# Lembas wafer

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Name

lembas wafer

Base price

45 zm

Nutrition

800 (1000 for elves and 600 for orcs)

Turns to eat

2

Weight

5

Conduct

vegan

A lembas wafer is a kind of comestible that appears in NetHack. It is a vegan food that has the highest nutrition-toweight ratio of all comestibles at 800 nutrition to 5 units.
Lembas wafers provide 1000 nutrition for elves, and only 600 nutrition for orcs.[1] Lembas wafers can also be used to tame cats and dogs.

Contents

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

Generation
Elven Rangers start the game with a stack of 4-8 lembas wafers in place of the role's standard cram rations.[2][3]
Tourists will sometimes start with lembas wafers among their initial stacks of food.[4]

Strategy
Lembas wafers take only two turns to eat, which gives them a high nutrition per turn - for all characters excluding elves or orcs, they are tied for the highest with K-rations. Orcs still gain 120 nutrition per aum, making them worthwhile enough for orc characters to stock up on. Non-cursed lembas wafers are never rotten, which also makes them a safe option if you must eat in the midst of combat or while fleeing.[5]
The combination of their high nutrition/weight and nutrition/turn makes them highly suitable for use in ascension kits, especially if players run into Famine. They are usually combined with a supply of K-rations for this purpose, and it is not uncommon for players to polypile food for more lembas.

History
The lembas wafer is introduced in NetHack 3.0.0. From this version to NetHack 3.4.3, as well as variants based on those versions, lembas wafers could be rotten just the same as other food; non-cursed lembas was made exempt from this in NetHack 3.6.0. The differing nutrition values for elves and orcs were 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 lembas among their random extra food items.[6] 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.[7][8]

Origin

Wikipedia has an article about:
lembas

In the works of J.R.R. Tolkien set in Middle-Earth, lembas is a lightweight, extremely nourishing food made by the elves. Lembas (or "waybread", as in the quoted excerpt used as the encyclopedia entry) was reputedly capable of keeping a "traveller on his feet for a day of long labour", and is given to the Fellowship to feed them on their journey.

Messages
A little goes a long way.
You ate a non-cursed lembas wafer as an elf.[9]
!#?&amp;* elf kibble!
You ate a non-cursed lembas wafer as an orc.[10]
Encyclopedia entry

In the morning, as they were beginning to pack their slender goods, Elves that could speak their tongue came to them and brought them many gifts of food and clothing for their journey.  The food was mostly in the form of very thin cakes, made of a meal that was baked a light brown on the outside, and inside was the colour of cream.  Gimli took up one of the cakes and looked at it with a doubtful eye.
'Cram,' he said under his breath, as he broke off a crisp corner and nibbled at it.  His expression quickly changed, and he ate all the rest of the cake with relish.
'No more, no more!' cried the Elves laughing.  'You have eaten enough already for a long day's march.'
'I thought it was only a kind of cram, such as the Dalemen make for journeys in the wild,' said the Dwarf.
'So it is,' they answered.  'But we call it lembas or waybread, and it is more strengthening than any foods made by Men, and it is more pleasant than cram, by all accounts.'

[ The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien ] 

References

↑ src/eat.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 323

↑ 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 119: Elven substitutions

↑ 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 223

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

↑ src/eat.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 1826

↑ src/eat.c in NetHack 3.6.7, line 1823