There should be more types of skeletal monsters in the game beyond the one-level-wonder ordinary skeletons (and technically liches). Particularly, there should be skeleton dragons, whose scale mail makes you inediate (not just slow digesting).

More types of skeletons appearing in more places would also allow for a “bone” item to be dropped, which various interesting things could be done with.

Drow get more nutrition when eating fungi and mold, since they come from a culture which has spent generations cultivating them underground.

If you are Satiated, your body is so bloated that you can’t be engulfed.

Celery, a comestible which uniquely has negative nutrition (because in real life, it takes a human body more calories to digest the celery than are in the celery.) The main use of this negative nutrition is to unsatiate yourself so you can continue eating other food.

It should be a large amount of negative nutrition in order to be worthwhile, but at the same time shouldn’t be instadeath for unsuspecting new players by immediately starving them. To that end, special case it so that it does not harm you if you are Hungry or worse, is worth -30 nutrition if “not hungry”, and is worth more negative nutrition if Satiated, possibly scaling up the more satiated you are.

Depending on implemenetation, it could either be safe or unsafe to eat when oversatiated - realism dictates it should be unsafe to eat, but gameplay dictates it would be useful in fewer situations unless it is always safe to eat. Or have it count as a small positive nutritional value assessed before maybe choking, followed by a large negative nutritional value assessed after you didn’t choke.

Knights still incur alignment penalties for eating celery while satiated.

The celery also crunches loudly whenever eating it, so it wakes up nearby sleeping monsters.

Everlasting gobstopper, a food item that you start sucking on when you eat it, providing a constant d2 nutrition per turn. It never gets used up, but once you spit it out (by choosing to eat something else or by using “-“ with the eat command) it is no good anymore and gets used up. If you get oversatiated by not spitting it out, you can indeed choke and die on it.

Cornuthaums give a lesser reduced-hunger casting benefit to non-Wizards who wear them. They also improve reduced-hunger casting for Wizards.

Becoming hungry or weak does not interrupt opening a tin, though it continues to interrupt all other occupations.

Your chance of sucking an opponent’s brain increases the hungrier you get.

When monks are weak from hunger, they don’t lose any Strength, due to being experienced with fasting.

Lemures have some sort of debuff that they give you such as sapping your nutrition when nearby. This stacks with other lemures, so it is insignificant if you are facing only one or two, but can get perilous if you are surrounded by a lot of them, as may happen in Gehennom.

It’s a problem that utility spells with a high failure rate, such as identify at 95% fail, is a mere inconvenience to players, since they can sit in a closet with a stack of food and wait for their Pw to recharge until they succeed. This is not really a problem with combat spells, since the penalty for failing to cast the spell correctly is a disadvantage in combat, where time and Pw matter. Some possible ways to address it:

• Large penalties for failing to cast a spell, like a 1% memory loss and 50 hunger.
• Failing to cast a spell locks it for a certain period of time. It would be hard to make this not turn into an even slower grind for utility spells, since the lockout period could just be waited out.
• Make spells never actually failable, but Pw cost is increased proportional to the failure rate, specifically: real Pw = base Pw / success rate. Under this formula, a 15 Pw spell at 95% fail becomes a 300 Pw spell at 0% fail. This means the Pw cost should be exposed in the spellcasting menu rather than failure rate, even though failure rate still needs to be calculated. Maybe use different colors in the spellcasting menu to denote spells you can cast now, spells you can cast by waiting to recover more Pw, spells you can’t cast even at your current maximum Pw, and forgotten spells.

Because vomiting only costs 20 nutrition, which is a strangely fixed amount and not very much, make it instead cost a proportion (say half) of your current nutrition, with a minimum of 20 if half of your current nutrition is less than 20.

Blessed tinning kits have a chance of creating multiple tins from large, high-nutrition monsters. Specifically:

• If the monster’s corpse is 800 or less nutrition (the amount from a food ration), it always makes 1 tin.
• If the monster’s corpse is greater than 800 nutrition, it produces NUTR / 800 tins, plus possibly one more with a (NUTR % 800) / 800 chance. (So a monster whose corpse is 2000 nutrition would always produce 2 tins with a 50% chance of a third.)
• It expends a charge for each tin produced like normal. If it would make more tins than there were charges, the amount of tins is capped at the number of charges.

When polymorphed into a mind flayer (or playing an illithid in variants that have it as a race), you gain additional nutrition when you eat the brain of a spellcasting or telepathic monster.

Disenchanters derive additional nutrition from enchanted objects they eat akin to dNetHack disenchanters.

Monks should receive a benefit for fasting. This could be in the form of giving them a point of alignment record every so often when they are Hungry or worse, and/or slowing down their hunger rate when they are Hungry.

Collection of vague ideas around a new “chef” role:

• Immunity to choking.
• Gets bonuses of some sort for being satiated.
• Either starts with a tinning kit and tin opener and gets a bonus from making tins, or eating from tins is a disgrace to their palate and gives them penalties.
• Hungers faster than normal, but is able to get extra nutrition out of corpses if they properly prepare them.
• May have similarities to hobbit races in some variants with regards to food mechanics.

The “vitamin” effect of a pill shouldn’t give a big chunk of nutrition. It should give a token amount of nutrition (say 10 or 20), but its main effect should be to exercise all attributes that can be exercised several times.

New artifact, The Dwarf Bread, or possibly, The Battle Bread of B’hrian Bloodaxe. It is a cram ration, and if the object materials patch is present it is made of stone. It cannot be eaten; if you try you get a YAFM about how you really aren’t that hungry. Its main effect is that while carried with no other apparent food available, your nutrition will not decrease if it is at or below the threshold of going from Hungry to Weak.

You are considered to “have food available” if:

• You are carrying any food in your inventory or in containers.
• There is any comestible, anything at all, that you can see on the map.

Possibly, it acts as a club when wielded, though being a cram ration it can’t be enchanted.

New artifact The Never-Ending Doughnut, an unspecified-comestible base type artifact that can only be eaten when Hungry or worse, but will never get fully consumed unless the eater is a purple worm. After eating it the first time, it is perpetually “partly eaten”. You cannot become satiated by eating it.

Reduce the nutrition value of eucalyptus leaves to 1 or 2; its current 30 is six times as much as a meatball, which makes no sense.

Real-life creatures tend to eat an amount of food proportional to their weight, so the hunger rate in NetHack should depend on your race’s (or your polyform’s) base weight. This mainly helps gnomes by cutting their nutrition rate significantly.

Remove Wizards’ exclusive access to reduced-hunger and hungerless casting. Instead, tie spell hunger to how experienced you are with the spell; this could either track how many times you’ve cast that specific spell, or use your skill in the spell’s school as a proxy for that, or both. Intelligence could remain a factor, but the important thing is that non-wizard casters can also enjoy the benefits. (Note that Wizards, what with casting spells a lot more than other roles and having high spell skill caps, will still reap a larger benefit from this.)

If you are eating someone’s brains when polymorphed into a mind flayer, and you are very satiated to the point where you aren’t getting the full amount of nutrition from it, you do less damage with the attack because you aren’t eating as much of their brain.

Pushing a boulder costs d3 or d4 nutrition, in order to balance out its easy source of Str exercise. However, something would probably need to be done to compensate in Sokoban (maybe put even more food there?)

Barbarians get extra nutrition from eating corpses, since they have practice in how to eat them properly. Possibly up to 1.5x the nutrition.

Vomiting subtracts nutrition proportional to your current nutrition instead of a constant 20. (20 is a decent floor though). Perhaps it takes half of your current nutrition.

Being satiated abuses wisdom for Samurai (at the same rate it does for Monks currently), and gives Monks slow alignment penalties instead of abusing wisdom.

Hungerful regeneration from the ring only costs excess nutrition if your HP is actually below full. Possibly, to compensate for not having to micromanage your ring finger, accelerate the hunger rate while regenerating HP: instead of double, perhaps triple or quadruple its usual rate.

Potion of honey; nonmagical but provides a lot more nutrition than juice. Can be obtained from bees somehow, possibly by dipping royal jelly into a potion of fruit juice or potion of water.

Famine’s hungering attack takes the maximum of his current 40-80 nutrition and a large fraction (1/2 to 3/4) of your current nutrition.

Alter the player’s corpse weight based on how hungry they were when they died.

Remove fainting and direct starvation as a game mechanic.

• In its place, just permanently and repeatedly decrement the hero’s Strength or Constitution while they are in the Starving range (when nutrition ≤ 0) until the hero dies from stat loss.
• The reduction happens when you hit -N nutrition, and it gets reset to 0 when this happens.
• Permanent reduction is done by reducing the current ‘‘and highest-reached’’ values of the stat by 1, so restore ability won’t restore its full previous value.
• Since Fainting was pretty lethal already, the interval between losing points should be pretty short.
• When you eat something, before adding the nutrition from the food, your nutrition resets to 0.
• Sustain ability prevents stat loss but makes you faint instead.

Non-cursed rings of hunger don’t drain excess nutrition when you are Hungry, and slow digestion rings don’t slow your digestion when you’re oversatiated.

The weight of your character varies depending on your hunger status.

When you complete your Quest and return the artifact back to your Quest leader, and if you return to them with the Amulet, you are rewarded with a (one-time) hero’s feast. This restores HP and fills your nutrition to just below Satiated (and increments the turn counter?)

When you are both hallucinating and weak from hunger, monsters start appearing as % instead of regular hallucinatory glyphs.

Swimming while satiated can cause you to drown from stomach cramps.

Allow a count for eating, or else have the character stop once they hit Satiated. (Note that numerous people have pointed out flaws with allowing the player to specify exactly how much they want to eat - for instance, it becomes trivial to stretch out a lizard corpse to every bite it provides).

Homemade tins give the minimum of the corpse’s nutrition and 50 nutrition. This is to prevent silliness like a killer bee corpse giving 5 nutrition when eaten but magically giving 50 after being tinned.

Most corpses have sharply decreased amounts of nutrition (from the current values). They may also be too mangled to be good for a sacrifice, randomly based on their object ID. Their intrinsic-conveying chances are unchanged, though.

Disenchanters can eat magical items for food like incantifiers do (i.e. draining the magic out of the item, leaving it as uncharged/cancelled/+0 or turning it into a mundane counterpart). This works for disenchanter pets, and for players polymorphed into them. Not specified whether this should give the player intrinsics.

Possibly, add a ‘magivore’ monster flag to represent monsters that can do this, though if only disenchanters are capable of doing this then it may not be needed.