Foodless
The foodless conduct restricts eating in any form. This includes noncomestible items, such as walls, doors, and boulders, if you happen to be polymorphed into a creature that can eat such things.
Contents
Breaking the conduct
The following activities break the foodless conduct:
- Eating any item with the [e] command.
- Eating the brain of a monster while polymorphed into a (master) mind flayer.
- Engulfing a monster while polymorphed.
The following activities do not break the foodless conduct:
- Quaffing a potion (even fruit juice, booze, or water).
- Attacking while polymorphed into a vampire so as to drink blood.
Starving
A player starts at nine-hundred nutrition. This means, without any aid or penalties, a player begins fainting at approximately turn 900 and starves soon after. Wearing a ring of slow digestion reduces nutrition consumption to 5% of the natural rate. So if you put on a ring of slow digestion on turn one, you will last approximately 18000 turns before fainting, which, if you're fast enough, gives you plenty of time to ascend. However, only wizards have a chance at starting with slow digestion, making this option less viable.
Other than the passage of turns, spellcasting, jumping, carrying the Amulet of Yendor, wearing rings and amulets, and being Stressed or worse all consume additional nutrition. See the nutrition article for more information about what consumes nutrition points.
Other problems
Other than the obvious problem of avoiding starvation, foodless is difficult because eating corpses is the most popular way to gain important intrinsics like poison resistance and telepathy. Because of this, most foodless ascensions have been completed as monk, who attain most of the important intrinsics from gaining experience levels. Other ways of gaining the intrinsics include being crowned and wearing rings and other equipment as you need their effects.
Strategy
Restoring nutrition
The following activities restore nutrition to some set amount:
- Praying while Hungry or worse may restore your nutrition to 900.[1]
- Activating an amulet of life saving with less than 500 nutrition restores your nutrition to 500.[2]
- Polymorphing into your own race sets your nutrition to 499 + 1d500.[3]
The following activities increase your nutrition level without breaking foodless:
- Quaffing a potion of booze[4] or undiluted fruit juice[5] restores 30 nutrition if blessed, 20 if uncursed, 10 if cursed. Half if diluted fruit juice.
- Quaffing an uncursed potion of water restores 1d10 nutrition.[6]
Keeping nutrition
Ways to keep your nutrition high include:
- Wearing a ring of slow digestion.
- Not jumping and not wearing rings and amulets.
- Avoiding spellcasting unless you have hungerless casting.
- Abusing the dual ring of slow digestion bug.
- Manipulating hunger checks in other ways (such as dropping the Amulet of Yendor for every sixteenth turn).
- Polymorphing into a monster that does not eat, probably wearing an amulet of unchanging.
- Sleeping reduces nutrition consumption to approximately 10% the natural rate.[7]
Variations
Speed
Ascending so quickly that nutrition never falls low enough to become a problem.
Atheist
Not praying to restore hunger, or being crowned for intrinsics. Also includes all of the other atheist challenges (such as no divine protection and no altar beatification identification).
Liquid diet
Only restoring nutrition by quaffing potions, usualy by using the Platinum Yendorian Express Card as a tourist on a horn of plenty.
True polyselfless
Not polymorphing into one's own race to restore hunger. Oddly enough, polying into one's own race does not break the polyselfless conduct.
Survivor
Not using any amulets of life saving to restore hunger.
Dual slow digestion
Abusing the dual ring of slow digestion bug to, ideally, never lose any points of nutrition.
Successes
- Daniel Ligon describes the first known foodless ascension here on RGRN.
- Michael Anthony Bayazes describes his foodless, polyless, atheist wizard here on RGRN.
- Marvin describes his foodless, atheist, survivor wizard here on RGRN.
- Robert R Schneck describes his liquid diet foodless tourist here on RGRN.
- eit_brad describes his ten-conduct ascension (including foodless) here on RGRN.
Source code references
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