I've had several characters of various races and classes, and since my old laptop died a while back I'm taking this as an opportunity to start from scratch. In the last few weeks I've started a human paladin, drakeling monk, hurthling assassin, and am considering a human ranger.

Right now I'm working on a grey elf wizard and I'm finding it incredibly hard to precrown compared to any other character I've ever had. I haven't gotten to the point of counting the steps/turns in between bouts of debilitating hunger or tracking the burndown of my piety, and I'm trying to stay out of the main dungeon because I don't want to generate any more artifacts than absolutely necessary to keep my level requirement for crowning low. I usually try to find an altar and lure monsters over but the only one I've found in a dungeon is for a neutral god when I'm lawful, but trying to stay L for precrowning and without being L to convert it I get punished and my equipment gets vaporized (yes, I've turned off permadeath and am scumming for that. Don't judge me, I've finished the game with permadeath before but I've got 4 kids in the house 7 and under and I'm lucky I get to do any gaming at all lately!).

I've tried to sacrifice food to quickly raise my piety and have experimented with offering gold (I've only stockpiled about 20K so far, which is nothing to my god), but by the time I go out walking around to kill monsters in the overworld and bring back their corpses it seems like I've dropped at least one level. And don't even talk to me about how infrequently Munxip restocks his shop, for hunger and piety reasons I've taken to scumming before I hike all the way across the map to try to get more food or dump any equipment I can't sacrifice to get some more gold at the general store.

What am I doing wrong this time, or are grey elves just eternally hungry and universally hated by their dieties?