Zombie (dNetHack)
In dNetHack and notdNetHack, most zombies are a form of derived undead that occur throughout the dungeon rather than distinct monsters as in NetHack, and are generated by way of monster template.
Generation
Randomly generated zombies occur in groups. Living monsters that are damaged in melee by zombies (or damaged by any skeletal monster, with a 1⁄20 chance each hit) and then killed by any means that leaves behind their corpse will rise from the dead as a zombie themselves. The presence of a dread seraph on a level will cause any corpses dropped to revive as zombies.
Description
A zombified monster is mindless and gains cold resistance, poison resistance and sleep resistance; they are resistant to piercing and bludgeoning weapons, they have a roughly 1⁄2 chance of reviving from their corpse, and their base dice for melee attacks are doubled (or tripled at midnight). However, they have a 2-point penalty to AC and take double damage from slashing weapons - weapons that have been given the "true death" boon by the Silver Flame deal double damage + 2d7 additional damage.[1] They also tend to move slower than living monsters: a monster with a speed of 6 or higher in their living form will have their speed in zombie form lowered to the higher of two values between half their normal speed and 6.
Other non-undead monsters will mutually grudge zombies, with each attacking the other on sight.
Other zombies
A basic "zombie" still exists in monst.c as a form of fallback for wizard mode, and is equivalent to the vanilla human zombie in this regard: Guards, high priests, aligned priests, shopkeepers, and Angels are special-cased to become zombies if the player attempts to directly create them in wizard mode, as is the case for them in vanilla NetHack - these monsters are not intended to be created outside of specific circumstances.[2]
In addition to the above, dNetHack also has several distinct monsters in the zombie monster class, with most of the monsters being new (highlighted in bold):
- Z undead knight
- Z warrior of sunlight
- Z undead maiden
- Z knight of the princess's guard
- Z blue sentinel
- Z darkmoon knight
- Z undead rebel
- Z pardoner
- Z occultist
- Z ghoul
- Z hedrow zombie
- Z skeletal pirate
- Z hungry dead
- Z skeleton
- Z gnoll ghoul
- Z dread seraph
- Z phalanx
References
- ↑ Specifically, a bonus equal to double the sum of the base dice plus its enchantment, e.g. a +7 saber (1d8 base damage versus all monsters) would do 2x(1d8+7)+2d7.
- ↑ src/read.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 2415: In NetHack, this applies to animating their corpse or statue as well. While this technically also applies to shopkeepers, revival is special-cased to work on them.
