Inediate

In NetHack, an inediate creature is one that does not need to eat any kind of food to stay alive. Inediate pets can sometimes be difficult to keep tame, as eating is a primary method of increasing a pet's tameness.

An "inediate" player who completes the game without eating is said to have achieved the foodless conduct.

Generally, monsters that are undead, demonic, angelic beings, or otherwise magical in nature are inediate. Some creatures that eat in the real world, like bees and fungi, are classified as inediate in NetHack because their natural diet doesn't exist in the game.

Polyself

Polymorphing into an inediate form suppresses the standard one point per turn of nutrition consumption, much like a ring of slow digestion. It does not prevent nutrition loss from other sources, e.g. spellcasting and ring hunger. If your polyself has regeneration, e.g. a vampire, that consumes nutrition on odd turns as normal. Consumption will resume when you return to your natural form, and wearing an amulet of unchanging to prevent this will incur amulet hunger, so polyself can't be used to permanently forestall nutrition consumption.

List of inediate monsters

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  • Although ghouls are classified as inediate, tame ones will eat old corpses and eggs; however, they won't starve for lack of food.
• killer bees and queen bees
• acid blobs and quivering blobs
• salamanders
• jellyfish

Variants

Vampires and vampire lords do need to eat in SLASH'EM.

See also

• Diet

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