Bat Form

Version 0.33: This article is up to date for the latest stable release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

You have been transformed into a swift-moving bat, increasing your evasion but substantially weakening your melee attacks. Any equipped weapons, armour and rings are melded, and you are unable to cast spells. The effectiveness of your melee attacks while in this form is based on experience level instead of on Unarmed Combat skill.

Bat Form is an ability and bad form which turns the player into a small and agile bat-like creature.

Useful Info

A source of polymorph or chaos can turn the player into any bad form, including Bat Form.

In addition, players in Vampire Form have an ability to enter an improved version of Bat Form; the ability has an XP-gated cooldown.

Offensive traits

• Unarmed Combat: 1 base damage (2 less than normal)

Defensive traits

• 0 AC
• +5 Dexterity
• Flying
• Greatly increased movement speed (0.6 movement delay, i.e. spriggan speed)

Restrictions

• Spellcasting is disabled
• Melded gear: All equipment other than amulets is melded

Vampire Bat Form

If entering Bat Form through the Vampire Form ability, you gain a large EV bonus. In addition, the ability itself can surround you with a cloud of bats.

Strategy

The most obvious use for Bat Form is for getting away from dangerous situations. Flying allows you to cross deep water or lava, and the speed and evasion boosts make it easy to get away from melee opponents. Enemies with ranged attacks will still be a threat, particularly if they have unavoidable or smite-targeted attacks.

Alternatively, it can be used to kite opponents if you happen to have the right abilities. Invokable and Evokable abilities still function while in Bat Form, allowing you to use wands and god-given abilities (Makhleb's abilities are particularly useful as they don't cost piety). The Fangs mutation also adds to your Unarmed Combat damage, but bats usually don't want to be in melee.

Bat Form	Gargoyle

History

• Prior to 0.31, Klown pies could polymorph the player, potentially into a bat.
• Prior to 0.25, Transmutations miscasts could turn the player into a bat.
• Prior to 0.22, Bat Form prevented the use of wands.
• Prior to 0.20, Bat Form's Unarmed Combat base damage was 1 + UC/5 for non-Vampires and 2 + UC for Vampires. It also came with a -40% lower attack delay.
• Prior to 0.19, players could not quaff potions or open doors in Bat Form. Also, being in Bat Form reduced hunger rate to 1.
• Prior to 0.18, Bat Form had a -5 Str penalty. Also, the effectiveness of Vampire's vampiric bite was reduced while in Bat Form: they got 50% less hit points and nutrition from biting monsters with blood.
• Prior to 0.16, drawing the Metamorphosis card could result in Bat Form.
• Prior to 0.15, drawing the Flight card could result in Bat Form.
• Before their removal, the Breathe Fire and Spit Poison mutations also functioned in Bat Form.