Invulnerability

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An invulnerability found in Doom II MAP08: Tricks and Traps.

The invulnerability is a powerup that makes the player generally impervious to damage for 30 seconds. The player is not protected from telefrags, and will still recoil from a successful attack. The powerup looks like a green sphere with a grinning red-eyed head inside. While it is active, the colors in the player's display change to inverse monochrome, and the eyes of the status bar face glow yellow (STFGOD0), making them look similar to the demon's; in the last few seconds the display will begin blinking back to its original colors. While the inverted monochrome effect is activated the game is effectively fully bright, and the player will be able to see every detail even in the darkest areas. Spectres in particular become much more visible under its effects.

Invulnerability can also be activated with the cheat code idbeholdv.

In deathmatch mode of vanilla Doom, invulnerabilities and blur artifacts never respawn. Some source ports allow flags to be set to cause them to respawn.

Invulnerabilities are included in the items percentage displayed at the end of each level.

Technical

According to the function P_DamageMobj in p_inter.c, invulnerability only protects the player from attacks doing less than 1000 points of damage; while no monster in the game can do nearly that much damage in one attack, a telefrag inflicts 10000 points (and indeed will kill even an otherwise invulnerable player). This also means that DeHackEd can be used to circumvent the invulnerability powerup by creating incredibly powerful weapons.

Data

Thing attributes
Thing type 2022 (decimal), 7E6 (hex)
Appears in Registered Doom
Ultimate Doom
Doom II/Final Doom
Radius 20
Sprite PINV
Class Artifact
Pickup

In classic Doom, invulnerabilities are first encountered on these levels:

Game ITYTD and HNTR HMP UV and NM
Ultimate Doom E2M7: Spawning Vats E2M7: Spawning Vats E2M7: Spawning Vats
Doom II MAP08: Tricks and Traps MAP08: Tricks and Traps MAP08: Tricks and Traps
TNT: Evilution MAP07: Prison MAP07: Prison MAP07: Prison
Plutonia MAP09: Abattoire MAP09: Abattoire MAP09: Abattoire

The IWADs contain the following numbers of invulnerability artifacts:

Game ITYTD and HNTR HMP UV and NM
Ultimate Doom 16 15 16
Doom II 29 24 23
TNT: Evilution 15 13 12
Plutonia 5 5 5

Notes

The early invulnerability powerup, as seen in MBF's emulation of the Doom press release beta.
  • The grinning face inside the sphere appears to be derived from the lost soul sprite in Doom 0.4. Oddly enough, the invulnerability sphere in that version of the game was invisible and had an unused sprite in the IWAD which looked like a giant health bonus.
  • Due to a limitation of the engine, the invulnerability artifact lights up all the areas in the game similar to the light amplification visor. Otherwise it would require a entire table of 32 shades for a proper effect.

See also

A bug caused vanilla Doom to fail to invert the sky color

Sources