Accidental murder

Verified against the spelunky.ai port v0.1.10 on 28 October 2026.

Monsters killed by traps don't count as the player's kills: Spikes and the Spear Trap mark them so. The Shopkeeper's death never reads that mark. However he dies, it adds to the player's kills and makes him a murderer, which lasts the rest of the game.

A thief who stole a cape waits on a floor past a hole with Spikes in it. The angry Shopkeeper chasing him jumps onto a block and walks off it into the hole. The Spikes kill him, yet the game counts him as the player's kill and marks the player a murderer ^[1].

The Shopkeeper runs the code most monsters share first, where landing on Spikes takes all his hit points and sets countsAsKill false, as for any monster ^[2]. A monster's own death reads it before it counts a kill, as the Caveman's does ^[3]. The Shopkeeper's doesn't ^[4]:

        else
        {
            if (isRealLevel()) global.enemyKills[19] += 1;
            global.shopkeepers += 1;
            global.kills += 1;
            global.murderer = true;

The player is made a murderer when a Shopkeeper is crushed or found inside a solid too, and those don't ask what did it either ^[5]. Only the Stars bonus room's Shopkeepers are spared, where a death counts toward the room's score instead. A murderer stays one until a new game: every Shopkeeper patrols and shouts "YOU'LL PAY FOR YOUR CRIMES!", every ware is free, and each level's exit has a Shopkeeper waiting by it ^{[6] [7]}.

Anger a Shopkeeper and lead him over Spikes, or die with a lit bomb beside him. The replays pin both: a thief luring an angry Shopkeeper into a hole with Spikes in it, where his hit points go and the kill, the Shopkeeper tally and the murderer mark all come on that step ^[8], and a bomb the dead player left killing the Shopkeeper ^[9]. A Tomb Lord the lava kills, by contrast, isn't counted ^[10].

The spelunky.ai port reproduces it exactly: it's in docs/quirks.md's list of the 1.1 source's bugs ^[7], and the oracle's fingerprints of the replays pin the tallies. The Spear Trap's version is read in the code and not yet in a replay. No option turns it off.