Early-game food sources post 1.22

[Zaph42nd]

With the changes to berry-bushes and introduction of fishing mechanics, I've wondered how y'all have changed your early-game food sourcing? Personally I've become more inclined towards fishing/hunting to establish a basic food-supply whereas pre-1.22 I'd usually spend my first few days collecting berries and setting up berry-bushes near my base, slowly transitioning into agriculture within the first in-game season.

[Dilan Rona]

Its a mix for me. Mostly berries/crops. with whatever dead animals and/or fish i happen to run into sometimes if a hunt fails. Only aspect i havent tried is the dedicated fishing mechanics.

[LadyWYT]

My strategy really hasn't changed much--berries and hunting still cover everything while I gets farms set up. However, since fishing exists now, I've also added fishing into the mix, since sometimes I'm lazy and don't feel like hunting.

[Chrondeath]

I think my 1.22 world was skewed because it started me at a high elevation and I didn't realize it for a while.  This resulted in a lot less variety of crops and a ton of goats and sheep wandering around. 

I definitely ended up with far fewer berries before the first winter, I normally have berry pies filling up a storage vessel and this time I only had a handful.  The replacement wasn't (mostly) fishing, it was red meat from all the goats and aggressive sheep.

[MKMoose]

It's difficult to really talk about specialization in this context, because overreliance on a food source will generally lead to faster depletion of food stores. At high difficulty it's more about reliability and availability, so a mix is usually required to survive then, especialy if you want to get decent nutrition early-on. Regarding the 1.22 changes, though:

• Fishing, I think, is annoying, gamey, and extremely front-loaded in its challenge. Depletion is virtually impossible if you have a large enough body of water. If you find a great fishing spot, you can fish up 1500-satiety chonkers (when filleted and cooked) at least every other catch, and you just need a decent supply of bait. Even if you're not particularly lucky, it's pretty trivial to come out positive on satiety - just watch out for areas which have no fish at all. I did fishing mostly just because once I have the resources, it ends up being trivially simple.
• Wild berries alongside crops and mushrooms are plentiful while traveling, not significantly worse than they used to be, and you should generally collect them whenever you have free inventory space and aren't intending to come back to the area anytime soon. Even in the middle of winter, at least if you get to berries in new chunks before they realize what season it is. Here's a casual 5130 satiety hotbar (9570 satiety if I were to cook all of this) plus a pile of seeds collected at the end of winter (first of March), sprinting around new territory on Standard settings and burning 1500 satiety over somewhere around 10 minutes:
  
• Wild animals are easier to kill or capture than they used to, and the new mouflon sheep provide a pretty safe and reliable early-game food source. If you quickly make a fence and get some animals in there, it is entirely possible to breed them at least once before winter. Not exactly the safest option due to how unnaturally aggressive the animals are, but due to the base experience being rather easy it was by far the most fun for me. It provides pretty good food security and helps with setting up leather and fat for later parts of the game. Finding a good hunting spot is an option as well, though remember that game animals don't (or at least shouldn't, if I recall correctly) respawn during winter.
• Crops now need to be protected from nibblers and grains are less efficient than they used to, but frankly that just made farming more of a chore to set up and not any less reliable once you do so. And once you have a basic farm set up, you're golden for the rest of the game, and it doesn't seem to me that this part of the balance will ever change.

[Bumber]

Haven't played the update, but I suspect it's much the same. Grab whatever berries, mushrooms, bushmeat, etc., I can forage before the farm is set up.

I'm not sure I want to stand around fishing. Is it the new nighttime panning?

[coolAlias]

1 minute ago, Bumber said:

I'm not sure I want to stand around fishing. Is it the new nighttime panning?

Panning is easy to do at night because you can build a small safe enclosure around a single water block. I don't think fishing will be quite as viable a nighttime activity.

However, fishing is great with a bow. Whenever I see a medium to large sized fish near the surface of the water, I'll just shoot it with my worst ammo and get some free fish for a few seconds of work, tops.

I'm sure it could be done with a spear, too, but aiming is a bit more difficult with those, especially at the longer distances needed for the fish not to be fleeing from you.

[LadyWYT]

10 minutes ago, Bumber said:

I'm not sure I want to stand around fishing. Is it the new nighttime panning?

Fishing is a little hit or miss. The two most important factors are making sure the hook is baited, and that you're fishing in a spot that has fish(that is, what the game considers populated, and not physical fish you can see). If the hook is baited, the fish should bite fairly fast, and if they don't then I generally take that as my cue to go elsewhere.

It's also going to be the best way to catch trophy fish if you want to hang them on the wall as decoration.

[Bumber]

12 minutes ago, coolAlias said:

Panning is easy to do at night because you can build a small safe enclosure around a single water block. I don't think fishing will be quite as viable a nighttime activity.

I assume you could build a small dirt shack on top of a lake and fish through the floor?

[coolAlias]

6 minutes ago, Bumber said:

I assume you could build a small dirt shack on top of a lake and fish through the floor?

Yes, you certainly could, but you'll quickly deplete that one spot.

I suppose it could be worth it if you are really struggling for food in the early game, but I usually have plenty of berries, mushrooms, and meat (from a catch-everything wildlife pit near my startup farm) that my night's are better spent doing other things such as knapping and clay-forming.

[Maelstrom]

I'll probably add fishing in the future.  But currently it's forage for berries/mushrooms while I sporadically add grains/veggies and the occassional protein from a hunt.

[VibeCenter]

I always start out harvesting berry bushes and foraging!!! I aim to trap animals before I begin hunting, so I don't cull my entire population  I plant my crops super early (and i always travel a hundred blocks or so south....) and by the late august I'm making all my leftover berries (and ones purchased from traders) into jam 

[CastIronFabric]

I am curious, can anyone explain how growing crops is an early game food choice? That is a best 9 days, likely longer because of time getting to making a crop and soil type, weather etc.

 

 

[Maelstrom]

It's not necessarily an early game source of food, but an early game task to secure a reliable food source and stop the foraging nightmare.

[CastIronFabric]

3 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

It's not necessarily an early game source of food, but an early game task to secure a reliable food source and stop the foraging nightmare.

fair enough but the title of the thread is as follows below which is why I asked the question specifically

Early-game food sources post 1.22

Edited June 23 by CastIronFabric

[Maelstrom]

2 hours ago, CastIronFabric said:

fair enough but the title of the thread is as follows below which is why I asked the question specifically

I answered your question specifically.  No need to be pendantically obsessive about the content in the thread; especially when you asked a question I answered.

[CastIronFabric]

1 hour ago, Maelstrom said:

I answered your question specifically.  No need to be pendantically obsessive about the content in the thread; especially when you asked a question I answered.

The copy and paste of the title in bold was not meant to really be a intentional yell or scream, just lazy on my part. I am just explaining the context of my question which yes you answered as basically no (meaning its really not a early game source of food) of which I agree.

I am just not sure why farming is being listed as one of the options for a early game food source which is why I asked.

 

Edited June 23 by CastIronFabric

[Maelstrom]

Crops/Agriculture.   I take that to mean foraging wild veggie and grain crops that are not berry/fruit based.

[Zaph42nd]

Just now, Maelstrom said:

Crops/Agriculture.   I take that to mean foraging wild veggie and grain crops that are not berry/fruit based.

Yep, in the early-game it's more foraging than growing but still distinct from berry-bushes in that berry-bushes are semi-renewable without replanting. Early-game while you can spend the first few nights getting wild-crops and such, seeds and, by extension farming, become more viable after settling in somewhere

[CastIronFabric]

49 minutes ago, Zaph42nd said:

Yep, in the early-game it's more foraging than growing but still distinct from berry-bushes in that berry-bushes are semi-renewable without replanting. Early-game while you can spend the first few nights getting wild-crops and such, seeds and, by extension farming, become more viable after settling in somewhere

ok fair enough, so to be clear when you say 'crops/agriculture' you are not talking about planting farms but rather what is more commonly referred to as forging (at least I would) but NOT forging berries, at least for the item on the poll

Interesting, thanks for clarifying.

EDIT: To answer your post question however, I forge but I do not make a distinction between doing so for grains/veggies/berries, I do all, even mushrooms in early game. I save hunting for later but primarily because I am using the Butchery Mod.

CORRECTION: I do fishing pretty much as soon as I can be somewhat stable in a location but until then, if I can eat it, I forge it, I do not bother to make the distinction on food source type for the early game when it comes to those choices.

Edited June 23 by CastIronFabric

[Yggdrasil Burnes]

IMO, Fishing is the early game meta IF you have a large enough body of water nearby AND IF you can rush cookware, but otherwise might be about as inconvenient as any other early food source.

If I'm playing Hunter, or there just is not any large bodies of water nearby, I'll just make a 2x3 pit or make a hollow moat around a my farm plots and lure a bunch of meat into it before pelting them all at once with rocks when I'm hungry. Red Meat saves for 5 days in Temperate weather once cooked and has a solid 280 Satiety all by itself, so it's much higher bang for your buck than fishing as Hunter, even after you get cookware. (This is also a good way to get livestock set aside for when you want to properly corral them.)

Anyone else, though, if you have a large lake or ocean, I would actually focus on fishing, even into mid-game, because tiny and small fish make excellent bait, a large fish normally makes 4 fillets, and those 4 fillets turned into Hefty Fish Meat Stew is almost as good as Hefty Red Meat Stew (1500 Satiety vs 1650 Satiety). If you don't have any livestock you want to cull, or just don't have a bazillion chicken eggs on hand, it's an excellent source of protein.

With that said: Cooking whole fish, at least, the ones worth cooking (Medium-400, Large-700, Huge-900) takes a super long time to cook, and quite a lot of fuel, while filleting and cooking the fish slices individually will only net you 100 Satiety a piece- and sometimes not enough fillets to be equivalent to the fish's whole value- but seemingly cooks faster. You'll have to rush at least 1 cooking pot and one bowl from clay or ruins if you want to get the most out of fish, but if you know what you are doing and are lucky, a single pit kiln can happen day one, peat moss can get you there faster, and if you find enough surface Brown Coal can get you there by nighttime if you are really speed running civilization. 

Bushes are now a lot more awkward and more time reliant to cultivate, which I do not hate. They are the only forage that really benefits from Malefactor's yield bonus, but they are now much less easy to hoard at base early game. (Being able to cultivate them from cuttings, however, gives them a good shot at being mid game sources of food, or even just a great late game thematic additive to cooking. Once you start getting cuttings down, you can double your entire berry bush count every single year exponentially.)

Mushrooms are still more often than not collected only 1 at a time and not much more nutritious than a single berry harvest, and I end up going through knives a lot trying to gather them. Grunting sticks are just much cheaper, especially in areas where hard stone for tools is rare, but if you are desperate or have the spare stones/flint, go nuts. They seem to grow all over forests and respawn naturally fairly regularly. If you're nearby woods, it can be good source of food. I don't know how long most mushrooms keep once cut, though.  

Additionally, you do not need to continue grunting the same block for the entire animation. Two grunts seems to be enough to coax worms out of the soil, and you can sometimes get 2 or 3 worms from the same block if you grunt it a second or third time. This makes early game bait harvesting super fast, though I wonder if that is intentional or an oversight. 

Edit: I forgot to mention that it's actually super easy to bait a fishing pole in your hotbar. You don't have to drag and craft it in the menu with your bait, you can pick up your stack of bait with left click in your inventory and just left click on the un-baited rod. This lets you get into a really good rhythm where you reel in a fish, quickly bait the rod again, and go back to fishing. If you bait the rod with juvenile fish or small fish, you'll end up like me hooking a whole Sheetfish every other reel in less than a minute each, but this could result in you overfishing a spot if it's not big enough to handle your insatiable gluttony.

Edited June 25 by Yggdrasil Burnes
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