Pet (SLASH'EM)

Pets in SLASH'EM are much like pets in vanilla. They fight on your side, they eat (or starve), they bring objects to you, they respond to whistles and track abuse.

This wiki page summarizes the situation with pets in SLASH'EM. Specifically, SLASH'EM does provide more domestic monsters to tame, more varieties of food to tame them with, and they appear in the dungeon more often.

The wiki markup  pet (SLASH'EM)  will expand to  pet  and produce a link to this page.

What is a pet?
SLASH'EM provides two other types of tame monsters, the tame minion and the spell being. Gods dispatch tame minions; the spells of flame sphere and freeze sphere create spell beings. To be consistent with Eva Myers' spoiler, we will apply the term "pet" to the exclusion of tame minions and spell beings.

All other sources of tame monsters provide pets. You start the game with a one pet; the spell of create familiar produces a pet; a monster made tame through feeding, thus becomes a pet.

In the source code, pets have an attached struct edog (identical to that of vanilla NetHack, defined at edog.h).

Basic features of pets
(These features are almost the same as those for vanilla pets...)


 * 1) Attacking in melee - A pet may use its melee attacks against a hostile or peaceful monster.
 * 2) * Most pets have some discretion and will not attack if the target monster has at least two more monster levels than the pet.
 * 3) * If the pet's attack hits and both parties survive, and if the target monster has not moved this turn, then there is a 3/4 chance that the target monster retaliates with melee attacks against the pet.
 * 4) Interacting with objects - A pet will seek objects, either to eat them, or to bring them to you.
 * 5) * A pet will rank all of the objects within a rectangle of radius 5 around the pet. It will prefer the object with the highest rank, and break ties by choosing the closer object. Then it will decide whether to seek this goal object or follow the player.
 * 6) * You may feed treats to your pet to encourage it to bring objects closer to you. The effect of the reward will diminish as the pet drops more objects.
 * 7) Avoiding objects of wrong beatitude - Most pets will avoid cursed objects. Pet demons and pet undead will instead avoid squares that contain blessed objects. A pet will normally not seek or enter squares that contain such objects. However, a pet may enter that square to eat if the pet is hungry or to eat a treat or "reluctantly" if the square blocks the pet's path. Even so, a pet will not pick up the cursed (blessed) objects on that square.

There exists a port of the pet ranged patch (by D. Shaligram, ported by Jean-Yves Moyen) that would allow pets to also attack with ranged attacks.

Domestic monsters
These monsters have the M2_DOMESTIC flag. You may domesticate (tame) these monsters by throwing acceptable food at them. If you throw the wrong kind of food, then these monsters become peaceful.

The table also contains the monster level and monster frequency (in the L:F column), and some basic stats about each monster. Remember that lower AC is better. As for speed, a koala (4) has one move per three turns, a lamb (12) has one move per one turn, a warhorse (24) has two moves per one turn. (Information is from, SLASH'EM 0.0.8E0F1.)

Monsters that want specific food
These monsters want a specific food item. If you throw that item to them, then they become tame. Otherwise, nothing happens (and the monster does not become peaceful). Once the monster is tame, it reverts to a normal carnivorous or herbivorous diet, except that the specific food item counts as a treat.

The specific food item will be a cheese (for rats), a carrot (for rabbits) or a banana (for primates). There are four types of rat on this list; cheese will not tame a rabid rat, a hellrat or the Rat King. Yes, rabid rabbits are on this list.

Links

 * Other types of tame monsters:
 * tame minion
 * spell being
 * How To Acquire Pets In Nethack 3.4.3 And Slash'EM 7E6F3 ("by Eva Myers, with helpful contributions from J. Ali Harlow")