Instadeath
The term instadeath can have several definitions, either in Crawl or in roguelikes in general. Of course, many people use it to describe a death which occurs instantly or very quickly, e.g. an early ogre one-shotting a low-level spriggan. However, the term is often more formally used to describe deaths which occur regardless of a character's current HP, even if the death itself is not instant (so-called 'delayed instadeaths'). Such instadeaths are fairly rare in Crawl, and can only occur in a few ways:
- Stat death: your character will die after a few dozen turns if any stat is reduced to zero and not restored.
- Falling into deep water or lava and failing to scramble free will result in an instadeath. Falling into lava without fire resistance is always an instadeath. Even if you scramble free from lava when you have fire resistance, you may still be killed by the direct HP damage caused by the lava.
- Being drained to experience level 0 will kill you instantly. Generally speaking, this does not occur past D:1, since after that the character will be greater than XL1.
- Starving to death is an instadeath.
Dealing instadeath to monsters
There are only a few ways to kill monsters irrespective of their hit points. All of them only work in a few specific situations:
- Most monsters die if they fall in deep water or lava. Usually, this requires confusing them near such terrain. Be aware that highly intelligent monsters are smart enough not to move while confused and adjacent to deep water/lava.
- You can also drop monsters into deep water or lava by petrifying them over it.
- Some "brittle" monsters (e.g. skeletons) may be instantly killed by the spell Lee's Rapid Deconstruction, with a chance based on spell power. This is not true of Shatter, however.
- Orange crystal statues and silver statues can reliably be killed with one hit from a wand of disintegration.
- Arguably, (Mass) Abjuration can deal a form of instadeath to summoned monsters.
- Banishment works regardless of a monster's current HP, although said monster may again be encountered in the Abyss.
History
Statdeath will be no longer be an instadeath in 0.13; instead, being at 0 in a stat will do irresistible damage each turn. Prior to 0.8, statdeath killed the player as soon as the stat hit zero, as opposed to being a delayed instadeath.
Due to the change in the mechanics of draining in 0.13, it will no longer be possible to suffer an instadeath from being drained of all life.
