When to eat ?

[seren]

I know this is a pretty basic question but I have had a hard time to find out the answer.

My first few runs I ate every time that I turned "Hungry", which was a bad way to waste permafood.

Now I tend to eat when I have been very hungry for a long time, or `Near Starving` when I am not sure the next fight will be easy.

But this might be overly cautious, what is the right time to use permafood ?

[Jarlyk]

I mostly wait until Starving for permafood or Near Starving if I'm playing a caster (to avoid the hassle of having to eat some 'fast food' in the middle of combat.) Sometimes I'll eat sooner than that as a caster if I expect a big fight coming up where I don't want to give up any turns to eat. Hunger is annoying, but it's not nearly as bad as it seems when you first start playing. Using one turn to eat some fast permafood is rarely a big problem (and if it is, you've probably made a tactical error that put you into such a bad situation in the first place, so it's likely you're best off disengaging from the fight.)

[le_nerd]

If I play melee chars, I eat chunks until lair. Once the inventory is full, usually midlair, I eat the smallest stack of permafood and keep engorging myself until orbrun.

[daggaz]

You cant waste permafood, there is too much of it. I eat a chunk when I turn hungry if I can, which is just a habit from the fact that I used to think it mattered, and you get the "hungry" message from the game whereas there is no "reasonably satiated" message, and its here you are allowed to eat chunks normally. It doesnt matter, if you eat chunks then and save perma food you will have too much permafood in no time. So now I also insta-eat anything that isnt bread or rations and I will gladly chow those too if hunger might be an issue. I cant see why you would ever wait until you were near starving or something before eating chunks, it does you absolutely no good even if food were a limited resource. If anything, it would be more optimal to eat a chunk as soon as you are allowed to as that puts you as high as possible on the satiation meter without having to resort to permafood.

When I get to Zot, or if I see a hungry ghost and I know I will have to deal with meleeing it for more than a few turns, I will eat up to full or better. Though frankly, 10 evocations and a wand of paralyze makes short work of death cobs and hungry ghosts are rarely that kind of problem.

[Jarlyk]

Just to be clear, I always eat chunks if Hungry or below and I'm not in combat or in danger of being in combat immediately. Thankfully '5' and 'o' take care of this for me. It's only if I don't have any chunks that I wait until Starving/Near Starving to bother with permafood. Or sometimes when not even hungry just to get an annoying 1-stack of permafood out of my inventory.

[advil]

For most characters it sort of doesn't matter, and I usually just eat permafood around "very hungry"/"near starving" out of habit, or chunks earlier. If you have chunks there's no reason not to eat them whenever you can. It can matter when you're casting a lot of spells out of balance with your Spellcasting (which for most casters you might want to do) and if you're using a lot of devices, basically you don't want to get to "starving" in the middle of a fight. For these I'll eat permafood a bit more aggressively. Rods vary a lot in their hunger impact so if you're relying on ignition vs. lightning rod for example that makes a big difference in how likely getting to "starving" is as well.

To see why it doesn't really matter, try playing a SpEn or something.

In current trunk death cobs do something else now.

[kuniqs]

How to basic: breathing