How to get enough food?

[xXEldestXx]

I've made it through Red Rock with several characters, and I've finally gotten one all the way through collecting the copper wire. All my characters that make it back from Red Rock seem to run into the same problem, which is that I cannot reliably find food.

What is the best way of getting enough food to survive between merchant re-stocks?

[Mehukannu]

Assuming you have butchery, you can go to the waterlogged tunnel that you can get to by going to the bottom level of Red Rock and following the underground river to the south.
There are enemies like eyeless crabs and knollworms which you can butcher up for food. Sometimes you might meet a odd slugsnout or two so it can be a bit challenging. There is also some special treasure there.
After that, whenever you get a quest to travel to Grit Gate, head to Rusted Archway first as that place has a lot of boars that will net you good amount of meat.

That amount of food should keep you going for quite awhile. You might also consider getting harvestry early on to harvest food from starapple trees and watervines, if you are really strugling for food. It is also useful to collect ingredients like dreadroot tubers for tinkering salve injectors.

[Wexmajor]

You pretty much have to get skilled butchery or skilled harvestry. Merchants are too few and far between in this game to rely on them. Personally I think this is a design flaw in a game that allows you to specialize in merchant interactions.

[Kaaven]

As the guys said - butchery is the way to go. Even the basic one will leave you with more food than you will ever need. Underground, there is plenty enough crabs and worms. On the overworld, same goes for pigs and goats.

On the very early days, if you feel like spending the initial points better, go for killing light but nutritious animals and carry a corpse or two with you. Corpses of bats, glowfish and glowcrows are good for that, being relatively filling and weighting only 5 lbs each.

[LCMDigs]

Eat corpses! Snapjaws, bats, centipedes, everything! The glow fish corpses, in particular, are great, since they weigh 5 lbs, can fill you from hungry to bloated, are plentiful, and the glow pads kill them for you. I usually take the ravenous physical defect and rarely have food problems.

One thing though, autofeed wont pick corpses as food. I turn off the auto feed feature and manually eat the glow fish corpses. Other than that, when I open the loot window after a kill, top off your hunger meter with the corpse of whatever you just killed without picking it up, and then hit tab or pick the items you want. Just hit space while the corpse is highlighted.

Wow, I don't think I would've ever used the word corpse so much in a post!

[57E]

Don't bother with the snapjaw corpses their nutritional value is near worthless (their severed limbs on the other hand are fine?).

Also the auto feed DOES eat the corpses (not grish though), not sure if it only selects them if they are only food you have.

Usualy my tiresome starting routine for each new character is to go to Mehmet, Agryve, Warden Ualraig and Tam - and buy all the Vinewaffers they have (300-500 units, they never restock this much so you can only do this once per game).
This costs you about 8-12 drams of water in total and with occasional pig butchery should last you atleast to up to the Bethesda quest if you don't visit the Stilt on the way.

[Nothing]

Bit of a necro here, but is there a way to boost agility to 13 so I can get butchery? Right now I am having a lot of success with ego-focused esper, but I start at 10 agility. Harvesting is tedious as heck, and I have to do it every 300 turns like clockwork.

[Iduno]

As someone who hasn't played with butchery or harvestry for years, have you tried eating corpses? Glowfish weigh like 5, are super easy to kill, and are somewhat filling. Centipedes weigh something like 30. Snapjaws aren't great food, and weigh a lot, but they're good snacks if you eat them as you kill them. A snapjaw village makes a nice meal. I haven't ever eaten a girsh, but I doubt even they have any negative effect.

But apples and wafers barely feed you at all. I think they mostly exist to quench thirst.

I usually pick a pile of stuff, eat the corpses, and grab whatever valuables I want.

[Nothing]

Oh. Well damn. I am too used to nethack where corpses rot to uselessness crazy fast. Thanks!

[.//slayer]

A snapjaw village makes a nice meal. I usually pick a pile of stuff, eat the corpses, and grab whatever valuables I want.

You, sir, are a one man apocalypse.

[Hypereia]

Whenever you kill something, try to eat its corpse. If its corpse weighs 5-10, those are the ones I like to carry around as food.

That alone should give you enough food to not be an immediate concern and give you a small buffer depending on your strength to carry the 5 weight corpses as food.

If you want a bit bigger of a buffer, or are running lower str builds with lower carry weight, I'd recommend picking up at least one rank of harvestry.

With two ranks of harvestry however, you can harvest 20 vinewafers each time harvestry comes off of cooldown.

In conclusion, as long as you buy all the vinewafers from the Joppa merchants, then are dilligent in harvesting vinewafers from the town and surrounding area, you could maybe have a 1k buffer of them by the time you hit Grit Gate depending on how much you grind or explore before getting there.

On another note - another reason harvestry is good early on, is because you can get witchwood bark from the yellow trees to heal 1d16+24 instantly. Eating one can confuse you, so make sure you know your exit path before doing so.

Good luck!