A complete guide to eating and leveling stats up

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A complete guide to eating and leveling stats up

Postby zebratul » Fri Aug 19, 2016 10:42 pm

Warning: this guide is completely out of date as of W11.


A complete and (somewhat) comprehensive guide to eating healthy.

Have you ever found yourself confused by satiations? Don’t know how do tea, beer, milk and wine work? Stuffed your face with bear bangers and have 100 str and 15 across the other stats? Well, look no further, hopefully this guide can answer all of your food-related questions.
Eating properly can save a great amount of resources you use to gain a FEP level and otherwise make your life much easier.
There a few basic things I’m going to cover:
1. General introduction.
2. How to use Variety bonus, Hunger bonus and food efficacy to your advantage.
3. Satiations and how to deal with them.
4. Decent food combos.



1. The food and FEP system.
The FEP system allows you to develop your character stats by eating various food.
In order to raise a stat up, you need to fill up the FEP bar up to the value of your highest stat - once you fill the bar, you roll for stat increase based on which FEPs you have accumulated in the bar.
This means that you want to keep the desired stats on the same level, if you want to progress faster.
The amount of FEP you gain when you eat anything greatly depends on a whole array of factors, for example: Hunger level, Food Variety, Satiations, type of chair you’re using, your symbel and more.
All of those factors will be discussed below.

Hunger bar.
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The Hunger level bar is the most important one of them. The amount of % you see when you mouse over it is the amount by which the FEPs you gain are multiplied. Hence it’s very important to keep it low (ideally at 300%, which is an x3 multiplier).
Every time you eat anything, your Hunger bar gets filled a little. It fills really quickly if you’re trying to eat low-q foragables to regain energy as a new character. This is why I recommend getting an alt to do energy-heavy labor, and also use tables with even basic wooden symbel to help negate that.
Hunger bar also affects the Food Variety bonus.


Food Variety.
Every time you eat a different sort of food (boar meat, then bear meat for example) the amount of FEPs you need to level up decreases. The amount of decrease is calculated based on the stat type of FEP, your stats and you Hunger bar.
The formula follows as such: Variety Bonus multiplier * square root of your highest stat.
Image
Here’s a screenshot of a Variety bonus in action:
I have 351 as my highest stat. When I eat my first meal (RoB, in this case), the total gets decreased by 1.097 * sqrt315 = 20,55.
After that, when I eat a honeybun, it gets further decreased by another 20,55 (around 6% with each new meal). This makes leveling up much easier.
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Satiations.
Following so far? Satiations are the most confusing out of the factors.
When you mouse over any food (amber client feature), a bunch of food types gets highlighted in the Food tab.
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Those are the satiations associated with that sort of food. A new character will have all of those satiations hidden, which means they rest at 100%.
As you eat trashy foragables early game, or massive amounts of sausages and baked goods later on, your satiations will drop based on the chance listed on the food.
Image

As you can see, food often fills satiations that are completely different from the food group it is in.
For example, you’d think that roasted chicken fills up poultry satiations, but no, fish and berries it is.
Keep in mind that amount by which the satiations are reduces depends on Q of the food.

The amount by which you FEP is affected by satiations is based on the following formula:
Image

Since the satiations are getting multiplied, having even one of them at a very low level will stop you from gaining any FEPs from associated food (1*1*1*0.15 = 0,15. Your food will only be 15% effective).


Symbel and other bonuses.
They work pretty simply – by multiplying the FEP amount you get by certain value.
Always have as much symbel as possible. Even trashy wooden cutlery will help you in the long run.
More on those later.




2. Variety and other bonuses. Use them and abuse them.
There are three types of bonuses you can use to your advantage:
a. FEP-increasing boni (symbel, Hunger level, smoking buffs)
b. Variety bonuses, which decrease the amount of FEPs you need to level up
c. Hunger bonus, which lowers the amount by which your hunger goes up every time you eat anything.

There are several ways you could increase the amount of FEP and lower the Hunger you gain from each food.
1.Always keep your hunger at 300%. Don’t spam-eat everything. Most of the berries and mushrooms found in the wild are not worth increasing your Hunger bar by 6% while netting you a 50% energy increase.
Some of the good energy-filling early game foodstuffs include: Grilled frog legs, rats on a stick, ants, roasted meat.
Frog legs are a god-send for the new player, giving both PER and AGI FEPs. And the frogs are easy to catch, given you have a swamp nearby.
If you’re in the situation when you have your hunger bar filled to up to 10%, I advise you to fast – avoid eating anything except rats, wait, and do quests in the meantime. Hunger reducing quests scale with how filled your stomach is – finishing one with stomach filled up to 100% gave me a 130% bar reduction, driving it back into 300% range.
Later on, eating salt will be your main source of Hunger reduction.

2.Use high-Q symbel. Always have your table filled with symbel items, and rotate them frequently when they start losing durability.
Start with simple wooden cutlery, add earthenware platters, mug and teapot made from clay, later throw in the antler steak cutlery and a drinking horn.
When you eventually have access to metals, use cast iron trivets, Metal Saucières, hard and soft metal cutlery. In the late game you’ll want to upgrade to silver and gold symbel for a nice 65% FEP table bonus. Using better chairs also gives you a small boon – consider upgrading to a cottage throne later.
Having your table filled with symbel will reduce the amount of Hunger your fill and grant you some extra FEPs.

3. Variety bonus. Open the character sheet and watch the FEP bar as you eat. Ideally, you want to fill your bar up to ~65-70% by eating main meals, and then fill the rest with different filler food, reducing the total you need to ding and saving you from over-filling the bar.
The bar doesn’t carry over to the next level up, so if you over-fill the bar, it’s gone (they still affect the chance of which stat you gain).
Good early game filler foods are: blueberries, ants, mushrooms, lingonberries, fish and mussels.

4.Smoking buffs. Grow some hemp, harvest and dry the buds out in herbalist table and fill a pipe with them.
Smoking cured hemp buds and tobacco will slowly give you a buff which decreases the Hunger you gain. You have to keep filling the pipe to reach the 100% buff strength. The bonus is about 20-30% for hemp, you can see the effect when you mouse over your food.

5.Bonfires. If you have a decent charisma score and a bunch of friends, you can also have nice cozy feasts by the fire.
Build and light a bonfire, and you will get a hunger reduction bonus scaling with the symbel in the tables around the fire, charisma of the host who lit the flames, and charisma of people in the bonfire radius.
Here’s a screenshot of me, feasting alone after lighting a bonfire. Even if you’re forever alone, you still get a bonus, 4% hunger reduction and 2% FEP increase in my case (this bonus might have come from the chair itself).
Image


6.Adding Grinded Peppers to individual foods.
Plant some peppers on trellis, wait for eternity for them to mature and harvest them.
Boil them up, dry in the herbalist table and grind on the grinding stone (or add them directly into a pepper mill, but you get less uses from that).
After jumping through all of those hoops use can distribute pepper to your meals from the pepper mils or salt shakers.
The bonus is pretty big, doubling FEPs or even more, however it only applies to a single item of food, and you dont get much charges.

7. Account bonus.
Verifying your account or subscribing to the game will give you a 10% and 30% bonus to FEP and LP you gain respectively. Pretty useful if you plan to level up into 10 000 stats range.

The final FEP formula is:
Food FEP*Hunger Bonus*Account Bonus*Table Bonus*Bonfire bonus*[Satiations values multiplied]




3. Satiations and you.

There are two ways you could manipulate your satiation stats to your advantage.

1. Reset your satiations.
When one of your satiations dips down into 10-20% range, you’ll have problems gaining more FEPs. Usually this happens with fish, meat and forage satiations in the early game.
That means you need to reset your satiations. When four of your satiations reach 49% and below, the lower one will be reset back to 100%. That’s why it’s a good idea to have a couple of «buffer satiations», rare and useless ones lowered down to 49%, allowing you to reset your important satiations easier.
In early game, I’ve forcefully lowered my nuts-and-seeds and mushrooms satiations to 49% by eating tonns of chestnuts and various shrooms. After that when I had my forage down to 40% from eating berries, I only needed to lower my meat or fish satiation down to 49%, which was easy.
So, if you have a very low satiation in your character sheet, try to reset it by lowering 3 more satiations into 49% range.

2. Buff your satiations.
You can also raise some of your satiations directly by drinking four of the drinks available ingame: tea, milk, wine and beer.
Drinking them will give you an increase to the following satiations (at Q10):
Tea: Forage by 1%, Bread by 0.5%, and Food by 0.1%. Drink it from a mug fresh and piping hot to get +20q increase.
Wine: Fruit by 0.5% and Cheese by 1%. Drink it from a wine glass.
Beer: Meat by 0.5% and Sausage by 1%. Drink it from a tankard.
Milk: Vegetables by 2%, and Berries by 1%. Not that useful, and it also decreases diary, which is a part of cheese food group (you dont want that lowered unless you can reset it). Milk has no preferred vessel, meaning you can drink it any way you like it.

Drinking them will also lower the correspondent drink satiation, which means you can only drink about 5-6 liters before you stop gaining any significant increases. Drinking satiations do not reset each other or other food satiations, so you’re stuck with them until you reset them by food.
However, you can abuse the system by lowering 1 useless satiation into 49% range (i personally lower fish, foul and poultry or mushrooms – those are not getting buffed by drinks, which is important). Get two more drink-satiations into 49% range. These three satiations will be your «reset buffer», enabling the fourth one to get resetted.
Now, you can consume 5-6 liters of desired drink and boosts your satiation. When the corresponding satiation drops into 10-15%, eat some fish or chicken or mushrooms to trigger your food satiation decrease from your «buffer». It will reset your drinking satiation back to 100%, so you can drink and raise valuable satiations like sausages, bread and food again.
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4.Conclusion and food combos.


To conclude this guide, here’s a small summary:
1. Don’t spam eat everything, watch your hunger.
2. Use an alt on a separate account to do your heavy lifting. You can run two windows.
3. Raise your stats evenly.
4. Use the said alt to shape him into crafter (Dex, Psy and Per on the same level). Make your main char into fighter/miner (Str, Agi, Con). Or vice versa, up to you. It’s much easier to keep two chars on 8000+ energy and 300% hunger, rather than one.
5. Employ as much bonuses as you can: symbel, variety, bonfires et cetera.
6. Manage and buff your satiations.


I’ll also include some decent food you can use to raise your stats up from 10 up to the lategame. From easy-to-obtain foods to more complex ones.
Strength: Soldier ants, Brill, Boar meat, Bear meat, Boar Baloney, Big Bear Bangers, Cellar cheddar.
Agility: Frog legs, Rabbit Meat, Ring of Brodgar donut, Honeybun, Delicious Deer Dog, Cellar cheddar.
Intelligence: Blueberries, Perch, Fox meat, fish sticks, blueberrie pies, fish pies, Elk dogs, Jorbonzola.
Constitution: Ant Pupae, lingonberries, fried eggs, Pumpkin Pies, Apple Pies, Bark pies.
Perception: Frog legs, Plaice, boiled eggs, Deer meat, carrot cakes, Lamb sausages.
Charisma: No early game items, candleberry, beats, cooked beats, Mutton meat, Raisin cakes, Tasty Emmentaler.
Dexterity: Chicken meat, Chantrelles, Roach, Mussels, Chantrelle & Onion Pirozhki.
Psyche: Sturgeon, Rat on a stick, Boiled River Pearl Mussel (very good for a crafter), buttersteamed cavebulbs.
Last edited by zebratul on Mon Feb 11, 2019 12:04 pm, edited 19 times in total.
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Re: A complete guide to eating and leveling stats up

Postby Jacobian123 » Sat Aug 20, 2016 1:46 am

Good tutorial.
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Re: A complete guide to eating and leveling stats up

Postby shubla » Sat Aug 20, 2016 8:14 am

Didnt read but regarding from images it looks quite nice.
You should add cheese for str and agi though.
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Re: A complete guide to eating and leveling stats up

Postby zebratul » Sat Aug 20, 2016 8:35 am

shubla wrote:Didnt read but regarding from images it looks quite nice.
You should add cheese for str and agi though.


Noted, thanks.
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Re: A complete guide to eating and leveling stats up

Postby Redlaw » Sun Aug 21, 2016 12:51 am

One thing I do is stack different foods with the same bonus when I can, to rack up food events bonuses. So something like a Blueberry, Blueberry pies, squirrel, spit roasted squirrel, ect.... even small berries can play into it.
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Re: A complete guide to eating and leveling stats up

Postby azrid » Sun Aug 21, 2016 1:49 am

Pepper not mentioned!
Otherwise good guide.
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Re: A complete guide to eating and leveling stats up

Postby InvaderDoom » Sun Aug 21, 2016 2:47 am

azrid wrote:Pepper not mentioned!
Otherwise good guide.


^ This. Although could it be because pepper is a painstakingly long process to make enough of to use during one feasting session.
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Re: A complete guide to eating and leveling stats up

Postby MagicManICT » Sun Aug 21, 2016 5:04 am

Doesn't take much pepper to give you a good FEP boost, but agree it's a huge pain in the ass.
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Re: A complete guide to eating and leveling stats up

Postby shadyg0d » Sun Aug 21, 2016 5:19 am

Stuff to add

-Overflowing the FEP bar still counts towards the chance.
-Lower FEP% drains faster
-Situations where %200 might be more efficient
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Re: A complete guide to eating and leveling stats up

Postby zebratul » Mon Aug 22, 2016 9:53 am

azrid wrote:Pepper not mentioned!

Thanks, totally forgot about that. Added.

shadyg0d wrote:Stuff to add

-Overflowing the FEP bar still counts towards the chance.
-Lower FEP% drains faster
-Situations where %200 might be more efficient


Added your first point, good job pointing it out.
However, i'm not sure what do you mean by lower FEP draining.
And are there situations where 200% would be better?
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