Comestible

A comestible % is anything edible; it is food. There are several types of comestibles in NetHack. They are important because without a sufficient supply, you will die from hunger. You must eat food to survive, though less frequently when you wear a ring of slow digestion.

Note that the word edible does not imply that you should eat it. Some food is bad to eat. For example, some corpses are poisonous.

If you want to read about corpses specifically, see the corpse page.

List of comestibles

• prepared foods
  • rations
    • food rations
    • cram rations
    • C-rations
    • K-rations
    • lembas wafers
    • cream pies
  • tins (see tinning kit, tin opener, spinach)
• produce
  • apples
  • oranges
  • bananas
  • sprigs of wolfsbane
  • pears
  • slime molds (the customizable fruit)
  • cloves of garlic
  • melons
  • carrots
  • eucalyptus leaves
• corpses
• eggs

Sources of food

• Some monsters have a chance of dropping a corpse.
• Sokoban often contains food.
• Ant and bee hives sometimes contain food.
• Ice boxes may contain up to 20 fresh corpses.
• Soldiers often carry C- or K-Rations, so places with a large concentration of soldiers (such as Fort Ludios) are a good place to find these rations.

Food strategy

Some adventurers don't carry enough food to the dungeon entrance. Recall from the Guidebook:

"In the morning you awake, collect your belongings, and set off for the dungeon. After several days of uneventful travel, you see the ancient ruins that mark the entrance to the Mazes of Menace. It is late at night, so you make camp at the entrance and spend the night sleeping under the open skies. In the morning, you gather your gear, eat what may be your last meal outside, and enter the dungeon..."

You packed enough food for "several days" of journey. However, some roles didn't think ahead and start the game with a small pile of 2 food rations, and some roles start with no food at all. Thus, one of the early goals of the game is to secure a food supply.

To stay alive, many players at the start of their dungeon exploration will eat any safe corpse, which "tastes terrible" but is not poisonous or harmful. When you kill a monster, they have a chance of leaving a corpse. It is common to find adventurers eating anything that their pet does not reach first (thus breaking the vegan conduct).

Good sources for food early on are the corpses of gnomes and dwarves in the Gnomish Mines (provided that you are not a dwarf of gnome in the first place, or are chaotic), and Sokoban.

A main food supply is the hives of ants and bees, somewhere below the Oracle. Some of these hives will contain one food item per square, which should yield a reasonable stack of food rations.

Even then, the supply is finite, so some players continue to eat monster corpses. Random Number God helpfully continues to provide them. Monster corpses may be stored for later use in tins using the tinning kit, or in ice boxes.