Animate Dead

Version 0.10: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Animate Dead
Level	4
School1	Necromancy
Source(s)	Book of Necromancy Book of Unlife Book of Power
Casting noise	3
Spell noise	0

This spell causes the dead to rise up and serve the caster; every corpse within a certain distance of the caster is affected. By means of this spell, powerful casters could press into service an army of mindless undead.

Animate Dead is a level 4 Necromancy spell that attempts to raise all corpses (fresh or rotten) and skeletons in LOS as zombies or skeletons. These minions cannot heal or use stairs, but will serve you faithfully until death. Some corpses cannot be raised in this manner.

This spell is similar to Yredelemnul's power of the same name.

Strategy

• Carrying the last few corpses from a floor with you and raising them on the floor below will give you a head start in building an army there.
• Recall helps compensate for the slow movement speed of zombies.
• Although pricier than Animate Skeleton, Animate Dead offers significant advantages:
  • Like skeletons, zombies have lower stats than the monsters they were raised from. However, the reduction is less dramatic (except for movement speed).
  • Animate Dead can raise multiple corpses at once, and from a distance. This makes it a much more useful option in the middle of combat.
• The choice between Animate Dead and Twisted Resurrection is a trickier one:
  • AD grants you several immediate minions; TR takes more corpses to build a proper army, and you may lose some pieces if you're careless.
  • AD's minions can't heal and are stuck on the floor they were created on; TR's heal and can travel with you.
  • AD can't affect certain corpses; TR affects any corpse.

Limitations

The following corpses are unaffected by Animate Dead:

• Giant eyeball
• Eye of draining
• Eye of devastation
• Great orb of eyes
• Vampire mosquito
• Giant amoeba
• Necrophage
• Ghoul
• Ugly thing
• Very ugly thing

See Also

• Derived undead

History

Prior to 0.10 Animate Dead would ignore any corpses on a spot after the first corpse.

Prior to 0.5, zombies and skeletons could use stairs, making this an excellent spell for creating armies.