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.