Codemanny wrote:What is the most practical way to start power levelling my strength?
Getting hard metals wasn't too hard in the past but now I suppose you can only alloy bronze starting level 2?? I have a minehole to level 2 but naturally I'm not strong enough to break anything. Considering just abandoning all other stats in favor of strength.
I find it very funny that I have thing's like merchant's robe prior to hard metals. Not the progression I'm used to.
Well right now there are many different ways to go about it and it all depends on your current stats but i will assume they are below 100, thus i will explain the progression as you would do it since week 1 (you can skip ahead if you can get stuff that i mention later AND you have a good table), but i would like to emphasize that it's a VERY good idea to make a mining alt and get the appropiate credos on it (quarryman+miner), this will allow you to focus purely on str on that char (give him some consti and int too, it's a good idea, trust me) and you will need lots of lp for masonry, some uac to defend yourself and skills like deep artifice+credos:
-My go to for start is spitroasted meat and spitroasted fish (as was previously mentioned) either boar or bear for meats, and as for fish there is not really a simple solution, usually sturgeons, pikes, mullets, perches are good ones while getting you other useful stats. There are also nut roasts which afaik are not that bad. You can probably get to around 80+ str or so just on that without an excessive grind.
-Once you get to -2 you will unlock MANY new options, first of all find lakes/rivers on -2 (or deeper) and scout them for cave anglers regularly, they are a GREAT source of str, either spitroasted, dried, or made into panseared fish. You could probably grind to 400 just on anglers without too much issue. But, you don't only get this, you also get access to meat grinder which allows you to craft a plethora of sausages that give good feps for str, ie. big bear bangers, elk dogs, wolf dogs, and some others. Make around 10-20 smokers (try to do best ql you can) and find some good smoking recipes on the cookbook (they are same as last world), i would recommend smoking for lowest hunger for starters. Unsmoked sausage is very much trash. There are also wolfs meat-in-jellies which are around 40-50 fep so pretty decent for a while and should also be better due to hql water.
-Once these things fall off it starts getting a little bit tough, the main way to grind str from here is orca meatpies (which are buffed HEAVILY by the boosted hql water) and pork bollock autumn steaks (at some point you can start adding driftkelp to them), but you can just aswell go with the route of just combining previous tier foods and eating 2-3 of them to get one stat, once your table is good enough it's really not that big of a deal to eat a panseared fish (can also be boosted by driftkelp if needed) and combine it with some smoked sausage and perhaps finishing off with a dried cave angler (It's VERY good).
-After that falls off you basically need cheese, driftkelp autumn steaks, truffled/peppered foods, or the aformentioned orca meatpies with the hql water or just mashing tons of subpar food.
Worth mentioning is that the VERY hql water we have now might enable some other early game baked goods that should be decent for str but i haven't tested those since i didn't grind stats after that change so you should check them out. And I can't stress enough how important it is to have as good of a table symbel as you possibly can, it really changes the way you can go about grinding stats. Once you reach gold symbels you basically don't need to worry about hunger.
It's worth noting that some recipes require specific spice/salad greens/etc. to actually give optimal amount of feps but having to post them all in the forum post would make it very much too long, if you are interested in specific recipes i'd be happy to provide some on the discord server, and i'm sure other people have their own recipes i'm forgetting about.
