Instant death

Featured Article
This article has been selected by wiki maintainers as an exemplar of everyone's hard work.

The subject of this article or section has no official name presented in-game. As a result, a name for it was chosen at the discretion of wiki editors.

While usually creatures in Qud die only by taking sufficient damage, some methods of death bypass damage altogether and kill regardless of how much HP one has.

Methods of Instant Death

Some instant death methods grant an achievement when the player dies this way. These are noted in the “Achievement” column when present.

Some methods kill the player even if they are currently dominating another creature and that creature is the one affected. These have a “Yes” in the “Kills dominator?” column.

A lack of message in the “Message” column indicates that instead of the usual “You died. [Message]” dialog, that method gives the fallback “You die! (good job)” dialog, which happens when no death message is specified in the code that causes the death.

Method	Achievement	Kills dominator?	Message
Reaching higher than 10,000°, causing instant vaporization		No	You were vaporized.
Losing your last remaining head to decapitation	Hole Like a Head	No	You were decapitated by [someone].
Violating the Pauli exclusion principle while phasing	The Laws of Physics Are Mere Suggestions, Vol. 1	No	You violated the Pauli exclusion principle.
Getting hit by the gaze of a lithofex		No	You were turned to stone by the gaze of a lithofex.
Standing in the path of a burrowed salt kraken		unknown	unknown
Drinking or cooking with neutron flux (specifically drinking or cooking with it; other actions with flux merely do large amounts of damage)	Starry Demise	No	You were crushed under the weight of a thousand suns.
Being turned into a gem by a gemming attack		No	You were transmuted into [a gem].
Dropping below 1 Willpower while wielding the amaranthine prism		No	You had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space.
Being any temporary forcefield (such as from a stasis grenade mk I, Force Bubble, or Force Wall) who was animated with Spray-a-Brain and running out the duration of the effect that spawned you (or, in the case of Grit Gate's entrance barrier, walking away so that you are disconnected from the originating force projector)		Yes
Running out the duration of Temporal Fugue when one is a fugue clone (Domination works on other creatures' fugue clones but not your own)		Yes
Being a wall and getting slammed (including by yourself)		Yes
Absorbing lava while metamorphed into a soupy sludge or morphing into a magmatic sludge, and have one's temperature go below flaming		No	You cooled into a block of shale.
Having one's original body destroyed when one is dominating another creature (caused by, e.g., any effect on this page being applied to the dominator's body while they're away)		N/A	Your original body was lost.
Having the creature one is dominating destroyed while still occupying it (This applies to any other entry on this table that has a “Yes” in the “Kills dominator?” column)		N/A	Your mind winks out of existence.

Not Normally Possible for the Player

The following methods of instant death are impossible for the player to do without wishes.

Method	Kills dominator?	Message
Having one's flywheel disabled, such as by becoming broken from examining oneself, when one is a norm core mk I, norm core mk II, or norm core mk III	No	Your flywheel failed catastrophically.
Being gas and dissipating or merging with another cloud of gas	No	You dissipated.
Being shot with a nullray pistol when one is normality gas	No

References

This information is reliable as of patch 2.0.201.67.