Cavegnomes

The Cavegnomes are enemies that can be encountered in Fear & Hunger.

Location & Behavior
The Cavegnomes can be found flying around in the level 3 prison and level 4 cavern. Their movement patterns are slow and somewhat random, but veer in the direction of the player if they're nearby. The player must walk into them to initiate combat; usually, an encounter is forced when the Cavegnome blocks the only way through a narrow passageway, such as a bridge or cell door.

Cavegnomes are relatively weak foes in combat, using only the Gnaw attack (8-12 damage, 25% bleeding, 30% infection arm and leg). The danger of fighting Cavegnomes is that they travels in pairs, and will call another Cavegnome to the fight every other turn. This can prove troublesome for players who do not have party members.

Strategy
Outright avoiding the cave gnomes or running from them seems to be the easiest option, as they are not particularly relentless at chasing the player and killing them yields no reward as they do not have corpses. Even standing still will make the cavegnomes unable to initiate a battle with you.

If you need to encounter them, there is a surprising number of strategies for dealing with Cavegnomes, considering that they have 100HP each and deal a very small amount of damage with their attacks.

The following tricks can be used to make an encounter easier:
 * The chained Cavemother on the other side of the bridge in the caves leaks yellow muckus from her breasts. Put some in a glass vial, and it will allow you to use it in the encounter with the Talk option to get the Cavegnomes to leave you alone.
 * Talk to the Cavegnomes. Using the "Kueh~!" option will confuse them. This can be used multiple times to keep the Cavegnomes from attacking while a weaker party takes them out. Useful if fighting alone, or with a weaker party member who needs 2 turns to defeat a Cavegnome.
 * Do not say "KAAW KAAW!" to the Cavegnomes. This will make more of them spawn. They also don't understand human speech.
 * A single ally capable of dealing 100hp damage in one attack will end this encounter easily if your character also attacks.