The Royal Jelly

Version 0.11: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

the royal jelly J [[File:{{{tile_name}}}.png|32px]]
HP	230
HD	21
XP	15000
Speed	16
AC	8
EV	4
Will	196
Attack1	50 (hit: acid)
Attack2	30 (hit: acid)
Resistances	rPois+, Asphyx, rAcid, rConstr
Vulnerabilities	None
Habitat	land
Intelligence	Plant
Uses	Eats items
Holiness	Natural
Size	Small
Type	jelly, royal jelly
Flags	No skeleton Sense invisible Special ability Acidic flesh Unique

A particularly rich and golden gelatinous thing.

Useful Info

The royal jelly is the boss of the Slime Pits. Located in the center of Slime: 6, it will not emerge until you approach the stone structure it resides in (or you make too much noise), giving you plenty of time to clear the rest of the floor first.

It has an impressive amount of HP, powerful acidic melee attacks, exceptional speed, and an unusual defensive mechanism: whenever it is damaged, it spawns various powerful jelly-type monsters to attack you (azure jellies, death oozes, brown oozes, acid blobs). Like other jellies, allowing it to consume items or shooting ammunition at it will restore its HP. Fortunately, it cannot pursue you up stairs, allowing you to abort attempts at killing it that you don't feel confident you can complete.

Killing the royal jelly causes three things to happen:

• Teleport control is no longer forbidden on the floor
• The four central vaults that the royal jelly guarded turn from stone to transparent rock, making it easy to dig or teleport your way in
• Jiyva, the god of slimes, immediately ceases to exist once its only sentient worshiper dies (you can prevent this deicide by worshiping him yourself before killing TRJ, but killing such a high-ranking jelly will result in penance)

Tips & Tricks

• TRJ will not follow you upstairs, but its generated slimes will. If you plan on running back upstairs mid-fight, expect some of its spawns to follow you.
• Haste and a potion of might/potion of brilliance are recommended to help you deal lethal damage to TRJ before its reinforcements make life unbearable (while berserking also works, you run the risk of having it run out halfway through the fight). If you need to escape the floor without pursuing jellies following you up, Haste will allow you to make a fairly safe escape; TRJ will keep up with you, but nothing else will. If you wish to actually outrun TRJ, you'll likely need both Haste and Swiftness.
• Fighting TRJ in one of the central stone corridors is a valid strategy, as only TRJ and one or two other monsters will be able to reach you. Just be prepared to deal with an angry jelly mob once you're done.
• If you've accidentally created an army of jellies and need to abort, heal up and then stair dance so you can clear out the reinforcements without dealing with too many of them at a time.
• Ranged weapon fighters will have a hard time with this fight, as ammunition heals it. You'll need to find some other means of killing it, unless you're a slinger and can make stones deal significant damage.
• If you have high-powered Lee's Rapid Deconstruction or Shatter, you can avoid fighting TRJ by breaking open the stone wall loot vaults. Just be sure to grab the items and rune before slimes can eat them. Be aware that both spells are loud and will attract attention.
• Banishing via Lugonu's ability is only advisable if you have some way to deal with stone walls, as the banishing will not turn the vaults' stone into diggable rock or allow teleport control. Failing that, a trip to the Abyss to kill TRJ would be necessary. Alternatively, corrupting the floor will open the vaults easily, but you'll need to move fast if you want to collect any of the non-artifact loot.
• Freezing Cloud will reliably kill TRJ in 10 or so turns. If you you can hold your own versus TRJ's summons (say, with your own wave of summons), you can cast Freezing Cloud early and let it do its job. Just be ready to run if things go south.
• If you are a ranged magic user and take the summoning route, you really can't do better than Summon Dragon. Dragons are fast and do superlative melee and range attacks. You'll need to plan ahead, of course: an 18 or 19 Summonings skill, high intelligence, a ring of wizardry, and Recall are the bare minimum. Worshipers of Trog can also benefit from this approach; a small pack of berserk iron trolls or stone giants should survive long enough to deal tremendous damage to TRJ before being melted away.
• Of course, if you wish to avoid this entire mess, you can simply worship Jiyva and open the vaults with a wand of digging.

History

Prior to 0.11, the royal jelly was not able to regenerate naturally. This made the fight much easier to complete over several small assaults.