Advices on food / "build" for Fighter/Explorer?

[Felky]

Hello!

I'm wondering if anyone has an recent-ish guideline about food in this game for 2026 because I found some really good threads but most of them are around 10 years old and even have disclaimers that it's outdated..

Just looking for some general good advices to not get softlocked again like 2 years ago where I couldn't dig deep enough to craft the stuff I wanted and it felt helpless

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Long Story:
I played this game for the first time in 2024 with no idea what I was doing eating absolutely everything nonstop which ended up in a disaster because after 1 month I didn't have enough STR to mine below Lv.-2 and I lost motivation to try to fix my messed up "build".

This time I did some research and learned about the FEP system; eating with table; hunger; etc etc..; and got a bunch of useful links bookmarked on Wiki too..

But I still feel like asking people who know what they're doing directly, in case there is some kind of "formula" that most people do to get a good start and have a decent Fighter/Explorer character exists.

I don't really want/care about extreme min-maxing I'm aware some people multibox or play with big groups where everyone is a beast at one specific thing so I'm well aware competing with those people is impossible as a small crew (I'm playing this with my friend co-op) I just want us to be able to do some random stuff being a bit all-rounders without the feel of being unable to progress because we didn't put X points into Y stats

[vatas]

Get a client that shows FEP/Hunger (I'm not sure if default client shows this in any way) and calculates how much FEP you gain (hunger bar modifier, account bonuses, table) and compares it to your FEP bar (ie it will say 33% when hovering over a piece of food that will fill your bar one-third the way.) With a fresh character, it's easy to hit cases where the percentage jumps to something like 400% (ie. three-quarters of the food is wasted completely) but if you don't see the number, you have no feedback whatsoever for this. Only client, that I know for sure shows the number, is 'Hurricane' viewtopic.php?f=49&t=76544

The food system has received a rework that should remove most of the "traps" that just ruin your hunger with little gain. There are still "bad" foods but they're (at least somewhat) more clearly just a lower tier of food. https://ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/FEP_Table can be hard to read because it's split in parts (presumably for technical reasons) but looking at the "Energy per hunger: Below 100" the worst foods are mostly raw vegetables, uncooked beef, and cheese curds. Things that can reasonably assumed to be ingredients, not staple foods.

"Energy per hunger: 100 and up" also has similar things at the bottom, but the top ones help explain a serious limitation with the table: 'Butter-Chived Trout' has no variable FEPs so it's listed with its genuine value, while most foods will receive additional FEPs, based on the ingredients used, on top of the base values. There's a night-and-day difference between bad and good ingredients. Using primitive/undomesticated crops will result in very poor FEP yield, while exotic meats can propel otherwise mediocre dishes into high tier.

At certain range of FEPs, you might literally not want to eat anything else* than spitroast fish. If you manage to find spots for at least two complimentary fishes like Pike and Haddock, you have almost all fighter/explorer relevant Attributes covered (Pike is STR/INT/CON while Haddock is AGI/PER) (all characters that are not throwaway alts need INT to study more/better curios, STR/AGI/CON are the fighter stats, and I guess you want PER to forage or even track scents.)

*Keeping around some low hunger berries for those cases where you fall just a tiny sliver short of filling the bar, is always a good idea. My group (or at least me) usually has a separate table for them to not waste good Symbel on them, it's mostly to leverage the "variety bonus" that causes the current FEP bar to shrink once per food type eaten (resets after the bar is filled). Note that while it used to be a case that some minmaxers utilized a wide palate of berries/etc. to halve their bar, there's now some serious "diminishing returns" on variety bonus.

P.S: I hope you're not a chatbot, in this age of LLMs it's hard to tell.

[Halbertz]

I don't really want/care about extreme min-maxing I'm aware some people multibox or play with big groups where everyone is a beast at one specific thing so I'm well aware competing with those people is impossible as a small crew (I'm playing this with my friend co-op) I just want us to be able to do some random stuff being a bit all-rounders without the feel of being unable to progress because we didn't put X points into Y stats

Issue with most of the food, that they reroll fep effects every world. You have to experiment a bit to be sure that agi+2 food are not giving +1dex instead.
But for starters you can focus on fish -> sosigs. Fish effects iirc never rerolled and always the same. So you eat dried/fried(with high q salt)/spitroasted fish (don't forget about finishers - random low fep food (berries) that gives you food variety bonus) then switch to smoked sosigs. With smoking you have to check every wood for best stat combinations. Sosigs effects themselves aren't rerolled, so it is only wood.
And just like this you could make 200-300 stats np.

[Felky]

Wow, a lot of interesting things thank you guys so much for the help and the few examples too I'll keep all this in mind and find something that works for me and where I get spawned when the World starts

..also yes I'm a real human

[MightySheep]

Since they changed food I literally eat anything and everything but for the most part I just smoke sausages and autumn steaks and my stats always seem to end up good enough maintains a fairly even spread by itself usually without needing to care about it



To fix this agi I'd prob need to pickle or something but I don't do pickling or whales or mammoth or seal or any tryhard shit