Hunger (property)

Hunger is a property in NetHack that increases the rate at which you burn nutrition.

The only source of the hunger property is wearing or eating a ring of hunger.

Description

While you have the hunger property, the rate at which your nutrition normally decreases is accelerated by 50%. This effect stacks with the accelerated hunger rate from other properties, such as conflict and regeneration conferred by the ring of regeneration. Slow digestion does not cancel out this effect.

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that it is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate this information.

As of commit 50084750, hunger prevents you from choking on food when oversatiated by making you vomit, similar to the breathless property, except that instead of draining 1000 nutrition, you are left with 60 nutrition.

Strategy

Extrinsic hunger is occasionally useful when you want to stop being satiated, in order to avoid dexterity penalties or eat more corpses. However, it is usually considered bad to have as an intrinsic, and a tinning kit is preferable for managing corpse consumption and nutrition.

Messages

You hunger rapidly.

You have hunger as viewed via enlightenment.

Variants

GruntHack

In GruntHack, hunger is an object property that can occur on some non-weapon items, and confers the hunger property when worn.

FIQHack

In FIQHack, hunger is one of the intrinsic properties a non-cursed potion of wonder can confer when quaffed; dipping an appropriate item in a non-cursed potion also has a chance of randomly bestowing hunger as an object property.

EvilHack

In EvilHack, hunger is an object property that can occur on armor and weapons, and confers the hunger property while the item worn or wielded.