Bat

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

bat b
HP	2-5
HD	1
XP	1
Speed	30
AC	1
EV	14
Will	1
Attack¹	1 (hit: plain)
Resistances	None
Vulnerabilities	None
Habitat	Land
Intelligence	Animal
Uses	Uses nothing
Holiness	Natural
Size	Tiny
Type	bat, bat
Flags	Batty Warm-blooded Sense invisible Flying

A large grey bat that, despite being herbivorous, is quite aggressive. It is myopic and uses echolocation to navigate.

"The sun was set; the night came on apace,
And falling dews bewet around the place;
The bat takes airy rounds on leathern wings,
And the hoarse owl his woeful dirges sings."

-John Gay, Shepherd's Week, Wednesday; or, The Dumps.

"Ere the bat hath flown
His cloister'd flight."

-William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605), Act III, scene 2, line 40.

Useful Info

Bats are one of the weakest and most annoying creatures in the game. They move three times faster than the average player and aren't easy to hit, but do very little damage. Bats are only a threat to players on the brink of death.

Bats can be summoned with the Summon Small Mammals spell.

Tips & Tricks

Bats move very quickly and can perform multiple actions before the player can react, which means they can hit and move out of melee range in between the player's own actions. One way to minimize this is to move away from them rather than toward them. They'll waste most of their turn approaching you and may end up next to you. This technique is very useful later on when dealing with monsters that are both fast AND dangerous.
Another way to deal with bats is to fight them in a corridor to restrict their movement. You can even trap the bat between yourself and another monster or a dead end to prevent the bat from moving.
Ranged weapons such as stones, darts, and bows allow you to attack even when they fly a few spaces away, but characters without the appropriate skills will still miss often.

Variant Bats

One particularly harmless-yet-annoying vault you can encounter (the aptly named "goddamned_bats" vault) contains a wide variety of unique bats. They all have their own names, but for the most part their stats are only slightly different from those of standard bats.

Megabat

A huge black bat.

Microbat

A bat that, despite its name, is not any smaller than a megabat.

Fruity bat

An ugly, silly bat. It sparkles.

Dwarf mountain bat

A species of bat that lives in mountain caves. How it got into the dungeon is a mystery — probably something related to the sudden demise of dwarves in those lands. But don't worry, an eradication team is on the way.

Giga bat (has 4 HD and slightly improved stats)