Food Supplies - a couple tips

[Robin of Spiritwood]

This will probably hold until Angling gets patched.

Food economics 101

Currently, a pony eats 4 units of food per day, and a merc eats 3. So the starting band of 4 men and a horse will eat 16 units/day.

A single unit of food is obtainable from carcasses or from dried fish/jerky. However carcasses weigh a LOT, while 10 jerky only weighs one pound. In the very beginning, carrying carcasses is a bad plan.

You need 48 units to get your starting band from one payday to the next, and it costs money to buy it. One jerky sells for one Krown, so factor in 48 Krowns per 3 day payouts.

Making Jerky

The Trackers sell a blueprint for a Drying Rack. 200 teeth. You will have to whack a lot of animals. That gives a lot of carcasses, which is a good thing. But carrying them is not feasible, so find somewhere to dump them for storage.
EG- the Sinister Mine mission leaves a body on the ground with a Golden Key. LEAVE the key alone, and put something else in before you take out the key. Once the "container" is stabilized with some item in there, you can stash your heavy carcasses.
OR- the Sawmill close to Stromkapp has 3 "containers" you can use.

Ok, once you can make the Drying Rack at the tinker's bench, it can deploy in your camp.
Click on it to start loading it with any meat. It also takes those carcasses.

2 Carcasses yield 10 jerky. Every time you camp. So this takes a LOT of cost and pressure off the team, as you only need supply 6 units a day. Eminently possible to get that from hunting or mushroom foraging, or simply buy jerky from merchants.

You can convert regular meat into jerky too, but you lose food that way.

I grab a few carcasses from the meat locker after leaving town to hold us over for a few days. You need 2/day, so 8 is plenty to get a few things done.

Cooking