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; some corpses are poisonous.

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

List of comestibles

• prepared foods
  • rations
    • food ration
    • cram ration
    • C ration
    • K ration
    • lembas wafer
    • cream pie
  • tins (see tinning kit, tin opener, spinach)
• produce
  • apple
  • orange
  • banana
  • wolfsbane
  • pear
  • slime mold (the customizable fruit)
  • garlic
  • melon
  • carrot
  • eucalyptus leaf
• 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.
• ...

Food strategy

Embarassingly, some adventurers never 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 must have packed enough food for "several days" of journey. However, often you will start the game with no food at all, and some with only a small pile of 2 food rations. Why? Did you think that food was plentiful in the top of the dungeon? Why did you not pack more food?

To stay alive, many players, at the start of their dungeon exploration, will eat any corpse, which "tastes terrible" but is not poisonous or harmful. You find corpses by killing monsters; some monsters have a chance of dropping a corpse. It is common to find adventurers eating anything that their pet does not reach first (thus breaking the vegan conduct). Thus one of the early goals of the game is:

• Secure a food supply.

The main key to a food supply is in the hives of ants and bees, somewhere below the Oracle. Some of these hives will contain one food item per square; this should yield a reasonable stack of food rations.

Before reaching the hives, you might be able to obtain food from Sokoban, or eat several corpses of gnomes and dwarves in the Gnomish Mines (provided that you are not a dwarf or gnome in the first place, or are chaotic).

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