Spell Hunger: Worth considering?

[bigmcstrongmuscle]

So I lost my most promising GrBe ever (by making the stupid decision to fight Sojobo on Depths:4, despite the warning signs), and I decided to roll a few DECjs for a change of pace. I'm noticing the basic choices magic-wise early game seem to be between stronger, more reliable spells (spell schools); and more MP and variety (Spellcasting).

I read in the Spellcasting description that it controls spell hunger. Coming off a streak of largely Okies and Troggites, I had hunger on the brain, so for the first couple tries, I initially was putting a lot of points into conjurations and casting, to try and get good fail rates and hungerless on my spells. But then I found out that neither Sif nor Vehumet require you to offer corpses, so I was ending up with chunks piling up way faster than I can eat them. I've already worked out that I'm putting more points than I really need into Spellcasting.

But now I'm wondering: Assuming I'm not a spriggan or something like that, is spell hunger even worth worrying about at all?

[crate]

the main effect of spell hunger is that if you have low spellcasting or int and you enter a fight at low nutrition (particularly if you're hungry or below) then you get a limited number of uses of level 6+ spells in that fight

you will not starve from spell hunger

[KoboldLord]

It isn't completely irrelevant, but it isn't all that important. As you've noticed, monsters are made out of food, and you can gather this food up after they stop moving and return to normal satiation after each battle. If you spend less spell hunger for a battle than the gap between normal satiation and starving, you spend no hunger on that battle. Spell hunger is only a factor at all in two situations. First, if you are forced to run away partway through the battle and have to abandon the temporary food until it rots, you might end up having to eat some permafood. This is no problem, you will have lots of it. Second, if you run yourself all the way down to starving during battle and need to cast more spells, you have to eat while monsters are biting your face, and that can be fatal so you should try to avoid that. Having lots of extra permafood doesn't actually help all that much because it's the time spent eating it that kills you, not the specific value of your nutrition level. It's probably a good idea to keep enough of a handle on your spell hunger that you won't run out of nutrition before you run out of spells to cast, which for a conjuror build is probably going to involve blowing your entire mp bar on your highest-level spells.

Generally speaking, I train spellcasting to get more spell slots long before I need it to reduce spell hunger. You also get a cheap bump in spell power from spellcasting if your relevant magic skills are far enough ahead that they cost four times as much xp to level.

[bigmcstrongmuscle]

That all makes a lot of sense. I think the next crack I take at this is gonna be a lot more conjurations and maybe a touch of dodging instead.

[Lasty]

Dodging helps a lot. Definitely don't forget about Dodging.

[Matanui3]

the main effect of spell hunger is that if you have low spellcasting or int and you enter a fight at low nutrition (particularly if you're hungry or below) then you get a limited number of uses of level 6+ spells in that fight

you will not starve from spell hunger

I did once enter Swamp with 11 bread rations and left with 0 (and I found at least one in the swamp, too).

Bolt of Fire was the only thing killing dudes fast enough as they swarmed me, and nothing was dropping a corpse except the bog bodies...
I also got the undead vault on the last level, so that didn't help either.