Jelly

Version 0.12: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

jelly J
HP	15-30
HD	3
XP	22
Speed	9
AC	0
EV	2
Will	12
Attack1	8 (hit: acid: 7d3)
Resistances	rPois+, rAcid+++, rConstr, rDrown, Asphyx
Vulnerabilities	None
Habitat	Amphibious
Intelligence	Plant
Uses	Uses nothing
Holiness	Natural
Size	Small
Type	jelly, jelly
Flags	Eats items splits Acidic flesh See invisible

A pulsating mass of acidic protoplasm. It can and will eat almost anything, and grows a little each time... "Beware of the Blob! It creeps And leaps And glides and slides Across the floor Right through the door And all around the wall, A splotch, a blotch..." -Burt Bacharach, "Beware of the Blob"

Useful Info

Jellies are notoriously dangerous monsters found on D:4 and below. They should be handled with extreme caution due to their corrosive acid attacks. When jellies hit you, your armour may corrode (permanent -1 to AC). Attacking a jelly in melee may also corrode your weapon (permanent -1 to damage). Jelly attacks deal significantly more damage if you have empty armour slots, so removing your gear to save it from corrosion is not a viable option. Cloaks are vital; that slot alone reduces acid damage by 50%.

Jellies eat items on the dungeon floor, ammunition fired into it, corpses, and doors. Feeding heals the jelly and will eventually cause it to split. A single jelly that comes across enough items can become an army, making a floor suddenly impossible to navigate safely.

Tips & Tricks

• When you hear 'a slurping noise', it means a jelly has just eaten something. If possible, collect any loose items you come across on those floors to ensure that it doesn't lead to more jellies. This is especially important if kobolds or centaurs have littered a room with individual darts or arrows. Luckily, they can't eat artefacts.
• While jellies will not attack other living monsters, they will happily devour the corpses of the fallen along with whatever they were carrying. Try to kill the jelly before taking out anything else if you have any choice in the matter.
• If at all possible, you should fight jellies using ranged attacks to avoid their acid. Thankfully, they are slow, which makes them easy to kite. While they will simply consume ammunition fired into it, they cannot eat fireballs. Magic is far and away the best means of dealing with them (including summons). Failing that, characters lacking magic can simply throw common stones or large rocks at the jelly. These are two of the very few things that jellies can't consume to heal. Bear in mind that sling bullets can be eaten.
• If it comes right down to it, a character with high Dodge and Unarmed Combat (or a trash weapon you don't care about) can simply march in and pound the thing, especially if you have powerful claws or horns. You may take some damage, but you can afford to strip naked first and should be able to beat the thing to death quickly. Their HP, AC, and EV are not too intimidating.
• An amulet of resist corrosion, a cloak of preservation or some other form of rCorr is recommended if you must fight one in melee. You can also use gear enchanted to at least +5 or any artifacts, as these will not corrode. Crystal plate mail and dwarven equipment also resist corrosion most of the time, but these are not guaranteed.

History

In 0.13, jellies will have speed 10. Their other stats will be nerfed to compensate for this: their base damage will be reduced to 3, and their HP reduced by about 25%. In addition, their XP value will be doubled and they will be slightly rarer in the main dungeon.