Best early game food source?

[PeterHoHK]

By "early game" I mean "I just unlocked Fire Biome!" kind of early.

It seems that most food sources are either too cumbersome to make (anything that needs to be farmed) or too unstable in their supply (i.e. citrus and meat).

Feels like fish is the only food source that avoids both of the problems. I can just set up some fish traps, collect them periodically, and have a furnace automatically cook them for me. Am I doing it right? Also I haven't looked into the Cooking skill. Is that any good?

Thanks for helping a noobie out!

[Ellie]

Honestly cooking doesn't seem worth it anymore until you've got a huge energy bar, lots of health and a heavy resource income.. So late game.

Best way is cooking the fish and consuming them that way. It's far, far to inefficient to eat them raw like it used to be a good source of energy income.
Before it would've been sushi as you gathered seaweed and fish from the fish traps.
Cooked fish now supplies the same amount of energy as sushi. Why bother with sushi when it costs more ingredients to make? It also restores health. Watch the developer nerf this now like everything else. Because removing fun from a game is good, right?

Eggs used to also be a good consumption early on. Making them to mayo which restored health, provided more energy was just a bonus. Now the eggs are .. Blegh. Same patheticness as raw fish. They pretty much halved the energy income of any of the raw ingredients. So. Have fun with that.

[Known Enemy]

eating sushi can give you exp. so that's good in the early game where this guy is.

[Jolly]

Low power veggie foods is brutal so I start cooking fish immediately. Cooked fish are effective enough with low hassle so I could see sticking with just that and supplementing with surplus junk (vs farming for it).

[PeterHoHK]

Huh, so raw foods have been nerfed pretty hard, then?

I have seen someone (Xisuma, if you're curious) play older versions and I have notice that raw foods gave more energy than they do now.

Now I want to know, what was the pre-Combat Update food meta like?

[Lázaro Stormcaller]

cooked fish is actually pretty good
You wait till you lost a heart by hunger, then eat the cooked fish, you gain the heart and some more stamina!

[aardvarkpepper]

Originally posted by Lazáro Stormcaller Zepelli:

cooked fish is actually pretty good
You wait till you lost a heart by hunger, then eat the cooked fish, you gain the heart and some more stamina!

This.

Originally posted by PeterHoHK:

Cooking skill. Is that any good?

I think no.

See if you agree with this reasoning. At some point you're unlocking health ups, vampyr wings, health and mana regeneration (though slow). At that point mostly you get health back faster than you lose it even if you eat nothing; you only need food for boss fights. Even then eventually you can eat ores and things.

What about before then? Well until then, you have loads of cooked fish.

Cooked fish is not ideal. If I remember right it requires coal, and what with all the brick, gold bars, and iron bars you're putting out, you won't necessarily have the resources to set a forge to infinite cooked fish production. But you don't need a load of it if you're careful, just some, and that can carry you until you reach that point that you're rolling in all the health ups and stuff.

Then too, what are you going to cook?

Sushi requires fish and seaweed. It saves on coal, which isn't the worst thing in the world, but you don't really need the sushi. And down the line you *may* want the seaweed for I think green pigment, which you'll probably use in some combination with druid scrolls and wizard scrolls for hide down the line.

As to meat skewers, it may not look like peppers are too useful, but down the line if you're doing void runs maybe you want those peppers for potions.

And of course for anything involving cheese, that costs glass that you want for lighthouses and bottles; you need the bottles for bugs for upgrades and for oil. So that's in short supply.

. . . so basically you don't need Cooking skill, and even if you get it you end up using resources that are needed more for other things. That's my take on it.

[fewRy]

A really great way to get ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of energy early game is kind of preferential, but there's ways to get a mass of gems early by primarily A. getting lighthouse mats asap, B. getting enough to craft a Quarry, C. getting a consistent source of making bombs and then D. blowing up all of the rocks your quarry spawns every now and then. This can net a hefty sum of gems for pre-endgame purposes (like 20-50+ per quarry spawn), and each gem can regenerate 250 energy. Food in general isn't really an issue tho, cooked fish is more than enough for basically the entire game, and if you just keep adding more fish traps you will be swimming in them (pun intended).