Alignment | 2 (lawful) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | 1 (Very rare) |
| Genocidable | Yes |
| Weight | 1550 |
| Nutritional value | 750 |
| Size | Large |
| Resistances | None |
| Resistances conveyed | None |
|
A sasquatch:
| |
| Reference | monst.c#line1947 |
A sasquatch, Y, is a type of monster that appears in NetHack. It is a strong and omnivorous apelike creature that has the highest difficulty level among its monster class. Sasquatches have the ability to see invisible, and can be seen via infravision.
A sasquatch possesses a pair of claw attacks and a kick attack.
A player character polymorphed into a sasquatch gains bonuses to kicking.
Generation
Randomly generated sasquatches can generate as peaceful towards lawful characters.
Sasquatches appear among the random Y that make up the second quest monster class for Healers and make up 6⁄175 of the monsters randomly generated on the Healer quest.
Strategy
Sasquatches are the second-fastest apelike creatures at 15 speed, making them difficult to outrun, and can inflict a lot of melee damage with their claws and kicking. Ranged attacks including wands and spells can weaken, slow or kill a sasquatch before it closes in, while a melee-geared character with good AC and speed can match a sasquatch's blows and ideally outlast it.
History
The sasquatch first appears in NetHack 3.1.0.
Origin
"Bigfoot", commonly referred to as Sasquatch, is a large and hairy human-like mythical creature purported to inhabit forests in North America, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Bigfoot is the subject of much enthusiasm among the cryptozoology subculture and its pseudo-scientific study, with various forms of dubious evidence purported to prove Bigfoot's existence, including anecdotal claims of sightings as well as alleged photographs, video and audio recordings, hair samples, and casts of large footprints. Most of the supposed evidence has since been identified as hoaxes or misidentification: the majority of scientists do not find any of the remaining evidence compelling, generally consider Bigfoot to be the result of a combination of folklore, misidentification, and hoax.
Despite this, Bigfoot has since become an enduring element of popular culture. Folklorists trace the phenomenon of Bigfoot to a combination of factors and sources, including indigenous American cultures, the European wild man figure, and folk tales, as well as wishful thinking and a cultural increase in environmental concerns. Many tales of wild, hair-covered humanoids, often rooted in indigenous cultures, also exist throughout the world: examples include the Skunk ape of the southeastern United States, the Almas, Yeren, and Yeti in Asia, and the Australian Yowie.
Many regions have differentiating names for the creature: the name Sasquatch in particular is widely used, often interchangeably, with the name Bigfoot in Canada and the United States. The name is anglicized from sasq'ets (sas-kets), roughly translating to "hairy man" in the Halq'emeylem language spoken by the various First Nations peoples of the British Columbia coast - one such culture, the Sts'ailes people, tells stories that describe the sasq'ets as a shapeshifting creature that protects the forest. The sasquatch's kicking bonus in NetHack is a pun on its "Bigfoot" moniker.
Variants
SLASH'EM
In SLASH'EM, sasquatches can be tamed with thrown bananas.
Encyclopedia entry
The name _Sasquatch_ doesn't really become important in Canada until the 1930s, when it appeared in the works of J. W. Burns, a British Columbian writer who used a great deal of Indian lore in his stories. Burn's Sasquatch was a giant Indian who lived in the wilderness. He was hairy only in the sense that he had long hair on his head, and while this Sasquatch lived a wild and primitive life, he was fully human.
Burns's character proved to be quite popular. There was a Sasquatch Inn near the town of Harrison, British Columbia, and Harrison even had a local celebration called "Sasquatch Days."
The celebration which had been dormant for years was revived as part of British Columbia's centennial, and one of the events was to be a Sasquatch hunt. The hunt never took place, perhaps it was never supposed to, but the publicity about it did bring out a number of people who said they had encountered a Sasquatch -- not Burns's giant Indian, but the hairy apelike creature that we have all come to know.
