Themed room
The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 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.
Themed rooms are introduced in commit 9b74ea0b. This page is up-to-date as of commit ae452e0a.Themed rooms are a type of rare room that appear in NetHack, based on the 'random vaults' of UnNetHack. Some themed rooms are simply unusual shapes, while others have contents unlike those that appear anywhere else.
Themed rooms are not the same as special rooms, though the distinction is not obvious at first. Special rooms are implemented in C, don't have special terrain (apart from throne rooms), and fill most spaces of the room with monster and object contents, whereas themed rooms are implemented in Lua and may have more sophisticated terrain and contents. There are fewer types of special room than themed room, and most special room types are more common than any particular themed room. Occasionally, a room will generate that is both themed and special, appearing as a special room with a non-rectangular shape.
There are two separate tables in the source code: one of themed room templates, and the other of themed room fills. Templates define the shape of the themed room, whether it is eligible to be a special room, whether it will get filled with contents like an ordinary room, and whether or not it will get a themed room fill. A template may also define a fixed set of room terrain and contents. Meanwhile, fills define the contents of a themed room, but in a way that must be agnostic to the shape of the room, so they can be applied to a wide variety of "blank" room shapes.
Currently, there are no room combinations that would result in a themed room fill overlapping with a special room; this is unlikely to change, but there's no reason why it couldn't happen.
Generation
There is a 37⁄1037 chance (approximately 3.56%) that the game will attempt to place a themed room instead of a normal random room.
In wizard mode, themed room generation will respect the environment variables THEMERM and THEMERMFILL. It will try to place the requested themed room (or fill) 50% of the time and an ordinary room the other 50% of the time. If both THEMERM and THEMERMFILL are specified at the same time, it will attempt to make the given themed room with the given fill 50% of the time and still make the other half of rooms ordinary.
List of room templates
| Name | Frequency | Can be special | Normal room contents | Map | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| default | 1000 | Yes | Yes | A common rectangular room. | |
| Fake Delphi | 1 | Yes (either room) | Yes (both rooms) | A 11×9 room with a 3×3 room in its center, imitating Delphi. | |
| Room in a room | 1 | Yes (either room) | Yes (both rooms) | A random room with a random subroom. | |
| Huge room with another room inside | 1 | Yes (either room) | Yes (both rooms) | A very large room, with a 90% chance of containing a subroom. | |
| Nesting rooms | 1 | Yes (any room) | Yes (all rooms) | A 9-12 by 9-12 room, containing a large subroom, which itself has a 90% chance of containing a small subroom. Each of these subrooms has at least 1 door and a 15% chance of a second door. | |
| Default room with themed fill | 6 | No | No | This rectangular room always gets a themed fill. | |
| Unlit room with themed fill | 2 | No | No | This rectangular room is always dark, and always gets a themed fill. | |
| Room with both normal contents and themed fill | 2 | No | Yes | Unlike the two rooms above, this rectangular room does generate ordinary room contents, but it also always gets a themed fill. | |
| Pillars | 1 | No | No | ------------
|..........| |..........| |..--..--..| |..--..--..| |..........| |..........| |..--..--..| |..--..--..| |..........| |..........| ------------ |
The pillars will be replaced with lava 1⁄7 of the time, pools 1⁄7 of the time, or trees 1⁄7 of the time. |
| Mausoleum | 1 | No | No |
--------- (example)
|.......| |.......| |..---..| |..|.|..| |..---..| |.......| |.......| --------- |
A rectangular room with a 3×3 subroom in the center. There is a 50% chance that there will be a lich, demilich, mummy, vampire or zombie sealed and waiting for you in the center of the room; otherwise there will be a @ corpse. There is a 20% chance that the center will have a secret door; beware. |
| Random dungeon feature in the middle of an odd-sized room | 1 | Yes | Yes | This rectangular room is guaranteed to have an odd width and height so that it has a clear single center point, which is an unusual piece of terrain. This point is randomized among cloud, lava, ice, pool, or tree. | |
| L-shaped | 4 | 70% | Yes | -----
|...| |...| |...---- |......| |......| |......| -------- |
This room may appear rotated. 30% of the time, it will get a themed room fill. |
| Blocked center | 1 | 70% | Yes | A 9×9 room with the central 3×3 spaces filled with lava (70% chance), walls (15% chance) or water (15% chance). When filled with walls, it may be mistaken for the Mausoleum room. 30% of the time, it will get a themed room fill. | |
| Circular, small | 1 | 70% | Yes |
---
--.-- --...-- |.....| --...-- --.-- --- |
30% of the time, this will get a themed room fill. |
| Circular, medium | 1 | 70% | Yes |
-----
--...-- --.....-- |.......| |.......| |.......| --.....-- --...-- ----- |
30% of the time, this will get a themed room fill. |
| Circular, big | 1 | 70% | Yes |
-----
---...--- -.......- --.......-- |.........| |.........| |.........| --.......-- -.......- ---...--- ----- |
30% of the time, this will get a themed room fill. |
| T-shaped | 4 | 70% | Yes |
-----
|...| |...| ----...---- |.........| |.........| |.........| ----------- |
This room may appear rotated. 30% of the time, it will get a themed room fill. |
| S-shaped | 4 | 70% | Yes |
--------
|......| |......| ----......| |......---- |......| |......| -------- |
This room may appear rotated or reflected. 30% of the time, it will get a themed room fill. |
| Cross | 1 | 70% | Yes |
-----
|...| |...| ----...---- |.........| |.........| |.........| ----...---- |...| |...| ----- |
30% of the time, this will get a themed room fill. |
| Four-leaf clover | 1 | 70% | Yes |
----- -----
|...| |...| |...---...| |.........| ---.....--- |.....| ---.....--- |.........| |...---...| |...| |...| ----- ----- |
30% of the time, this will get a themed room fill. |
| Water-surrounded vault | 1 | No | No | The room is not connected to the other rooms, but may appear adjacent to a corridor. It can generate on the same level as an actual vault, but it is not a real vault and cannot contain the portal to Fort Ludios. It contains a giant zombie, ettin zombie, or vampire lord guarding four chests. One of the chests is guaranteed to contain exactly one of the following escape items: a scroll, ring, or wand of teleportation, or a wand of digging. This room is also covered by a teleport exclusion zone so you cannot teleport into it. This room may also be more abundant than its frequency implies, because its small footprint means it can generate late in the level creation process when larger rooms are ineligible. | |
| Twin businesses | 1 | No | No | The room contains two 3×3 (interior space) shop subrooms, consisting of a weapon shop and an armor shop. Each has a 1% chance of being locked. These cannot appear before level difficulty 4, but can appear on a floor which also has a normal shop, as well as on rooms-and-corridors levels below Medusa's Island. |
List of themed room fills
| Name | Notes |
|---|---|
| Ice room | The floor is replaced with ice. 25% of the time, the ice melts under 2000 turns after the level is generated. |
| Cloud room | This room is filled completely with a persistent, non-poisonous vapor cloud, but not actually using the cloud terrain. 25% of spaces in this room contain a sleeping fog cloud monster. |
| Boulder room | Each floor space in the room has a 30% chance of having a boulder or rolling boulder trap. These cannot appear before level difficulty 4. |
| Spider nest | Each floor space in the room has a 30% chance of having a web. If the level difficulty is at least 9, about 80% of the webs will have a giant spider sitting on them. |
| Trap room | 30% of spaces in the room have a trap. All of these traps will be of the same type, and if this room appears early enough in the dungeon, they may generate fake bones piles. They can be arrow traps, dart traps, falling rock traps, bear traps, land mines, sleeping gas traps, rust traps or anti-magic fields. |
| Garden | This room contains multiple sleeping wood nymphs with a 30% chance of a fountain. The walls of the room are replaced by trees. |
| Buried treasure | This room has a chest containing 3d4 random objects buried in the floor. A burned engraving pointing to the treasure ("Dig X east/west Y north/south") is also placed on a random floor space on the level. |
| Buried zombies | This room has zombie corpses buried in roughly half of its squares, which will revive and crawl out of the ground in roughly 1000 turns—they can rise earlier if disturbed by monsters or the hero. The set of zombie species that can generate is adjusted based on level difficulty - kobold, gnome, orc, and dwarf zombies can generate anytime; human and elf zombies can generate at difficulty 4 or higher; ettin and giant zombies can generate at difficulty 7 or higher. |
| Massacre | There are 5d5 player monster or quest guardian corpses on the floor. |
| Statuary | There are 5d5 statues and d3 statue traps. |
| Light source | This room has a lit oil lamp on the floor. It can only generate in a room which was already dark, so it is slightly less common on early levels. |
| Temple of the gods | This room contains an altar to each of the 3 gods in your pantheon. The room is not an actual temple and does not contain a priest. |
| Ghost of an Adventurer | This room contains a sleeping ghost atop a pile consisting of the following objects, all of which are either cursed or uncursed: |
| Storeroom | Each space in this room has a 30% chance of being either a chest or a mimics disguised as a chest. Each "chest" in the room has a 3⁄4 chance of being a disguised mimic. |
| Teleportation hub | This room contains no special terrain, objects, or monsters, but 2-4 teleportation traps will be created elsewhere in the level. Each of these traps is special and will send anyone who triggers it to the same location each time, somewhere inside this room. |
Variants
xNetHack
xNetHack uses a similar lineup of themed rooms to the one listed above, along with some rooms adapted from UnNetHack and new rooms that are original to the variant.
A user has suggested improving this page or section as follows:
"List the rooms it has that 3.7 doesn't. Currently there is a list at xNetHack#Themed rooms."
