What do I do with all these corpses

nethack

I've killed a quite a few gnomes, and there are corpses all over the place. I can't pick them up without being encumbered. Is there anything useful I can do with them?

Best Answer

The NetHack wiki page on Corpses suggests that they can be :

eaten by you or your pet - with varying effects depending on the corpse type and age
preserved in tins for later consumption
sacrificed to your god, on an altar
revived with an appropriate wand or spell (some even revive themselves)

Gaining nutrition

Comestibles. The most straightforward way to gain nutrition is to eat comestibles (labeled as % - food, meat and corpses). The amount of nutrition you get depends on what you eat. Early on in the game is often the riskiest time; you may not start with much food. At this stage, it's normal to eat as many fresh, safe corpses as you can get your hands on. If you make it that far, there is guaranteed food in the Sokoban levels, which are accessed somewhere between levels 6-10.
Praying. Praying while weak will restore your nutrition, but safe use depends on your current prayer timeout. Also, using up your favour with your god could backfire if you have a sudden unforseen need (e.g. you have gained a fatal illness like food poisoning, or are being turned to stone).
Convert boulders to food. As theist points out, you can convert boulders to huge chunks of meat if you have the stone to flesh spell. These are hugely nutritious (2000 points).

Reducing nutrition loss

Wear a ring of slow digestion. This is a great item, if you can find one. It changes your rate of nutrition consumption to 5% of your normal rate (giving you twenty times as long to find food). As Grace Note points out in the comment below, this is because you are only paying the nutrition cost of the ring - your standard rate of consumption is halted.
Take off your rings. In general, you lose one nutrition every twenty turns for each ring or amulet you wear. Rings of regeneration are particularly pernicious; if you're wearing one, you'll lose a point every other turn.
Drop your stuff. If you're Stressed or heavier, you lose a point every other turn.
Don't cast spells. Spellcasting makes you hungry (unless you're a wizard with high Intelligence).

How to hoard items effectively

There are four main things that help in hording items: getting a bag of holding, keeping a stash, travel improvements, and value assessment.

Bag of Holding

These can be purchased in tool shops and other stores, can sometimes be found lying around in the Gnomish Mines, and there's a 50% chance you'll get one at the end of the Sokoban levels. Refer to this map for reaching the Mines and Sokoban, but simply put they're fairly early. The earlier you get one, the easier everything becomes.

The bag of holding is a container, which automatically expands your carrying capacity. Unlike your inventory which is limited by the number of letters in the alphabet, an infinite number of items can be stored in a container. Of course, an infinite item quantity is an infinite weight, which is where the second benefit comes in that a bag of holding reduces the weight of its contents. An uncursed bag of holding reduces the weight of items by 1/2, while a blessed one reduces the weight by a whopping 3/4!

Bags of holding make it a lot easier to both carry all the essentials you need to survive in the dungeon, as well as traffick heavy goods across long distances. Hope to get one as early as possible. However, there are some dangers involved with what you put into a bag of holding: read up on them here.

Keeping a Stash

It's indeed unreasonable to try and carry everything you can. So what is important is to have a place to safely store your stuff. Keeping a stash often is tasked with a few points.

Scare monsters away - monsters that might pick up your stash items can be scared away by either dropping a scroll of scare monster on the stash, or by engraving "Elbereth" onto the ground. Ideally Elbereth written permanently via a wand of fire or wand of lightning. (Since 3.6.0 though, Elbereth only works on the square you are standing on, not on stashes.) So use one of these, or hostiles can do things like pick up and use your weapons, wands, potions, etc, or more dangerously gelatinous cubes can eat all your stuff.
Use a container - Not every monster respects Elbereth, and the majority of creatures that don't happen to be the kind that pick stuff up. Storing it in a container prevents these creatures from accessing your stuff. Pick something like the many chests you see lying around. Just be warned that most containers are of an organic material which gelatinous cubes will eat, destroying everything inside - so don't forget Elbereth!
Keep in a safe place - Elbereth and containers only protects against creatures themselves, not stray bolts of energy. You want the stash to be in a place that will ideally see no monster activity, or not be in danger of damage. Many people pick the first level of Sokoban, as its monster spawn rate is very low (and the Eye of Aethiopica artifact provides a very quick warp to Sokoban when Invoked). An alternative method is to store your stash in a one-tile room behind a locked door. Also consider using boulders, which block most monsters from accessing it.
Keep easy access - Don't create a stash in a remote place if you can avoid it. Instead, try to stash it as close to stairs while still being out of the way of combat. Combine this with mining short-cuts through levels if you have a pick axe or mattock, and it'll be a lot quicker to return to the stash once you have better identification methods.

These are the main points of stashing. All it needs to do is hold onto items and keep them safe.

Travel Improvements

Keeping a stash is worthless if you can't use it! You need to have better methods of travel across the levels. This isn't really limited to hording items, but it's something I can cover as a relevant tangent. Just consider 3 commonly accessible methods of easing your travels (I'm not going to cover the Eye of Aethiopica since it's rather specialized and already covered up above).

Level Teleportation - One of the best methods to reduce travel time is level teleportation. The easiest method is by reading a cursed scroll of teleportation. Combined with teleport control in some fashion, this lets you very quickly reach the level that your stash is from, and then return to where you need to be. Very risky without teleport control, however.
Teleportation - Standard ease of travel when moving across a single floor. It can also speed up actually reaching your stash, and then returning to the stairs. Not as risky without teleport control, but can be more annoying and time-consuming.
Digging - Pick up a pick axe or dwarvish mattock, and just start taking out walls. Convert as many floors to a straight line path from stair-to-stair. The less corridors you have to navigate, the less resources spent. While digging holes to fall is an option, do note that where you actually drop is random so building a complex "down elevator" doesn't quite work as well as it may seem in theory.

Value Assessment

The final point to knowing how to effectively horde items is knowing what to horde. Equipment, such as weapons and armour, are often useless to keep. They sell pitifully compared to their weight, and you rarely need to keep any equipment that isn't immediately useful to you. Also try to figure out the usefulness of items by unconventional means. Reduce not just how much you have to carry, but how much you need to stash as well.

And finally, consider carrying no more than one copy of heavy items like potions when unidentified. Identifying one serves to identify them all, and simply rely on one or more stashes to keep the extras.