Monster attributes

Version 0.21: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

All monsters have different attributes. These attributes govern every aspect of how the monster functions in-game – the monster's behavior, its toughness in combat, its special abilities, its resistances and vulnerabilities, and its general stats.

Most of the attributes for each individual monster are stored in the mon-data.h file in the Crawl source code, in the following format:

row 1: monster id, display character, display colour, name
row 2: monster flags
row 3: monster resistance flags
row 4: experience modifier, genus, species, holiness, resist magic
row 5: damage for each of four attacks
row 6: hit dice, hit points
row 7: AC, evasion, spells, corpse effect, shouts
row 8: intel, habitat, speed, energy_usage
row 9: gmon_use class, body size, body shape
row 10: tile, corpse

Many other monster properties are hardcoded into other parts of the source. For instance, negative energy resistance is not one of the "resistance flags" in mon-data; it is in monster.cc:

int monster::res_negative_energy() const
{
    if (holiness() != MH_NATURAL
        || type == MONS_SHADOW_DRAGON)
    {
        return 3;
    }
    [additional checks for items w/ resistance]
}

The above means "if the monster is not natural or is a shadow dragon, it has 3 levels of negative energy resistance".

If you want to know the maximum number of chunks a monster can leave, take a look at the function turn_corpse_into_chunks which can be found in misc.cc

See Category:Monster attributes for documentation of various attributes and lists of monsters with specific attributes.