Add a themed room commemorating the long-lived tactic of pudding farming. It has the following properties:

• It is a huge room, possibly a variant of the “Huge room” themed room with no subroom.
• On one space in the middle of the room is the pudding farmer, a random player monster.
  • They generate at level 15-30, as they do on the Astral Plane, but don’t have the same equipment as they would get on the Astral Plane, just the regular gear a player monster would get. Possibly some nicer gear under the assumption they’ve farmed it off the puddings.
  • They are hostile to the player, unless of the same role, in which case they are peaceful.
  • The pudding farmer also carries a thoroughly rusty -3 knife or stiletto, their Puddingbane, though it is not named as such.
  • Messages and farlook show their name as having replaced their rank title with “Pudding Farmer”, e.g. “Fred the Pudding Farmer”.
• The remaining spaces in the room have some reasonably high chance of spawning a black pudding, with varying degrees of reduced current and maximum HP.
• There may be a sink somewhere on the room’s floor, from which the initial pudding came.
• No globs of pudding on the floor from already-killed puddings; the thematic thing would be to have pudding corpses, which no longer exist in vanilla. Globs would imply the player monster has been pudding farming in NetHack 3.6 or later, which doesn’t make much sense.
• The minimum level difficulty of this room is 4, though that seems awfully low given how dangerous it’s likely to be. It could be based on the difficulty of black puddings, such as the difficulty of a black pudding + 3.
• One option to cut down on the gimmickiness of it is to have the corpse of a player monster, possibly with some gear, but not the player monster themselves, implying they slipped up and fell victim to the puddings.
• Since it was possible to pudding farm brown puddings in earlier versions of NetHack, there could be some chance that this room consists of brown puddings instead, which could then appear at a slightly lower difficulty and would lack a sink. Though this would be strange in the above case of there being a corpse rather than a player monster, since brown puddings cannot deal damage (maybe they choked?)

Occasionally when fighting in melee with a weapon you are Expert in, not twoweaponing, and there is no special artifact effect already in play, you get some special benefit of that weapon type. Ideas:

• Some of the longer swords allow parrying monsters’ attacks.
• Mace or flail or morning star could stun or confuse targets
• Stiletto gives you automatic counterattacks sometimes.
• Spears can skewer through an enemy and hit another one directly behind it.