Eat

Eating is a command that appears in NetHack, and is performed using the e key.

The hero primarily maintains their nutrition levels by eating comestible items whenever they become hungry. While many monsters do not normally concern themselves with nutrition unless they are tame, quite a few monsters are capable of eating food for other purposes depending on their diet, and some monsters have special diets that enable them to eat other non-food items as well—digestion attacks even enable the consumption of other monsters.

A user has suggested improving this page or section as follows:

"Continue expanding, and ensure the following isn't too redundant with the nutrition or comestible articles."

Description

Pressing e informs the player about comestible items on the hero's square if any are present and gives a yes/no prompt to the player if they want to eat one, and otherwise the command will open a menu listing all comestibles that a hero can eat and prompt the hero to select one. Using m as a prefix will proceed straight to the latter menu and ignore any items on the hero's square. If the hero is polymorphed into a monster with a more exotic diet, items that are edible in that form will be shown in the eating menu as well.

A hero eating a food item will increase their nutrition (or alternately decrease their hunger level, depending on the perspective) by the amount that food provides, and each food item has a set amount of turns that the nutrition is distributed evenly across while it is eaten until the meal is completely finished—rotten food will grant less nutrition and may even cause adverse effects. Eating is an occupation that can be interrupted, e.g. by a hostile monster's presence.

Particular food items, e.g. many types of monster corpses, can grant certain effects and properties to a hero that fully eats one, while others such as aged corpses can cause harmful effects when consumed, which can vary from mild setbacks to immediately lethal—food appraisal will warn a player when the hero is about to eat something potentially unsafe. Most useful intrinsic properties for the hero can only be gained by eating the corpses of monsters.

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that the information below is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate it.

Pets can gain resistances and other properties by eating corpses as the hero can. They will also avoid corpses that cause polymorph unless they are starving or about to die.

Diet

Monsters have diets that determine what types of food they will eat and how often they will eat it, and may also eat food outside of their diet under specific circumstances. In contrast to the hero, monsters will adhere to the diet type specified by their monster flag: a monster can be carnivorous, herbivorous, omnivorous, inediate (i.e. able to survive without food), or may even be a metallivore whose diet consists of metal. Heroes that polymorph into monsters with particular diets will often have different messages printed when eating certain food items, i.e. a fleshy corpse that merely tastes "okay" to a hero will taste "delicious" to a hero in the form of a carnivorous monster (though with no difference in nutrition).

The hero is always considered omnivorous, but in practice does not adhere to any specific diet unless the player is actively observing a food-related conduct: the exception to this rule is the Monk role, who is expected to stick to at least a vegetarian diet, and takes a -1 penalty to alignment record every time they consume non-vegetarian food—for this reason, abbots and monk player monsters are herbivorous rather than omnivorous like other player monsters and quest guardians, though this will make no realistic difference in gameplay. See the article on conducts for more detailed information on how eating is affected in each one.

Pets

Monsters eating food items behave differently from the hero consuming food: in their case, the item is split from its stack if applicable and immediately consumed, and the monster is then made immobile for a number of turns roughly equal to the time a hero would spend on the meal. They will also avoid corpses that are normally harmful to them, and will only eat certain types of food when they are otherwise about to starve.

As discussed prior, pets are the primary monsters that have to concern themselves with nutrition, and a monster's preferences in food depend on their diet—in addition to the above mechanics for monsters, the nutrition gained from eating a comestible item also depends on the pet's hunger status and physical size. See the linked article at the top of this section for more details, and see below for monsters that will eat food or other objects even when not tame.

Special cases and diets

Some monsters have special diets that allow them to eat non-standard "food" items and/or consume them under circumstances outside of a pet eating applicable food:

• Gelatinous cubes, which can engulf and 'eat' most organic items
• Rust monsters, which are metallivores that eat items made of iron and other rust-prone metals

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that the information below is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate it.

All ghouls and purple worms will seek out and devour edible corpses.