Cram ration
% 
| |
|---|---|
| Name | cram ration |
| Base price | 35 zm |
| Nutrition | 600 (700 for dwarves) |
| Turns to eat | 3 |
| Weight | 15 |
| Conduct | vegan |
A cram ration is a kind of comestible that appears in NetHack. It is a vegan food, and is lighter but less filling than a food ration; dwarves gain an additional 100 nutrition from cram rations.
Generation
In addition to random generation, gnomish and human Rangers start the game with a stack of 4-8 cram rations.[1]
Tourists will sometimes start with cram rations among their initial stacks of food.[2]
Strategy
Non-cursed cram rations are a safer option than most other comestibles if you must eat while hostile monsters are nearby—they are never rotten, relatively light and can be eaten in 3 turns.[3] This makes them particularly useful during the ascension run or an encounter with Famine in the Astral Plane.
History
Cram rations first appear in NetHack 3.0.0. The inability of non-cursed cram rations to be rotten when eaten is introduced in NetHack 3.6.0; the extra nutrition for dwarves is added in NetHack 3.6.1.
When the starting races were introduced in NetHack 3.3.0, orcish player characters except for Wizards could start the game with cram rations among their random extra food items.[4] There was intended to be code for an orcish character's initial inventory that gave them tripe rations in place of cram rations and lembas wafers, which is properly implemented in NetHack 3.6.2.[5][6]
Origin
Cram is a type of food in the Middle-Earth setting of J.R.R. Tolkien, where it is biscuit-like with some vaguely hardtack-like qualities. Cram is made by the human inhabitants of Lake-town and Dale and shared with the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain - while much less flavorful compared to elven lembas, cram is still very nutritious and is said to keep fresh indefinitely, making it viable sustenance on long journeys. In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins and the dwarves keep themselves fed with cram during the latter part of the Quest of Erebor; in The Fellowship of the Ring, Gimli eats a tiny portion of a lembas cake expecting it to be a similar type of cram, but takes a liking to the food and eagerly finishes it.
Messages
- This cram ration is bland.
- You ate a non-cursed cram ration.
Encyclopedia entry
If you want to know what cram is, I can only say that I don't know the recipe; but it is biscuitish, keeps good indefinitely, is supposed to be sustaining, and is certainly not entertaining, being in fact very uninteresting except as a chewing exercise. It was made by the Lake-men for long journeys.
Refrences
- ↑ src/u_init.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 119: Initial inventory for Rangers pre-substitution
- ↑ src/u_init.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 144
- ↑ src/eat.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 55
- ↑ NetHack 3.3.0 u_init.c, line 806
- ↑ src/u_init.c in NetHack 3.6.2, line 222
- ↑ src/u_init.c in NetHack 3.6.2, line 1055
