Any preferred food?

[Loko8]

I dont wanna eat my own crops, so something cheap for early on?

[Hepatitis C++]

Field Snack and Foraging berries.

[dino_inc]

Harvest all the salmonberry bushes and you should be good until fall, where you can get blackberries to last you until spring again.

[MassConnect]

Don't know how little work you're doing, but salmonberries ran out before spring ended for me. Even the spring onions and field snacks from clearing my farm didn't give me enough energy to do everything that I had the time/money to do.

Investing in a good food is better than chasing that stuff down. The energy required to cut down trees in an attempt to get the seeds for a field snack is much greater than the energy a field snack would restore. Most forage items and raw crops don't give much energy.

Recipes are the best, so much so that investing in a house upgrade just to get the kitchen might be a good idea.

Chowder is the best imo - 225 energy for only 150g if you can find anyone selling it. It's also super easy to make, 1 clam (just walk the beach regularly and forage everything) and 1 milk, while getting Willy to 3 hearts isn't too hard.

The only thing you can reliably get that's decent (energy:money ratio) is a salad at the saloon. 220g each, or a kitchen that costs 10,000g? 10,000 only buys 45 salads. You want more than that, so making your own food is the better long term solution.

But if you insist on cheap? Sorry, no cheap solution. Forage for freebies until the spa opens.

[Useless Noodle]

early on I ate whatever I got by foraging, fishing, and trash picking, commonly mushroom (yes I did ate the red one and the sap too), algae, cave carrot, blackberry, Joja cola, etc.

it was hard time.

[MassConnect]

The alternative to investing in food is investing in revenue that requires no energy to collect. Namely: sprinklers, since planting seeds and harvesting are free actions.

Some people like tappers, too. It's a fine strategy if you have money to invest, but getting tappers off the ground from a freshly started new game takes quite a while.

Beekeeping is better than tapping, if you understand the range of the bee house you can get quite a lot of flavored honey from just a couple flowers. Flowers do take a bit to grow, but the best ones will give you much more revenue by season's end than tapping would have. The downside is you need tapping in order to have a supply of syrup used to craft the bee house. Honey is not a quick-to-start strategy either.

Then there are crab pots. You can either get ingredients for good recipes from them (clams for chowder, snails for escargot, lobsters for bisque, crabs for cakes, and fish stew from several other catches if you run out of the preferable ingredients), or you can use them as your revenue stream, but the revenue is very unpredictable until you hit fishing 10 and decide to take the profession that prevents you from ever getting trash in your pots again.

The caveat to crab pots is you need bait. The alternative level 10 profession allows you to use pots without bait, but the catches would remain unpredictable due to trash. Worm bins aren't easy to unlock, but collecting bug meat from the caves isn't terribly hard.

[Chamaeleonx (˳˘ ɜ˘)˳ ♬♪]

Hops is great as you can get a lot. But it also nets you good profit through making it into booze :P.

[Chad "The King" ThunderCuck]

plant a ton of cauliflower. it heals like 60-80 energy for the no star variety.

for money, crap pots and the crab pots are cheaper/dont require bait skill upgrades. i have crab pots placed every spot i can place them on one file and can easilly earn 150k per day if i dedicate that time to grabbing all the crab pots, plus a TON of refind quartz (which also sells well) from recycling crap.

[jellyfingers]

Fish are a handy free food providing you have enough energy in the early stages of the game