Unarmed Combat

Version 0.28: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

The Unarmed Combat skill determines the effectiveness of all attacks made with your character's fists (or tentacles in the case of octopodes). It increases the damage, accuracy, and speed of your unarmed attacks. It does not boost auxiliary attacks except for the off-hand punch done without a shield.

Your fists do not normally benefit from weapon brands and defintely don't have artefact properties. However, training Unarmed Combat gives a special bonus to base damage (base = 3 + UC) instead of the normal skill bonus. And they are one of the few weapons to hit minimum delay at the maximum skill level of 27. High level unarmed combat is defintely competitive with weapon-wielding, especially when boosted by transformations, though is noticably weaker early on. Also, some species have natural aptitudes or innate mutations that make unarmed combat a much more tempting choice.

Aptitudes

At	Ba	Co	DE	Dg	Ds	Dj	Dr	Fe	Fo	Gr	Gh	Gn	Hu	Ko	Mf	Mi	MD	Mu	Na	Op	On	Sp	Te	Tr	Vp	VS
-1	1	-1	-2	-1	-1	0	0	0	0	0	1	8	0	0	1	1	0	-2	0	0	-1	-2	1	0	1	0

Attack Delay

Unarmed combat starts out at 1.0 attack delay, but requires much more skill to reach the minimum of 0.5 delay. It takes roughly 5.4 skil levels to reduce delay by 0.1, reaching the delay of 0.5 at UC skill 27.

Other Factors

Characters in bat form attack at 60% of the normal time, though at a significant penalty to damage. Other effects that can influence attack speed (such as Haste, Slow, Statue Form, etc.) apply as normal, with a hardcoded limit at 0.3 decaAut which you cannot exceed.

Final Calculation

Finally, your attack delay can never be a fraction of the decimal place of an aut. If your calculated speed falls between two decimal place numbers, the game will round up or down based on the remainder (0.72 would have a 20% chance of being rounded to 0.8 and an 80% chance of being 0.7).

UC	Avg delay	UC	Avg delay	UC	Avg delay
0	1.0	10	0.81	20	0.63
1	0.98	11	0.80	21	0.61
2	0.96	12	0.78	22	0.59
3	0.95	13	0.76	23	0.57
4	0.92	14	0.74	24	0.56
5	0.91	15	0.72	25	0.54
6	0.89	16	0.7	26	0.52
7	0.87	17	0.68	27	0.5
8	0.85	18	0.67
9	0.83	19	0.65

Base Damage

The base damage of your primary unarmed combat attack is determined through the following factors:

Condition	Damage	Special
Base damage	3	-
Claws mutation	+2 × Claws ranks	Wearing gloves negates this
Ghoul	5	Negated by gloves
Felid	5	Works well for stabbing
Troll	9	-
Spider Form	5	Venom
Lich Form	5	Draining
Tree Form	12	-
Ice Form	12	Freezing
Statue Form	12	-
Blade Hands	22	-
Storm Form	2 + spell power/3	Cleaving, Electrocution
Dragon Form	38	-
Pig Form	1	-
Bat Form	1	60% Attack Delay
Vampire Bat Form	2	60% Attack delay
Wisp Form	5	Effectiveness based on XL instead of Unarmed Combat
Fungus Form	12	Confusion

Your base damage is then increased by 1 for each skill level you have in unarmed combat (though this bonus is divided by 5 when in Bat or Pig Form). This base damage is then further modified by your strength, fighting skill, and other factors.

Off-hand punch

Offhand punches are significantly less powerful, using the following calculation:

Condition	Damage	Special
Offhand Punch	5 + (UC / 3) + (1d3 × Claws ranks) or + (6 if Blade Hands)	Wearing any shield negates this

Octopodes get tentacle slaps instead of offhand punches, and may still make tentacle slaps while wearing a shield. Other species are unable to use the off-hand punch unless their off-hand is empty, which means not wearing a shield or wielding a two-handed weapon.

History

• Prior to 0.17, unarmed combat attack delay was penalized by armour. Also, trolls' claws could inflict the now-removed bleeding status.

• In earlier versions of Crawl, Unarmed Combat improved the performance of your non-punch auxiliary attacks, giving all melee fighters a reason to train it.