Where to find food?

[mf2]

So I have started three worlds now and never had a supply of food that kept me alive for more than two days. A couple of berries, mushrooms, enough to fill the "hunger meter" to up to 30%, that's it. I keep running around, fleeing from wolves or bears (or weird creatures) trying to find another berry bush to survive for a few more minutes, but I only find flowers and birch leaves.

I read that you are supposed to build a shelter and a farm, but I can't do that because I am always starving and losing health because I have no food.

Can't hunt, because I can't gather the resources to make any weapon, because I must run around looking for some mushrooms so that I don't starve to death.

Any hints? 

[LadyWYT]

What class and difficulty are you playing? Blackguard will have an extra 30% added to hunger rate as well as a penalty to foraging and a penalty to ranged damage, which can make hunting more difficult. Wilderness Survival turns the hunger rate up to 125%, compared to the default of 100%.

Playing a class like Malefactor or Hunter will make foraging or hunting easier, respectively. Likewise, turning down the hunger rate might be a good idea if you're struggling to the point of not having fun.

Edit: Also keep in mind that holding things in your off-hand will result in a 20% increase in hunger rate. Sleeping through the night will also drain hunger, so while it's handy for passing the time it may not be ideal to do this if you're low on food.

1 hour ago, mf2 said:

So I have started three worlds now and never had a supply of food that kept me alive for more than two days. A couple of berries, mushrooms, enough to fill the "hunger meter" to up to 30%, that's it. I keep running around, fleeing from wolves or bears (or weird creatures) trying to find another berry bush to survive for a few more minutes, but I only find flowers and birch leaves.

I read that you are supposed to build a shelter and a farm, but I can't do that because I am always starving and losing health because I have no food.

Can't hunt, because I can't gather the resources to make any weapon, because I must run around looking for some mushrooms so that I don't starve to death.

Farms are a good idea, but are more of a long term investment as you'll need to create farmland to plant crops and then wait for the crops to actually mature. Until you can get farms going, you will need to rely on what you hunt or forage.

The default start is the temperate zone, and unless you get very unlucky, there should be some combination of berry bushes, mushrooms, and wildlife near spawn that you can use as an immediate food source. A handful of berry bushes alone will give you enough food to survive for a couple of days, as will mushrooms, but hunting will most likely be the predominant food source since meat is a rich food source. Spears are a powerful early game weapon, and easy to craft with sticks and flint or other hard stones. Small game such as rabbits, foxes, chickens, and raccoons are fairly easy to kill with little risk to yourself; while small game like this might not provide much, it's food and the calories will add up.

You'll also want to get a cookpot and bowl as soon as you can, since cooking food into proper meals will pause the hunger drain for a short time. The pause effect is most noticeable for redmeat stews.

In an emergency, don't forget that you can dig up cattail roots with a knife and cook them. It's not ideal, as the cattail plant will be destroyed in the process and the cooked root isn't that filling, but it's better than starving.

Edited Thursday at 10:15 PM by LadyWYT

[MKMoose]

11 hours ago, mf2 said:

So I have started three worlds now and never had a supply of food that kept me alive for more than two days. A couple of berries, mushrooms, enough to fill the "hunger meter" to up to 30%, that's it. I keep running around, fleeing from wolves or bears (or weird creatures) trying to find another berry bush to survive for a few more minutes, but I only find flowers and birch leaves.

I read that you are supposed to build a shelter and a farm, but I can't do that because I am always starving and losing health because I have no food.

Can't hunt, because I can't gather the resources to make any weapon, because I must run around looking for some mushrooms so that I don't starve to death. 

Overall, @LadyWYT's advice should get you far. There are two other things I want to mention which I've personally found tremendously helpful, the first being that you should travel far and often. Travelling will typically let you find more berries than you can eat (as long as you don't travel around dry areas), and some of those berry bushes you can pick up and plant near wherever you want to set up a home. You can also find a whole lot of crops to plant as well. The main difficulty is finding the right areas (generally any grasslands should be fine for most purposes) and actually noticing the berries or crops in the landscape. I've seen some new players walk right through berries and crops without noticing them, though I'm not sure if I can give any concrete tips for this other than to familiarize yourself with their appearance (you can also check out what they look like in the handbook or in external sources).

Travelling will also let you notice a lot of things which you will be able to use later if you mark them on the map, like clay, surface copper or other deposits, spots where pigs or goats or chickens spawn, bees, and any other useful places - you don't need to mark down absolutely every tiny detail, but having a good idea of what's in your immediate proximity will make searching for these things so much easier later on.

The second thing that helped me was fish, but only in meals (made in a cooking pot). While some of this is quite likely to change with the nearest major update, currently fish are extremely easy to kill with any spear. Raw or cooked they are kind of worthless, but putting them in meals for some reason increases their satiety all the way to 375, 7.5 times the raw fish, very competitive with red meat. If you have a cooking pot and find a pond with a couple fish, you've got dinner for a day or two at least. I remember I had 4 ponds near my house on my first world, and that allowed me to just go out and collect some 10 to 20 fish whenever I was running low on food.

[mf2]

Thanks for your replies, I appreciate it!

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

What class and difficulty are you playing? 

I am playing as the default one, no changes there. 

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The default start is the temperate zone, and unless you get very unlucky, there should be some combination of berry bushes, mushrooms, and wildlife near spawn that you can use as an immediate food source. A handful of berry bushes alone will give you enough food to survive for a couple of days, as will mushrooms,

Man I wish. As I wrote I can maybe find 3 to 4 berry bushes and each of them will just fill that hunger bar by maybe 10%, so that is way too low to survive. Maybe it is what @MKMoose is saying and I don't spot them, but I make sure to move the cursor over the objects and check the respective names of the plants.

When I travel to find mushrooms I "spent" so much of the hunger bar that when I finally find a few, I am in a worse position than before.

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

some of those berry bushes you can pick up and plant near wherever you want to set up a home.

I already did that, but those berries take 7 days to respawn; that is way too long to survive on them.

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

You'll also want to get a cookpot and bowl as soon as you can, since cooking food into proper meals will pause the hunger drain for a short time. The pause effect is most noticeable for redmeat stews.

But for a cookpot you need clay (it seems) and I have not yet found any clay in any of the maps. That stuff seems to be harder to find than ores (which I have seen plenty of already, but of course I don't have the tools to use them.

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

In an emergency, don't forget that you can dig up cattail roots with a knife and cook them. It's not ideal, as the cattail plant will be destroyed in the process and the cooked root isn't that filling, but it's better than starving.

But cattails are even harder to come by. I can barely find the 10 required to progress in the tutorial.

Again, thanks for all your help. Maybe I will give it another try on the weekend.

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, mf2 said:

As I wrote I can maybe find 3 to 4 berry bushes and each of them will just fill that hunger bar by maybe 10%, so that is way too low to survive.

Right, but you need more than 3-4 berry bushes to keep you alive. That many bushes will, on average, give a player 12-16 berries, which is enough for one day and that's about it.

 

5 hours ago, mf2 said:

I already did that, but those berries take 7 days to respawn; that is way too long to survive on them.

This is true for most foods in Vintage Story. Plants take time to grow, as does livestock. Wild animals often respawn relatively quickly though, which is one reason hunting is more reliable. Like @MKMoose said, you'll want to scout a fairly wide area if you're relying on hunting and foraging for your food. Also keep in mind that most food has a shelf life--you don't want to collect more than you can eat in a couple of days unless you have some way to preserve it.

 

5 hours ago, mf2 said:

But for a cookpot you need clay (it seems) and I have not yet found any clay in any of the maps.

Clay is usually difficult to spot until you learn what it looks like. If the sides are visible there is a noticeable difference in color between the clay and surrounding dirt; viewed from the top it's a little harder to spot as the patchy grass on top of the clay blends in to surrounding grass, but there will be bits of clay color peeking through. Red clay is the more common find, occurring wherever there's enough rainfall. Blue clay tends to be found around sea level, often by bodies of water, and like red clay also requires enough rainfall to form deposits. Fire clay is the rarest variety, spawning only in bauxite or sometimes underneath black coal/anthracite veins.

If you're having trouble finding a deposit, you might try your luck with cracked vessels. Sometimes those contain small amounts of clay.

[Maelstrom]

@mf2 You may want to play in a couple of test/training worlds to get over the learning curve for identifying food sources.  VS has a steep learning curve.  I played 4 or 5 short term worlds to get everything under my belt before making a run at a long term world.   It wasn't until my long term world that I discovered that wild crops grow in a square pattern where grass grows in a cross pattern.   Once I saw that I was forever seeing all the crops I had missed previously.