Why do monsters sometime leave no corpse?

[Lavandula]

Natural monsters may not leave a corspe. Why does that happen? I guess it was done in attempt to balance necromancy before zombies were temporary, but now it just adds a layer of weird quantum randomness to low-level spells and characters with high hunger costs (like, there may or may not be a corpse on bottom of that stash, so casting corpse rot has 50% chance of failing).

Interestingly, latest development was intuitively bypassing corpse drop chance mechanic. For example, infestation, death channel and Gozag's piety system completely ignore it.

[stoneychips]

If you'd like a flavor reason, I'd say sometimes we just bash/shoot them too hard and there isn't all that much left? (Although in a more realistic sim, I'd expect that to apply more to some forms of attack/monsters than others.)

But I don't claim to know the design rationale behind it all. I'd imagine it limits food frequency, too. Unfortunately sometimes the RNG limits it severely for a consecutive stretch of drops.

[Shtopit]

It limits spells like corpse rot. That one is pretty good, especially for its level: a cloud you can place beneath creatures.

[duvessa]

The original reason is probably "NetHack does it". It's probably better to work on transitioning to a system where monsters don't have corpses, instead of going the other way and making them drop more corpses.

[stoneychips]

It's probably better to work on transitioning to a system where monsters don't have corpses, instead of going the other way and making them drop more corpses.

Better because... What?

Not saying I need more corpses necessarily, but why ask for zero corpse effects out of the blue?

[Shard1697]

It makes visually identifying items after a battle much much less annoying, for one, because you don't have to walk over and examine every tile a monster died on and dropped a corpse along with its weapon because it makes it show up as "there's something underneath this weapon" which could be something valuable like a ring or wand but usually is just a random corpse and a waste of your time.

Not really "out of the blue" when duvessa has been asking for this for I think at least a couple years now

[stoneychips]

It makes visually identifying items after a battle much much less annoying, for one, because you don't have to walk over and examine every tile a monster died on and dropped a corpse along with its weapon because it makes it show up as "there's something underneath this weapon" which could be something valuable like a ring or wand but usually is just a random corpse and a waste of your time.

You might as well argue any stacks at all are a waste of time. They could as easily code the thing so corpses are on the bottom of stacks instead of the top. But if we didn't find another way to represent stacked stuff, the same problem would come back again. Except now it'd be, I can't see the dagger I want cause somebody dropped a mace on top etc.

Incidentally, looking at the tiles screen it seems to me there's a whole swath of open space under the zone maps where it might be possible to display what's stacked up on a tile being highlighted, or what buffs/resistances a given monster on a tile has in shorthand icons form so we don't have to manually view them for that matter. But maybe there's no mechanism in the software for using all that black space for such things to begin with. I dunno, just a thought.

Not really "out of the blue" when duvessa has been asking for this for I think at least a couple years now

It only took you a whole line or two to answer (at least in summary), and without any explanation there it was pretty out of the blue for this thread.

I know duvessa has a lot to say everywhere, but it's getting ridiculous when people start to imply, how could anyone dare not be following and constantly mulling over everything they've said about everything. Just the other day, I think I was being pointed to a post made about four years ago. As if it was yesterday. Of course, there was no link or specification just another, don't you remember Duvessa said the (implied?) obvious only one true, everyone must know it(/implied?) answer somewhere -- so who knows maybe not.

[VeryAngryFelid]

If it was me, I am sorry. I didn't realize it was 4 years ago.

[Shard1697]

Corpses are already on the bottom, the problem is that corpses dropping makes what would otherwise be individual items you could immediately see into stacks that you need to take time to walk over and check. What would be a dagger becomes a dagger *plus something else unknown*, except unlike in the case of armor, ring, wand etc that something else unknown is worthless unless you are a character with one of a few necro spells that cares about corpses. These necromancy spells could be reworked to work like death channel(but wearing off only after raising a certain number of corpses, or with a random chance of wearing off per each corpse raised) if they must stay(this would be a mild buff to most of them but I really doubt it would make a huge difference. it would certainly make corpse rot less annoying, not that corpse rot and animate skeleton shouldn't still be removed-so basically this would just be a change to animate dead).

And yes, it would be good to cut down on stacks in general. Stuff like redundant armor(multiple +0 scale mail dropped from orcs, for example) just clutters up loot dropped by monsters and makes it take longer to find relevant items to your character.

You're right that I shouldn't assume everyone reads this forum so damn much

[Majang]

Corpses on the bottom of stacks are also annoying from the point of view of players who want to snack on corpses. Right now, when hungry, after each fight, I have to investigate each pile to see if there is something edible below. Maybe it is possible to treat corpses as not contributing to stacks, but give them a different symbol that says "here is a dagger, and there is a corpse below". This could combine with the stack symbol, at least in tiles.

[stoneychips]

Corpses on the bottom of stacks are also annoying from the point of view of players who want to snack on corpses. Right now, when hungry, after each fight, I have to investigate each pile to see if there is something edible below. Maybe it is possible to treat corpses as not contributing to stacks, but give them a different symbol that says "here is a dagger, and there is a corpse below". This could combine with the stack symbol, at least in tiles.

If you are comfortable with auto-explore, it's often pretty good about sweeping you toward any potentially useful stuff on the floor, including corpses. Although, this may not work out so well in zones where those aren't currently all lying in a safe path.

I tend to try to find uses for corpses (mostly Animate Skeleton or Gourmand -- sometimes Gozag; I don't completely understand Corpse Rot), but I could see how there might be a technical reworking for such effects.

[Shard1697]

Unfortunately autoexplore will also butcher corpses automatically if you have that feature on, preventing you from animating them, which means either not autoexploring or not auto butchering if you want to get the most out of animate dead.

[Siegurt]

Maybe stuff in stacks just shouldn't be not-known information, if all stacks started as 'investigated' so you could see with x-v or control-x what was in them, I think that would remove the awkwardness entirely.

I'm not really sure why "you can see what is in a stack of stuff in the same space on the floor" requires you walk over to it in the first place, either *everything* should be "something mysterious" that you can't see until you stand over it, or nothing should be IMHO, the thing on the top of a stack being "known" and the rest of the stack being "not known" really comes across as awkward and annoying more than anything.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

There's a golden opportunity here to make every item mysterious, unless it's in your backpack, on your body or under your feet. Imagine the fun we could all have wandering through the dungeon.

Time to memories shadow creatures. Now where was that book I saw earlier? Was it this game? It was this game, wasn't it? I'm sure it was somewhere between D:9 and D:12. Hmm. Better check the L:6 vault again.

[Majang]

Wouldn't be a problem, would it? The optimal player would just have paper and pencil with him at all times, and scribble notes of all things everywhere. Easy.

[Plantissue]

There's an option somewhere for writing in game notes isn't there?

[Fingolfin]

There's an option somewhere for writing in game notes isn't there?

Yes, press '!'

[njvack]

If I could design Crawl from scratch, monsters would have a chance of leaving multiple corpses; when asked why I would say "sometimes monsters have other monster corpses in their inventory"

And then they would ask "what about uniques, where did Sigmund get a dead Sigmund to put in his backpack" and I would stare at them and smile very slowly

Of course this would be on Tavern so no one would see my smile

but I would still smile

[VeryAngryFelid]

I am surprised some monsters don't drop rations by the way. What do they eat?

[Siegurt]

I am surprised some monsters don't drop rations by the way. What do they eat?

Other monsters?

[Rast]

I am surprised some monsters don't drop rations by the way. What do they eat?

Other monsters?

Other players.

[VeryAngryFelid]

I am surprised some monsters don't drop rations by the way. What do they eat?

Other monsters?

It is not a very balanced diet for elves I believe:)

[nago]

Elves eat moss from the walls