u/Ardub23

Friendly creature react violently to a gentle bump (even with the 'm' prefix), but only when they're invisible and there's no way you could have known to avoid them. Seems nonsensical.

I went looking through the source code; this seems to occur because, on line 250 of uhitm.c, wakeup() is called with TRUE instead of FALSE, as if the attempt at taking a step was an attack. There's a code comment:

> #H7329 - if hero is on engraved "Elbereth", this will end up assessing an alignment penalty and removing the engraving even though no attack actually occurs. Since it also angers peacefuls, we're operating as if an attack attempt did occur and the Elbereth behavior is consistent.

I don't understand this. At first I thought it was saying that, before we even reach this point in the code, the game has already treated this harmless walking as an affront to Elbereth (in which case, why not just… not do that?) But actually, the Elbereth check is in setmangry(), which is called after this point. In fact it's only called because wakeup() treats this like an attack. So what gives?

Edit: I want to clarify—just because there's a call to a function called wakeup(), doesn't mean the monster was asleep. In fact, it's most likely a peaceful monster who's wide awake, knows you're there, and turned themselves invisible on purpose.