# Talk:Egg
Contents

1 An egg is mashed!
2 Chances of found eggs hatching?
3 Gargoyle eggs
4 Identifying what type of egg you have?
5 chance of splatting
6 Add Generation Odds
7 gargoyles are implied to lay eggs
8 Egg, With My Markings?
9 Two questions re egg identification (polymorph; stethoscope)

An egg is mashed!
I broke a chest with a quarterstaff and got the message "An egg is mashed!". This implys that eggs can break if you break thier containers with a quarterstaff. --124.197.39.207 10:14, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Chances of found eggs hatching?
I found an uncursed killer bee egg in a shop.  It would be kind of cool to have a killer bee as a pet (the egg will only cost me 9zm), does anyone know what the chances are that the egg will hatch?  And if it does hatch, what the chances are that the killer bee will be tame?  --Tam9960 20:44, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Update: it hatched, and it was hostile. --Tam9960 20:47, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
Gargoyle eggs
Is the thing with most winged gargoyles laying gargoyle eggs a reference to the Ultima series? I ask because of this passage from Ultima VI: 

When a child hatches from his egg, he is born without wings. But even from birth 
one can tell whether a child will grow up to be a winged or a wingless one...The        
winged ones are few, but they are entrusted with the intelligence and wisdom of the     
race." 

--Kahran042 16:31, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Identifying what type of egg you have?
Is there a way of identifying what type of egg you have in your inventory? I have cast Identify and it only ever says "egg". How can you tell if an egg found in the dungeon is of a particular type?

chance of splatting
(Because eggs break when thrown 99% of the time, they cannot be used to reliably tame dogs or cats; a thrown egg that does not break will tame the creature.)
Where do you get this 99% number from? --Tjr 04:59, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Wiz mode testing confirmed that eggs can tame cats/dogs, it just takes a long time (i.e. doing this is in no way helpful in a regular game). Source diving showed breaktest in dothrow.c, line 1629. Non-artifact fragile items, including eggs, have a 1% chance of not breaking from the call to obj_resists (which is in zap.c). -- Qazmlpok 13:55, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
Add Generation Odds
What are the odds that a randomly generated egg is "just an egg" vs. an egg of a type of monster.
Also, how is the monster selected?
Are these odds different from the Horn of plenty
--192.207.234.194 20:05, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

If I get a chance, I can look this up. If someone gets to this before I do, that would also be chill.
--Ozymandias (talk) 15:49, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

gargoyles are implied to lay eggs
Winged gargoyles lay very few winged 
gargoyle eggs - 76/77 (approx. 98.7%)
of the time the egg will hatch into a
gargoyle.

it seems odd to me that there is no discussion beyond this of whether and when mobs lay eggs. i can't remember any ever doing so*. should the above sentence read "players polymorphed into Winged gargoyles...?" --194.116.198.185 12:09, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
*qualifier: my memory is shot, i don't keep logs and i'm rubbish at reading battle spam.

Monsters never lay eggs. Only the player (and a horn of plenty) can. --Tjr (talk) 20:05, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
Egg, With My Markings?
In SLASH'EM, I identified an egg via Shopkeeper Services. The egg identified as not only a louse egg, but also had "(with your markings)" after it. I have never seen this before, and cannot find any information on it. The egg was found in the Lawful Quest and is not named.

Two questions re egg identification (polymorph; stethoscope)
First, if one becomes a female oviparous monster, can one identify one's species' eggs (may be change in 3.7 and/or xNetHack; may be only after laying one)? Second, does a stethoscope have any function in this regard (again, may be a change in 3.7 and/or xNetHack)? -Actual-nh (talk) 18:09, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Yes to the first, no to the second as that is a recent xNetHack change from EvilHack. There are no recent egg changes in vanilla.
I recommend building a copy of 3.7 so that you can run it in wizard mode and test these things out. --Phol ende wodan (talk) 18:15, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
Thanks! The first answer is also in the page, as it turns out - I will try to make it easier to spot. -Actual-nh (talk) 18:16, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
Done; I have put the egg identification in the stethoscope page's Variants section. -Actual-nh (talk) 18:26, 18 January 2021 (UTC)