Mash monsters

"Mash" monsters are phantom versions of certain Hexen monsters that cannot be placed as things, but appear via scripted events. They are identical to the normal version of the monster except for two things: they are translucent, like Heretic's ghosts, though lacking any special weapon immunities, and they vanish instantly when killed rather than having death animations. The term "mash" comes from the script spawn names.

In the original levels, mash monsters are produced only by scripts invoked by Korax in the second phase of battling him in the Dark Crucible. If Korax is slain quickly, they may never be seen in a playthrough. The script responsible for spawning these monsters is shown below:

script 254 (void)  
{
    int var0;
    int var1;

    if(mapvar8 != 0)
    {
        Radius_Quake(2, 5, 1, 5, 245);
        var0 = random(230, 239);
        var1 = random(100, 103);
        Thing_Spawn(var0, var1, random(0, 255));
    }
}

Aside from possible flavor considerations, it is likely that the inclusion of mash versions of these monsters was intended to reduce the chances of hitting the visible sprite limit during the Korax battle by not leaving corpse sprites behind.

Monsters with mash versions

Mash green chaos serpent firing a green projectile.

Monster	ACS spawn name	ACS spawn #
Ettin	T_ETTIN_MASH	102
Centaur	T_CENTAUR_MASH	103
Green chaos serpent	T_DEMON_MASH	100
Brown chaos serpent	T_DEMON2_MASH	101

Bugs

Even though mash green chaos serpents reuse the green chaos serpent sprites, they fire the same projectiles as brown chaos serpents. This is due to the ranged attack function of the chaos serpents only checking if the caller's internal ID matches exactly with that of a green chaos serpent. If it does, the attack spawns a ball of fire. If it does not match, a green projectile is spawned instead.