Template talk:Monster

The terms resistances and resistances conveyed should be changed to instrinsics and intrinsics conveyed. See leprechaun for a good example. They only convey teleportitis and it seems stupid to have to write teleportitis as a resistance (to what?).Addps4cat 16:44, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

The attributes of this template should be documented here. Where do you get the difficulty number and what's its scale? --ZeroOne 21:25, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

It might be the ring of warning number, but I am not sure how that would work... --Kernigh 00:03, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

The numbers are given in the Monster Manual. I still don't know if they have some meaning in the source or if they even exist there or not. --ZeroOne 21:10, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

i believe difficulty is generated by util/makedefs.c, see mstrength() in there --paxed

See monsters (by difficulty). Addps4cat 13:41, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Shouldn't this template also include the tty-symbol, like u, and the vanilla tile? --paxed

Should it include HP? Lotte 16:18, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

It's sort of complicated. See NetHackWiki:Ask an expert#Monster HP?. Addps4cat 13:41, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to see the following info added to the template:

Hazards to eating the corpse
Probability of incurring said hazards
Probability of gaining resistances from eating the corpse

Any thoughts?

I also notice that when referring to a monster page, in addition to Difficulty and Attacks, I always want to know what Resistances it has. Any thoughts on adding/moving Resistances above the 'show details' link? Perhaps it could be moved back down once 'show details' is clicked? (I don't know that much about wiki coding

I don't think that should all go in the template. Maybe just list it in the wiki page. As it is the template is already too big. Addps4cat 13:41, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Why is there so much data we're trying to cram into the narrow monster template? Why not change the monster template layout to have both a wide main section and the current narrow section to address all the types of information to be conveyed? Or maybe have a wide template across the top of the monster page that gives quick details, then have the expandable narrow section on the right provide some of the more (subjectively!) "optional" data? That's my 2¢. — Qwip 14:39, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I second this motion, it's just a big messy box that interferes with the rest of the page at this point. Addps4cat 16:00, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Incorrect capitalization

I notice that this template lowercases the first letter of the monster's name. This is fine for ordinary monsters, but produces incorrect results for monsters with unique names (e.g. “Ashikaga Takauji” becomes “ashikaga Takauji”). One workaround would be to explicitly specify the name parameter for uniques; is there a better way? -- Killian 05:52, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

G_NOCORPSE and corpse nutrition

If a monster never leaves a corpse, corpse nutrition is irrelevant; however in monst.c, there are some monsters that never leave a corpse whose nutrition is nonzero (e.g. skeleton Source:monst.c#2182, whose corpse nutrition is 5).

It would be logical to set corpse nutrition to zero on the wiki pages; this is the approach that was taken in http://www.spod-central.org/~psmith/nh/mon2-343.txt for example.

On wikihack, it seems corpse nutrition is listed as it appears in monst.c. Sometimes a comment is added there parenthetically that a corpse is never generated. Sometimes nocorpse=1 is added to the attributes. Sometimes nothing is mentioned.

Can we agree on a standard for this case? Rogerb-on-NAO 20:53, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

The standard should be the use of nocorpse=1 in all the monster wiki pages (if the monster leaves no corpse, of course). The lack of a standard for this seems to be from people not being aware of the new parameters for the monster template. Using the attributes parameter is technically optional and the template will be generated just fine without it, but that was done to keep backward compatibility for many pages that weren't expecting new parameters to be defined. I figured someone would have updated all the pages so that the newer parameters (i.e. attributes and reference) are used (since I took a long break from NetHack and NetHackWiki), but that didn't happen. ;) —Shijun 10:49, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

An old comment, but monsters should still list nutrition even if they never leave a corpse. It's still possible to "eat" them through engulfing attacks. If the monster would leave a corpse (ignoring NO_CORPSE), then you gain half the nutrition you would have gotten from eating the corpse regularly. Resistances, however, can never be conveyed through engulfing, so even if a lich "conveyes" cold resistance, it's impossible to get it. -- Qazmlpok 16:30, June 1, 2010 (UTC)

Gehennom-only tag and newbie misconceptions

Quite often, people will encounter some Gehennom-only monster created e.g. by a polymorph trap and helpfully update the monsters wiki page with something like "created only in Gehennom and the Gnomish Mines", e. g. Bone_devil. I propose someone knowledgable please change the "frequency" tag to "frequency (by [[normal mechanism]]s)". I'm volunteering to write up an according "normal mechanisms" page that points people the right places. -Tjr 15:22, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Done. --paxed 16:38, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Eating habits should go in template

Please add a clear statement on monsters' eating habits to the template, even if it doesn't eat anything. This matters for the decision when you stop dragging your pet over that polytrap. Monsters can be

carnivorous (e. g. cats)
herbivorous (e. g. horses)
omnivorous (e. g. the player)
non-eating (e. g. vampires, demons, angelic beings)
metallivorous (xorn, rock mole; rust monster if rustprone)
special cases (e. g. ghoul, gelatinous cube)

Also, some monsters can be tamed with appropriate food. -Tjr 14:48, June 1, 2010 (UTC)

Currently, eating habits are listed as part of the attributes template. Do you want this information added as a separate "Diet" section of the monster template, or as an expansion to the attributes? -- Qazmlpok 16:30, June 1, 2010 (UTC)

Basically, I want to know if a monster (e. g. salamander) really doesn't eat or if somebody forgot to put that info in. A separate diet section or an explicit carnivorous/non-eating/... tag both sound like good ideas how to go about it. Tjr 17:09, June 1, 2010 (UTC)

There are 3 main flags for eating; M1_CARNIVORE, M1_HERBIVORE, and M1_OMNIVORE. Omnivore is just the other two at the same time (M1_CARNIVORE|M1_HERBIVORE), and inediate is the absence of both. There is no separate flag for being inediate, and technically a rust monster or rock mole is considered inediate, as they have neither 'vore flag. Typically, if the attributes section is present, it's usually also comprehensive; I think most people that fill it in use autogenerating tools to do it, like myself. Finally, the inediate page does exist, and I believe it mentions every monster that will actually eat nothing -- Qazmlpok 17:37, June 1, 2010 (UTC)

So if the information is present, why not assemble it in an easy-to-find way? Tjr 12:07, June 2, 2010 (UTC)

Why not? Well, because someone would have to modify the template and possibly many existing monster pages. I'm not going to touch the actual template myself. Eating habits are somewhat complicated, especially if you want to go through the Diet route. There's herbivorous, omnivorous, carnivorous, and inediate, and then potentially metal on top of all that. Umber hulks technically eat rock (Chewing through rock while polymorphed into an umber hulk both gives nutrition and breaks foodless), and mind flayers eat brains. There are plenty of other special cases, and tons in SLASH'EM.

Marking monsters as inediate would require either a new "|inediate=1" flag to attributes, or to somehow determine the lack of "|carnivorous=1" etc and add it automatically. The latter wouldn't require going through every inediate monster and adding the new flag, but I know nothing about the programming logic used in the templates so I don't know how difficult it is to fill in text given the absence of flags. And, of course, adding a new Diet section to the monster template itself would require modifying every monster on the wiki. At the very least though, I consider the phrases "Eats fruits and vegetables" and "eats corpses" to be unclear, and if nothing else I think they should be replaced with "is herbivorous" and "is carnivorous" or similar. -- Qazmlpok 13:25, June 2, 2010 (UTC)

I changed the Template:attributes, so it now shows "does not eat" if none of the 'vore flags are present. Is that sufficient? There should probably be a link to a page that lists exceptions, or something, at least... --paxed 14:05, June 2, 2010 (UTC)

Corpse hazards should go in template

Suggested by DemonSlayerThe3rd, the edibililty of a corpse should be documented in the monster template. I'm thinking of a line like:

Aggravate monster, teleportitits, speed toggling, nurse healing, wraith level gain, and troll revival are borderline cases. They should probably be covered by "intrinsics conveyed". Tjr 13:44, September 17, 2010 (UTC)

Vegan/Vegetarian/Meat is lookup - "All <classes> are vegan, all <classes> are vegetarian, all others are meat.

Elf/Orc/Human etc is already mentioned in Attributes. Also, I'm not sure it's cannibalism if you digest them.

As is Poisonous/Acidic

Food poisoning affects all corpses except lichens and acid blobs. I don't think it should be mentioned at all.

Edible is a misnomer if you intended it as an alternative to those choices. Only the riders are truly inedible. Poisonous corpses quickly become edible, acidic corpses quickly don't do enough damage to be inedible, stunning/hallucinogenic corpses are edible after obtaining a unicorn horn, sliming and stoning corpses are edible in extreme circumstances (polymorph, or sliming if you're desperate and have a source of fire). Polymorph-inducing can be helpful; it's not always bad, etc.

Polymorph-incuding, were, stunning, sliming, and stoning are done by lookup; these specific monsters cause these problems, others do not. Hallucination is caused by being a purple fungus or by having a stunning attack.

Just comments on implementation of this. I don't know how difficult it is to do the lookup stuff in the template itself. Either way it'll probably require modifying every single template on the site, although that wouldn't be too bad since some of them lack details anyways. -- Qazmlpok 15:50, September 17, 2010 (UTC)

My exact words on the matter were, "Also, on the template for the monsters, I believe there should be an "Etibility" section where you put whether it's vegan, safe to eat and what not." I know there are several thing that come up with this, but I think this suggestion should just be out here. An example would be for instance, a hill orc. I belive the Edibility section would go below the Nutritional value (by positions). It would then list:

hill orc
Weight	1000
Nutritional value	200
Edibility	meaty safe to eat otherwise
Size	Medium

It could be something like this. Maybe different wording but this is a general idea.

Now let's use a yellow mold as an example:

yellow mold
Weight	50
Nutritional value	30
Edibility	vegan poisonous hallucinogenic
Size	Small

As you can see, the effects of eating it are listed as well.

I hope this all makes sense. Remember, this is an idea of what it might look like.

PS: how do you move Tables? XD✑DemonSlayerThe3rd♠ 19:37, September 17, 2010 (UTC)

A flag for newbies it's safe to eat without precautions, and fleshing out an edibility section would be good.

Elf/Orc/Human/etc, Poisonous/Acidic, and most of the more specific hazards would be moved there. Undead always leave old corpses, which should be mentioned briefly. Vegan implies vegetarian, poisonous implies "unsafe without proper resisstance" etc - I don't think that need be repeated. The benefit would be a one-stop place to check if the corpse is safe your for current character, targeted at intermediate players. Tjr 17:54, September 17, 2010 (UTC)

So something more like this? (edited tables)✑DemonSlayerThe3rd♠ 19:37, September 17, 2010 (UTC)

That's great. I'd volunteer to do the work if I could. Tjr 22:34, September 17, 2010 (UTC)

I'd go around and edit as well. But I'd need a full list of all monsters and I'll be in wizard mode for a while. XD So if this goes into effect, I'll help s much as I can. Also, until I learn how to work with the type of editing format (the example on the page this talk page is about), I will only easily be able to add in the Edibility section to the other edit style (that shows the visual).✑DemonSlayerThe3rd♠ 04:06, September 18, 2010 (UTC)

Remove "Other attributes" header

The "Other attributes" header is redundant; attributes already lists "A <monster>:". It also takes up half of the horizontal space. So I removed it. Jafet @.& 10:29, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Monster sounds

What do people think of adding a field for the sounds the monster makes when #chatted to (eg MS_SILENT, MS_ORC, etc)? Perhaps it could link to a page that catalogs all the sounds monsters make under different circumstances, similar to Talking to vampires. -Ion frigate 04:30, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Incorrect weapon usage

Just as in the case of the Minion of Huhetotl, the infoboxes of many weapon-using monsters incorrectly state "physical damage". These vanilla monsters are affected: Hobbit, Mordor_orc, Uruk-hai, Orc-captain, Goblin, Hobgoblin, Orc, Hill_orc, Giant, Stone_giant, Hill_giant, Fire_giant, Frost_giant, Storm_giant, Titan, Troll, Ice_troll, Rock_troll, Olog-hai, Barrow_wight, Woodland-elf, Green-elf, Grey-elf, Elf-lord, Elvenking, Doppelganger, Guard, Aligned_priest, Soldier, Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Croesus, Water_demon, Horned_devil, Erinys, Bone_devil, Yeenoghu, Orcus, Dispater, Sandestin, Lord_Carnarvon, Pelias, Shaman_Karnov, Hippocrates, King_Arthur, Arch_Priest, Orion, Master_of_Thieves, Lord_Sato, Twoflower, Norn, Neferet_the_Green, Thoth_Amon, Cyclops, Nalzok, Master_Assassin, Ashikaga_Takauji, Lord_Surtur, Dark_One.

Additionally, ranged weapons are handled inconsistently - sometimes, they are declared, sometimes not. Which monsters can use polearms?

Perhaps it would be best to re-do all monster templates from scratch. --Tjr 05:49, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Polearm usage cannot be determined automatically (using nhtohtml) from monst.c, AFAIK. --paxed 06:55, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Same with ranged weapons. Centaurs is one example that has ranged attacks declared, but monst.c simply declares it as a weapon attack (and thus so does nhtohtml). If someone knows how Nethack determines if a monster can wield polearms or use a bow, or throw daggers, it might be possible to modify the scripts to include that information.

Modifying all of those monster templates to state 'weapon' instead of 'physical' is certainly possible. I'm pretty sure that a lot of templates also have incorrect experience values and/or missing percentages on resistances conveyed, so it certainly wouldn't hurt to go through all of the templates and standardize them. -- Qazmlpok 13:03, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I fixed the infoboxes for the above monsters, as well as a few others that were missing (such as zombies). The infoboxes now state "Weapon" (or "Claw", etc.) instead of "Physical". --Erica 05:26, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

slashem monster frequency

A lot of mostly-SLASHEM monsters still have monster frequency specied in the "old", non-numeric way:

Could those be fixed, please? --Tjr 15:20, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

I think I'm done with the vanilla monsters, and I'll get to the others as soon as possible. --Erica 05:27, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Covetous attribute, diet attributes

The "covetous" flag currently says that the monster wants "your quest artifact" among others. The only monster using this flag is the Wizard of Yendor, who in current versions can steal any quest artifact, so I'd suggest making the template say the monster wants "all quest artifacts". I don't know offhand if the Wizard will pick up other QAs from the floor or fight other monsters for them, but by far the most common case is him stealing them from you, so I think it's a safe change.

Describing monsters as "eats corpses" or "eats fruits" is vague and misleading (carnivores won't eat lichen corpses, herbivores also eat carrots, and so forth). I think "is <carnivorous|herbivorous|omnivorous>" would be much more clear. "Does not eat" can probably be left alone, or changed to "is inediate" for consistency. --Darth l33t (talk) 17:54, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Late seconding here, clarity would be a big plus. --Umbire the Phantom (talk) 13:49, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

I've clarified Template:Attributes regarding diet (although I left "can eat metal" and "does not eat" the same). There is more than one monster using covetous - I recently did a change so that wantsall and covetous, which had the exact same description, didn't both show up - so this will need further investigation. (I think I may see about automatically adding some categories such as "Covetous" to help keep track of what's what.) -Actual-nh (talk) 17:23, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

According to vanilla monst.c, the Wizard is the only one with M3_COVETOUS, and nothing has M3_WANTSALL (M3_COVETOUS was probably meant to be a mask to be applied against M3 to test whether a monster coveted anything, but in practice it's interchangeable with M3_WANTSALL). If anything else uses M3_COVETOUS, it's probably something from a variant. I think we might need a separate attribute/monster template for variants, because a variant could add new fields and/or change existing flags in a way that's incompatible with the vanilla template. Then we could update the vanilla covetous flag to match the Wizard's behavior. --Darth l33t (talk) 22:25, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

(In vanilla (3.7.0, but I don't think it's changed), M3_WANTSALL and M3_COVETOUS are actually the exact same value - the "OR" of the various WANTS flags.) I'll see sometime soon (might be tonight, might be later in the week) about adding categories to check on variant usage; good point about those. -Actual-nh (talk) 22:50, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

I have added Category:Wantsarti, Category:Wantsall, and Category:Covetous - use of this template (or, to be more precise, Template:Attributes) with each of these flags automatically adds them to the appropriate category. I should probably rename the last to Category:CovetousFlag and have Category:Covetous include anything that is covetous - as in, has any of wants* or covetous. -Actual-nh (talk) 00:11, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

I've added the various categories. It looks like the main question is if people are incorrectly tagging things as wantsall, covetous, or both - particularly with sometimes also having other more-specific tags - or if this is due to variants... or a mixture of the two, which is what I suspect. -Actual-nh (talk) 20:09, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Redlinked tiles

Does anyone know if it would be possible to make the monster's tile simply not display if the corresponding link is a redlink? That would clean up the displayed templates for variant monsters, while not breaking anything for whenever someone does get around to uploading the tile. -Ion frigate (talk) 17:49, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Source references point to NetHack 3.6.1 source

I'm cleaning up articles with old versions, and I noticed the "Reference" parameter refers to NetHack 3.6.1 source hosted on this wiki. So does the "Refline" parameter. This is already a little off, and it's going to be a problem when NetHack 3.7.0 releases.

Dunno what to do about "Refline". For "Reference", can we change all the callers to use versioned srcref, instead of their current unversioned form? -- Furey (talk) 15:59, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

We're overdue to do something of the sort, but then a lot of the vanilla monsters barely have proper articles to begin with, which is something I've been trying my best to cut into. --Umbire the Phantom (talk) 04:49, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Template talk:Monster

Contents

Incorrect capitalization

G_NOCORPSE and corpse nutrition

Gehennom-only tag and newbie misconceptions

Eating habits should go in template

Corpse hazards should go in template

Remove "Other attributes" header

Monster sounds

Incorrect weapon usage

slashem monster frequency

Covetous attribute, diet attributes

Redlinked tiles

Source references point to NetHack 3.6.1 source

Navigation menu

Template talk:Monster

Incorrect capitalization

G_NOCORPSE and corpse nutrition

Gehennom-only tag and newbie misconceptions

Eating habits should go in template

Corpse hazards should go in template

Remove "Other attributes" header

Monster sounds

Incorrect weapon usage

slashem monster frequency

Covetous attribute, diet attributes

Redlinked tiles

Source references point to NetHack 3.6.1 source

Navigation menu

Search