# Cram ration

% 

Name

cram ration

Base price

35 zm

Nutrition

600 (700 for dwarves)

Turns to eat

3

Weight

15

Conduct

vegan

A cram ration is a kind of comestible that appears in NetHack. It is a vegan food, and is lighter but less filling than a food ration; dwarves gain an additional 100 nutrition from cram rations.

Contents

1 Generation
2 Strategy
3 History
4 Origin
5 Messages
6 Encyclopedia entry
7 Refrences

Generation
Gnomish and human Rangers start the game with a stack of 4-8 cram rations.[1]
Tourists will sometimes start with cram rations among their initial stacks of food.[2]

Strategy
Non-cursed cram rations are a safer option than most other comestibles if you must eat while hostile monsters are nearby—they are never rotten, relatively light and can be eaten in 3 turns.[3] This makes them particularly useful during the ascension run or an encounter with Famine in the Astral Plane.

History
Cram rations first appear in NetHack 3.0.0. The inability of non-cursed cram rations to be rotten when eaten is introduced in NetHack 3.6.0; the extra nutrition for dwarves is added in NetHack 3.6.1.
When starting races were introduced in NetHack 3.3.0, orcish player characters except for Wizards could start the game with cram rations among their random extra food items.[4] There was intended to be code for an orcish character's initial inventory that gave them tripe rations in place of cram rations and lembas wafers, which is properly implemented in NetHack 3.6.2.[5][6]

Origin
Cram is a biscuit-like food in the Middle-Earth setting of J.R.R. Tolkien, made by the human inhabitants of Lake-town and Dale and shared with the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain. While much less flavorful compared to elven lembas, cram is still very nutritious and is said to have kept fresh indefinitely, making for viable sustenance on long journeys. In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins and the dwarves keep themselves fed with cram during the latter part of the Quest of Erebor; in The Fellowship of the Ring, Gimli eats a tiny portion of a lembas cake expecting it to be a similar type of cram, but takes a liking to the food and eagerly finishes it.

Messages
This cram ration is bland.
You ate a non-cursed cram ration.
Encyclopedia entry

If you want to know what cram is, I can only say that I don't know the recipe; but it is biscuitish, keeps good indefinitely, is supposed to be sustaining, and is certainly not entertaining, being in fact very uninteresting except as a chewing exercise.  It was made by the Lake-men for long journeys.

[ The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien ] 

Refrences

↑ src/u_init.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 119: Initial inventory for Rangers pre-substitution

↑ src/u_init.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 144

↑ src/eat.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 55

↑ NetHack 3.3.0 u_init.c, line 806

↑ src/u_init.c in NetHack 3.6.2, line 222

↑ src/u_init.c in NetHack 3.6.2, line 1055