Talk:Statue

During inventory, statues are often described as 'empty.' What might a non-empty statue contain? And how might one access the contents? (unsigned comment by 16:18, 16 March 2006 N8chz)

I do not remember all the details, but...

If you hit a monster with a cockatrice corpse, it becomes a statue. The monster inventory becomes the statue contents. So the statue of a grid bug that I sometimes carry around is empty, because grid bugs normally carry nothing. To get the contents, the only method I know is to learn the stone to flesh spell, cast it on a statue, then kill the resulting monster and take the dropped items. --Kernigh 20:26, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

You can also smash the statue to rubble and take its contents from the pile. Polymorphing the statue isn't recommended, as if you polymorph any container into a non-container (in this case, likely a boulder), the contents are lost. GreyKnight 15:45, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

I like Oracle statues

My wizard found a spellbook of finger of death in one :P Fredil Yupigo 21:42, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Wow, this will make my adventures to Sokoban much more fun! LOL!- - DemonSlayerThe3 :: The Neutral Gnomish Wizard, with my kitten Ellinis! 00:10, September 17, 2010 (UTC)

Oracle statue weight

Why do not the oracle statues weigh the same every game? Sometimes, I can lift some, but not all foo centaur statues (individually).

Their weight should be 3/2*corpse weight + inventory weight. This also occurrs when all involved statues are empty and depict the same monster type. -Tjr 13:09, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Weight measurements in one wizard mode game:

Monster type	Measured weight	Predicted weight
Forest centaur	22	3825
Forest centaur	1275	3825
Mountain centaur	15	3825
Mountain centaur	45	3825
Plains centaur	600	3750
Plains centaur	30	3750
Plains centaur	1350	3750
Plains centaur	225	3750

-Tjr 13:40, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

The same code is responsible for C343-36: Weight of corpses on special levels may not be calculated correctly, which will be fixed in next version. --paxed 11:51, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Oracle Probabilities

I never was happy with the table on steelypips, since it averaged out the probability over several levels and then tabulated the chances of finding certain numbers of spellbooks. I wrote up a quick Python script to randomly generate millions of levels' worth of Oracle statues and add up the numbers of spellbooks. Weird thing is that even with millions of runs, I still seem to only get one decimal place of accuracy. (e.g. Level 6 matches level 7 up to the first decimal only.) Probably need to go back and read some math texts again to see why that happens. If anyone needs it, I can upload the script, if given basic instructions about how/where to do that. --AileTheAlien 20:12, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

BTW, if somebody is currently taking an undergraduate class with probabilities, calculating the exact chances would be a great way to study for exams. Plus it would be infinitly accurate, and not just a close approximation. --AileTheAlien 20:20, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

The probabilities are wrong because they do not account for monster size. mkobj.c, line 607 checks if the statue is not "very small", and only on that condition makes a book with (level/2 /(level/2 + 10)) chance. --Tjr 23:57, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Should have been more explicit; The probabilities were not matching because between simulating the even/odd levels, I was getting different dice rolls on my pseudorandom number generator. Hence they did not match exactly. Anyways, I wrote the program which calculates the exact probabilities, all even/odd levels match, and it's accurate to more decimals than are used in the chart. Done. --AileTheAlien 03:31, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

whacking a statue with an ax might be a Bad Idea

i added the messages for applying an ax to a statue rather than a pick-axe because, scanning the source, it looks like it can kill you. a mister Umbire the Phantom has since come and deleted my comment that this is "probably a bad idea."

i don't want to say for sure "this can kill you" because i'm not perfectly versed in the source code, but the line to which i referred in my annotation, in dig.c, says:

if (vibrate) losehp(2, "axing a hard object", KILLED_BY);

so it seems kinda dangerous. anyone have a better idea of how to express this to newbies without offending mister umbrie, who asked me to "Avoid additional comments like that" when he deleted it?D4 wryyyy (talk) 09:27, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

I removed that not because of any perceived """offensiveness""", but because it doesn't seem to make much sense to presume new players would try it to begin with. --Umbire the Phantom (talk) 15:24, 23 December 2021 (UTC)