Skeleton (monster)
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For the item left behind by rotting corpses, see skeleton.
| A skeleton compelled to unlife by the exercise of necromancy.
"God save us from the skeleton |
Skeletons are the reanimated bones of once-living creatures and are a type of derived undead. Either way, they are considerably slower, stupider, and clumsier than whatever they were when they were alive. They also cannot heal or use stairs, but on the flip side they do have undead resistances.
Skeletons may appear in the various branches of the Dungeon as random monsters, or be created by players through Necrotise. As servants, skeletons are useful for characters who need meat shields (so to speak). A newly-animated skeleton will drop weapons and armour that they were wearing.
Identifying Skeletons
Different monsters will leave behind skeletons with differing stats, but Crawl tends to lump them all together, making identifying them at a glance difficult. Console mode will display skeletons as either z or Z, depending on their size. Tiles mode provides different tiles for several different kinds of skeletons, but there are still many different monsters that fall under each type. In any case, if you want to find out exactly what you'll be fighting, simply hit x and highlight the skeleton in question.
Below are all the categories of skeletons in tiles mode:
Fish
Humanoids (small)
Humanoids (medium)
Humanoids (large)
Quadrupeds (small)
Quadrupeds (large)
Quadrupeds (winged)
History
- Prior to 0.29, skeletons on the ground could be re-animated using Animate Skeleton or Animate Dead. Reanimated monsters kept their weapons and armour. Skeletons were also removed from the main Dungeon's spawn table.
- Prior to 0.26, skeletons were somewhat important as they allowed food (chunk) of that monster to be eaten.
- Prior to 0.23, butchering a corpse did not always leave a skeleton item, though Animate Skeleton always left chunks.