Food guide. From early game to end game dishes and how to gather them.

A guide to all in game food and how to get them. From early game to end game dishes. Updated to include the expertise update.

Introduction (You might want to get a drink before we start)

Flotsam is a colony survival game. And as such you have to maintain your colony's needs before they all end up starving or dying of thirst. Thankfully the game will give you a bit of leeway by letting you skip a few meals or go a few days without food or water before it starts ending you survivors.


So you don't have to panic from the start but you will have to get on with it and the sooner the better.

So we will start with the water. Since it is the simplest to fix. In this game you have three ways to get water. You can find it on the islands you can scavenge (useful but not reliable). You can use Desalinator which you can use energy to purify water. And lastly the Solar Still, which purifies water passively over time. As well as two different types of water storage.


Really the Desalinator is your only option. The Solar Still only generates one water per building per day as nobody will ever empty it into the water storage. And you would need one Still per person.


The Desalinator starts off needing firewood to purify water but can be upgraded to run off your EELctric system. Either way it will need a survivor to run the machine. So generally have someone with a good liquid skill to get it done. In the bottom left you can assign the priories of people. As well as tell them how much water you want to have in storage. The town heart can store 20 units of water and the other storage options can store 10 and 30 receptively.

Generally just keep a few days of water in storage and you should be fine.

Now on to...

Early game food. And why you will want to start tossing fish overboard.

Food is much more complex and difficult to process. With multiple buildings needed to gather, process and then cook the food. As well as 3 different types of fish and two different types of seaweed to deal with. Not to mention the buildings needed.


Thankfully this part of the guide will only focus on the early game stuff. Namely the Fishing Chair and the Fish Sticks.

The Fishing Chair will allow your survivors to catch any fish near your town and the Fish Sticks will let you dry our the fish into Dried fish. Which is the worst food as it tastes the worst (so your survivors get sad and less effectient when they eat it) and has a lot of Pollution in it. Which when builds up in your survivors will incapacitate them for a full day as they vomit it out.

But hey still beats dying.

More importantly you can only process Bottle Fish into these meals. Which is only a third of the type of fish you can catch. Meaning that two thirds of the fish you catch is going to sit there and slow down your ship. You cannot eat them yet and they are just taking up space until you unlock the other buildings. So consider tossing them overboard by right clicking on them in the storage tab.

As bad as dried bottle fish is. There is a slight improvement with the first processing building. The unbottler.


The Unbottler will remove the hard plastic bottle around the fish before you put it on the Fish Sticks to make a slightly less disgusting meal.


Still low tier food but it is a start.

Also you can expand the range you can catch fish with a Mooring point with a fishing boat. Once you have this you can break the Fishing Chair.

So you want to cook Oil Gobblers?

Oil Gobblers are the second tier of fish you can catch in game. And generally require the most processing to make into a clean meal. To even get started with dealing with this fish you will need the Fish Kabob. This one building will let you cook the other two tiers of fish you can catch. Allowing you to cook them without having to process them first.


This building will need firewood until it is upgraded to let you use EELctricity.

This will make much better food for imporving the people's moral. But you will still have to deal with sick days until you improve it with more buildings down the line.

So what about seaweed?

Seaweed can also be eaten. But requires it's own building to be processed or cooked. The Chop Shop. Which doesn't need fuel or power to work.




This will let you make a simple meal out of seaweed or make a additinal ingredient for making completely pollution free meals. Called Seaweed Sheets. But more on that later.




But I did say there was two kinds of Seaweed. The normal ones and the still growing Seaweed called Seaweed Spores. Which just need a little time in the farm to be used in cooking.

Pollution Free Food.

The only way to keep the plastic out of your meals is to prepare it correctly. Only Two of the three fish can be completely Pollution Free. And both of these will need the last two cooking buildings. The Fish Washer and the Food Truck.


The Fish Washer is used to process both the Oil Gobbler (Tier 2) and Bloated Flounder (Tier 3) for further cooking as well as turning Bottle Fish into Fish Chow for your Seagulls.


With these processed fish you can then cook them into the best food with the Food Truck. The easiest example of this is with the Bloated Flounder.

Bloated Flounder --Fish Washer--> Flounder Filet --Food Truck--> Quarter Flounder


However the Oil Gobbler will need the aid of the Chop Shop and Seaweed to reach it's full potential.

Oil Gobbler --Fish Washer--> Gobbler Filet
Seaweed --Chop Shop--> Seaweed Sheet
Gobbler Filet + Seaweed Sheet --Food Truck--> Gobbler Roll

So what would I recommend doing in the endgame?

Bottlefish should be made into Bird Chow. They can be made into food for your survivors but it will always be polluted. So it isn't worth it.

Oil Gobblers can be made into Gobbler rolls. But require plenty of seaweed. So make the excess Gobblers into Grilled Gobbler Fillet at the Fish Kabob. These will eaten when you run out of cleaner food.

Bloated Gobblers should be made into Quarter Flounders. These are the best of the best.

And that should be enough to feed everyone. Hope this guide helped.

[mark.j.edwards]

thanks this helped me out alot