Lembas wafer

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Name	lembas wafer
Base price	45 zm
Nutrition	800 (1000 for elves and 600 for orcs)
Turns to eat	2
Weight	5
Conduct	vegan

A lembas wafer is a kind of comestible in NetHack.

It is a vegan food, and has the highest nutrition/weight ratio of all the comestibles at 800 nutrition to 5 units - lembas wafers provide 1000 nutrition for elves, and only 600 nutrition for orcs. Lembas wafers can also tame cats and dogs.

Strategy

Lembas wafers take only two turns to eat, which gives them a high nutrition per turn - for all characters excluding elves or orcs, they are tied for the highest with K-rations. Non-cursed lembas wafers are never rotten, which makes them a safer option than most other comestibles if you must eat while hostile monsters are nearby. While orcs do get less nutrition from lembas wafers, they still grant 120 nutrition per aum, which makes it more than worthwhile for orc characters to stock up on.

The combination of their high nutrition/weight and nutrition/turn makes them highly suitable for use in ascension kits, especially if players run into Famine. They are usually combined with a supply of K-rations for this purpose, and it is not uncommon for players to polypile food for more lembas.

Messages

A little goes a long way.

You ate a non-cursed lembas wafer as an elf.

!#?&* elf kibble!

You ate a non-cursed lembas wafer as an orc.

History

The lembas wafer is introduced in NetHack 3.0.0. From this version to NetHack 3.4.3, as well as variants based on those versions, lembas wafers could be rotten just the same as other food; non-cursed lembas was made exempt from this in NetHack 3.6.0. The differing nutrition values for elves and orcs were added in NetHack 3.6.1.

When starting races were introduced in NetHack 3.3.0, orcish player characters except for Wizards could start the game with lembas among their random extra food items. 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 was properly implemented in NetHack 3.6.2.

Origin

In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, lembas was a lightweight, extremely nourishing food of the elves, which was given to the Fellowship to feed them on their journey.

Encyclopedia entry

In the morning, as they were beginning to pack their slender goods, Elves that could speak their tongue came to them and brought them many gifts of food and clothing for their journey. The food was mostly in the form of very thin cakes, made of a meal that was baked a light brown on the outside, and inside was the colour of cream. Gimli took up one of the cakes and looked at it with a doubtful eye.
'Cram,' he said under his breath, as he broke off a crisp corner and nibbled at it. His expression quickly changed, and he ate all the rest of the cake with relish.
'No more, no more!' cried the Elves laughing. 'You have eaten enough already for a long day's march.'
'I thought it was only a kind of cram, such as the Dalemen make for journeys in the wild,' said the Dwarf.
'So it is,' they answered. 'But we call it lembas or waybread, and it is more strengthening than any foods made by Men, and it is more pleasant than cram, by all accounts.'

[ The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien ]