Riders

This article is about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. For the use of monsters as steeds, see riding.

The Riders collectively refers to a group of monsters that appear in NetHack, and are among the last bosses that the hero will encounter. The name is short for the Riders of the Apocalypse, and the group consists of three monsters: Death, Famine, and Pestilence, &.

Common traits

All three Riders are part of the demon monster class, and are neutral humanoid monsters that are strong, have infravision, can see invisible, can be seen via infravision, are capable of flight and regeneration, and can follow a hero to other levels if they are adjacent (though this is never seen in normal play).

Corpses and revival

A Rider will revive from their corpse if they are destroyed - the revival has a ¹⁄₃ chance of occurring each turn, with a guaranteed revival after 500 turns, and revival always occurs in response to something that would prevent it otherwise:

• A tinning kit is applied to the corpse.
• The hero or a monster attempts to pick the corpse up.
• The hero attempts to sacrifice the corpse.
• A boulder is placed on the same square as its corpse.
• The corpse is teleported.

Rider corpses do not normally rot away. Eating a Rider's corpse abuses wisdom and is instantly fatal, including digestion attacks and attempting to eat their brain as a mind flayer or master mind flayer, and the Rider will immediately revive from its corpse even if the eater survives via life saving. If a Rider corpse is somehow eaten by a hero without the hero dying or the corpse reviving, they receive 1 nutrition point and always gain teleport control - the single nutrition point is so that a tinning kit can be used on the Riders and properly trigger the revival effect.

Resistances and teleportation

The Riders possesses many elemental resistances: fire resistance, cold resistance, shock resistance, poison resistance, and stoning resistance. Subjecting the Riders to disintegration will simply cause them to instantly reintegrate. The Riders also have teleport control, which has a ¹²⁄₁₃ chance of placing them adjacent to the hero if they are teleported, and teleporting their corpse fails and revives them.

Armor class and other abilities

All of the Riders have a low natural armor class of -5 and possess touch attacks that deal damage in addition to the special effects each Rider's touch possesses - in the case of Pestilence and Famine, if both attacks land then the second attack will stun the hero. None of these attacks can be blocked by cancellation. Rider touch attacks will have no effect on monsters that they hit, as there are no cases for these damage types when handling combat between monsters, though a second successful hit damages and stuns monsters as they do the hero.

None of the Riders respect Elbereth, and they also ignore the sanctuary effect given to you by a coaligned priest in their temple. In addition, all Riders can unlock doors without an unlocking tool, and will displace other monsters that are in their path unless the monster is occupying a square where a corpse cannot be generated.

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that the information below is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate it.

Per commit 017a8687, as a means of remedying issue #594 the Riders' touch attacks can damage other monsters, depending on various factors:

• Famine's touch attack will not do any damage to inediate monsters.

• Pestilence's attack inflicts disease damage, which can be blocked with immunity to sickness.

• Death's touch does reduced damage to an undead monster.

Generation

All three Riders will always generate on the Astral Plane, where they are each placed in the center of one of the three round rooms at level creation.

The Riders are always generated hostile, and are not a valid form for polymorph. They are always created with 10d8 maximum HP, and their current maximum HP is preserved upon death for revival.

The Riders always leave corpses upon death to ensure they can revive.

The Four Horsemen

Below is a very quick overview of each of the Riders, along with a link to their article.

Death

Death, &, is the embodiment of death, and their touch attacks can be suitably lethal for a hero without magic resistance. Death is also the only one of the Riders to possess drain resistance, and is energized and healed by death magic.

Famine

Famine, &, is the embodiment of starvation, and their touch attacks can drain the hero's nutrition, rendering them weak or even unconscious from hunger. This usually leaves them to either starve, or to much more likely be battered to death by Famine and other nearby hostiles.

Pestilence

Pestilence, &, is the embodiment of plague, and their touch attacks can inflict sickness that eventually kills the hero unless it is cured quickly. Pestilence is uniquely healed by potions of sickness and will quaff them to restore their HP, while potions of healing and similar items and spells have a "sickening" effect on them.

War

You, the hero, are War.

This is revealed by a message printed when the hero attempts to apply a tinning kit to the corpse of one of the Riders, and chatting to one of the other Riders can produce a message referring to the hero as War. Additionally, one of the messages a T-shirt can generate with is "Hello, I'm War!" Finally, the game data that lists each monster and their qualities explicitly describes the player character as War in the comment for the Riders.

Naturally, the hero as War does not possess the same abilities as the other Riders.

Strategy

The Riders are among the toughest of the many obstacles standing between the hero and their goal of ascension at the high altar of their alignment: they have some of the most damaging attacks in the game, and are stationed such that the hero will encounter at least one of them along the path, no matter the layout of the Astral Plane - they are not thwarted by locked doors, and also cannot be reliably circumvented by teleportation or disposal of their corpse, making these methods Bad Ideas to deal with them.

Pestilence is widely considered to be the most dangerous of the trio due to the delayed instadeath from their touch—players often use telepathy to identify which high altar is guarded by Pestilence, and then have the hero explore the other altars first in hopes of avoiding an encounter. Death and Famine are still quite dangerous in their own right: the former's deadly touch can eat away at the hero's maximum HP, and the latter's touch can drain enough nutrition to weaken the hero from hunger, possibly causing them to faint and leaving them at the mercy of the Astral Plane denizens.

The ability of the Riders to stun the hero by landing both of their touch attacks in a round of combat make dealing with them in melee a perilous endeavor, even before taking into consideration the unique dangers of each one - this typically warrants the use of a blessed unicorn horn or other form of healing so that the hero can escape, re-position themselves and/or fight back effectively. Combined with their near-guaranteed ability to revive, the Riders are persistent and deadly threats that pursue the hero while they search for the correct shrine containing their alignment's high altar. For this reason, some heroes opt to carry a helm of opposite alignment to increase their chances of being able to ascend at the first high altar they find.

Despite the deadliness of their touch attacks, and their many elemental resistances alongside regeneration and revival, the Riders can be bested with strong ordinary attacks and highly-enchanted weapons due to their low base HP; the magic missile spell can be used by heroes capable of reliably casting it to defeat them in a few shots or rebounds. Famine and Pestilence are both vulnerable to the wand of death and finger of death, though Death is healed by death rays instead. The expensive camera is the only item that can scare any of the Riders, and is worth bringing to the Astral Plane if you come across one—it is more than possible to handle the Riders without a camera, however, and it is typically not worth spending a wish on unless you have leftover wishes after fully preparing your ascension kit or readying yourself on the Plane of Water.

Eliminating the Riders permanently

Although the normal way to get the Riders off your back is simply to ascend, there are a few methods that are much trickier and are generally sought out for novelty or bragging rights:

• The primary way to permanently banish them is to kill them, then fill every square on the level with monsters so that when they revive, there is nowhere for them to go. When you see the message "You feel much less hassled", a Rider corpse has started to decay, and will eventually rot away, provided that you do nothing to disturb it.
  • Acid blobs are a good candidate for filling up the Astral Plane to dismiss the Riders, as they can be created en masse with scrolls of create monster while confused. As a fallback method if you lack enough scrolls, reading the cursed Book of the Dead will create lots of graveyard monsters and only partially respect extinction, but some of those monsters can be quite dangerous. The Riders cannot swap positions with a monster located in a square that is ineligible for corpse creation.
  • While the level is filled with monsters, you can eat a Rider corpse without it reviving, provided you are wearing an amulet of life saving. (If your meal is interrupted, you will need another amulet.)
  • Attempting to pick up or apply a tinning kit to a Rider corpse will still fail when there is nowhere for it to revive.
• Famine and Pestilence can be tamed with the spell of charm monster if they are level-drained first (though they will resist the spell drain life). Death is immune to level drain.

History

The three Riders first appear in NetHack 3.1.0, alongside the revamped endgame featuring the Astral Plane.

In NetHack 3.4.3 and previous versions, along with some variants based on them, if you polymorph yourself into a green slime, you can turn them to slime—the sliming touch attack is not considered magical. If you want, you can then tame the resulting green slimes. Similarly, a substantial herd of tamed green slimes stands some chance of turning a Rider into a slime, although this is only somewhat less risky. Additionally, a hostile gelatinous cube can engulf Rider corpses without trying to digest them, allowing you to steal them from the cube's inventory using a nymph polyself—if you were capable of lifting 1450 units of weight, you could then use several methods to dispose of the corpse permanently, such as placing it in a cursed bag of holding and then repeatedly looting it without using up any further turns.

NetHack 3.6.0 makes the Riders immune to sliming and polymorph, makes it so that gelatinous cubes cannot engulf their corpses, and grants the Riders their ability to displace other monsters.

The T-shirt message referencing War is added in NetHack 3.6.1.

The inability for Riders to displace monsters located on squares that cannot have corpses created on them (such as a closed door) was added in NetHack 3.6.3, in order to ensure that Rider corpses are created when they are killed.

Origin

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are characters in Revelation, the last book of most common versions of the Christian Bible. They are also known as the Riders of the Apocalypse, hence their collective name in NetHack. The sixth chapter in particular has verses describing them as they appear when the Lamb (representing Jesus) opens six of the seven seals of the Apocalypse—all quotes are cited from the New International Version:

I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest.

Revelation 6:1-2, describing Pestilence—but see below.

I heard the second living creature say, 'Come!' Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other.

Revelation 6:3-4, describing War.

I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, 'A quart of wheat for a day's wages, and three quarts of barley for a day's wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!'

Revelation 6:5-6, describing Famine.

I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him.

Revelation 6:8, describing Death.

They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.

Revelation 6:8-9

The White Horseman

The White Horseman's identity tends to vary widely with the translation of the passages—he is sometimes given the moniker of Conquest, and other times identified as Pestilence, with the latter being far more commonplace in allegories and portrayals within contemporary literature and popular media. While the description given in the chapter's first two verses is closer to the idea of Conquest, the phrasing of the verse following their introductions does give some credence to the idea of Pestilence being one of the Horsemen.

That said, it is a matter of debate as to whether this passage refers to the fourth rider only, or to the four riders as a collective—among information cited to support the Conquest interpretation includes the later appearance of Christ mounted on a white horse in Revelation 19; the recurring motifs of the color white representing righteousness and the idea of Christ as conqueror throughout the Bible as a whole; and the literal conquest of the early Christian community by the Roman Empire and/or Parthian forces (associated with both archery and white horses).

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's 1916 novel, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, provides an early well-known interpretation of the White Horseman as Pestilence: "The horseman on the white horse was clad in a showy and barbarous attire. ... While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad. At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases." NetHack is among the works that make use of this latter interpretation, as are other roguelikes such as ToME.

Messages

Who do you think you are, War?

This is the default response when chatting to a Rider.

Yes... But War does not preserve its enemies...

You attempted to apply a tinning kit to the corpse of a Rider.

The corpse evades your grasp.

As above, but you did not see the corpse revive.

Eating that is instantly fatal.

You attempted to eat a Rider's corpse.

Ingesting that is fatal.

You attempted to eat a Rider's brain as a mind flayer or master mind flayer.

Unfortunately, digesting any of it is fatal.

You used a digestion attack on a Rider.

Related patches

Seven Deadly Sins 1.0
Author	GreyKnight
Download	link
NetHack PatchDB	178

GreyKnight has written a rudimentary patch which occasionally replaces the Riders with some or all of the Seven Deadly Sins; the patch is hosted directly on the NetHack Patch Database.

Variants

Some variants of NetHack make significant changes to the Riders, some of which are in line with their origin.

UnNetHack

In UnNetHack, the Riders generate with three times as much health, and cannot be identified as specific monsters (e.g. via far look) until they enter the hero's line of sight, which reveals their identity.

dNetHack

In dNetHack, notdNetHack, and notnotdNetHack, the Riders are all male primordials. In addition to their traits from NetHack, they are amphibious and breathless, have death resistance, and will turn traitor if somehow tamed. If the hero is a Binder, then 3 Binah sephiroth are generated whenever a Rider is generated or revived (meaning that 9 will be present on the Astral Plane at level creation).

Attempting to sacrifice any of the Riders to The Black Mother will anger her and revive them as usual.

Apocalypse angels are capable of using the Riders' touch attacks against the hero.

War is present in monst.c as a defunct monster, and may have represented an entity separate from the hero.

EvilHack

In EvilHack, the Riders have their monster levels raised to 40 and are given psychic resistance and immunity to sickness, and they generate with 100 + 10d8 HP. They are capable of instantly destroying boulders that block their path on each turn, and will instantly kill tiny monsters rather than displace them to get to the hero. Illithid heroes in base form that attack the Riders in melee will not use their secondary tentacle attack.

All four Riders are also each given a unique monster to serve as a steed:

• Death is generated atop the Pale Horse.
• Pestilence is generated atop the White Horse.
• Famine is generated atop the Black Horse.
• If the hero enters the Astral Plane and is at least fervently aligned (alignment record of 9 or more), they are rightfully recognized as War and given the Red Horse as their companion, even if they are of a race incapable of riding.

Encyclopedia entry

[Pestilence:] And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals,
and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four
beasts saying, Come and see. And I saw, and behold a white
horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given
unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.

[War:] And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the
second beast say, Come and see. And there went out another
horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon
to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one
another: and there was given unto him a great sword.

[Famine:] And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the
third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black
horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his
hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say,
A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley
for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

[Death:] And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the
voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and
behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death,
and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over
the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with
hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

[ Revelation of John, 6:1-8 ]