Personally, I found that more than half of the available food and their perks are not useful for me.
I would like to know how are you optimizing your food consumption and know some useful tricks that I can also use.
What I do is:
Teaching Pie: When doing general activities such as building, crafting, gathering surfaces resources and trunks
Starberry Soup/Loaf/Pie: Depending on tier of tools I used. Mainly during long harvesting/gathering sessions. The I idea is unlimited energy. The starberry should regen as much energy as the tool is consuming.
Persisting: For when the time I love my tool so much (but not anymore). I generally prefer the starberry for more enjoyable harvesting/gathering sessions.
The +1 caustic food: For the times when skills point is parsed and you need access to TNT hub.
Cooked basic food (Earthyam, Meat, etc.) - Mostly to fill up the energy bar once it drop a significant amount. I never understood the need for higher tier for basic energy refilling food such as meaty pie, etc. I would never wait for my energy bar to be very low before eating.
This is mostly in the lense of a not maxed out character in terms of level. I do have a maxed out character but I always enjoy starting all over again.
In addition to the ones you mentioned, I do use strength/speed brews when mining and hunting. Revive brews also come in handy. I also use the innocuous one when sneakily collecting resources on exos. The Kraken brew is good for long underwater adventures but I donāt use it often. Floating pies can be useful when scanning planets but I donāt do that often either. I have them on me always though.
Ohh right I didnāt include the brews but I also use the strength, speed, and healing brews, just them though. The innocuous, kraken, and floating are something I still havenāt used but they sure looks really useful in very situational cases!
Mediterranean plus select Mexican, Italian, and Asian.
Anyways
Persisting pies is by far my most used food, I prefer my tools to last as long as they can. I do find the lack of energy to be very annoying but I rather get the most out of something.
Mega-fast brews I also use for most types of mining.
main food always teaching pie (building, crafting, general clearing)
mining/gathering or water clearing then starberry pie plus mega fast or kraken brew
bombing with persistent purply pies
From the looks of it, we all mostly use the same food for the same purposes. I was thinking that there are some not so obvious combinations that greatly improves QoL. I was thinking along the line of that food that increases the max energy + meaty pie to compensate for that bigger max energy because in my head, both of them are useless by themselves.
Same goes to the tiers of food. Teaching pie for example, having access to the market so easily, we donāt have use for their lower tier equivalents. For the basic energy replenishing food, the top tiers are underwhelming and borderline useless.
Now that monumental is in charge, this might also need a second look to make food more exciting and useful.
I always thought to make lower tier viable choice for crafting/use, it could all have the same effect and only differ in length (time-wise) of effect; so, all persisting food giving the same durability bonus but lasting 10, 15, 20 etc. minutes. Someone not having time/will to acquire some higher tier ingredients would probably craft lower tier in large numbers to make up for shorter effect time.
The same way, all teaching food could give the same xp bonus but the xp total could start at 10.000 xp and scale up then to the current value on the pie.
Question is what effect would that have on economy - buying/selling activity on the market if it comes to food.
Persisting Pie when mining/gathering. Pretty much any time I am using Forged Gem or above items. Its just a no brainer to save overall monies and rare resources
just tooling around base or building itās Eathyam soup, Easy to make, and Iām always Crysoān extra stacks of earthyams, so itās basically the free food for me
Thatās actually a pretty neat yet simple idea. And yeah youāre right about the market. I feel like weāll eventually converge to the ābest bang for the buckā tier since they basically have the same effect but only differs in duration. A couple of mins difference might not be a major inconvenience enough that weāll all settle on the lowest tier if the price is significantly cheaper.
The other option Iāve seen is to level-gate the higher tier food which I donāt personally prefer but it easily gets the job done. Probably somewhere in the middle where if you consumed a significantly higher tier food than your level, it will have a penalty of some sorts. You should of course still have positive net compared to consuming the lower tier (the one for your level). So itās up to the player if itās worth pursuing the highest tier (if they are rich enough ). This should encourage the player to just use the appropriate tier if they want to optimize their resources.
I gotta ask, do you consume earthyam pies because you really needed the extra replenishment on hunger? Or itās just something you have in abundance so you eat pies?
I was asking since Iāve been using the same skill build always and thinking if there are those who build with max energy that really capitalizes on pies.
Earthyam pies fully restore your energy and donāt remove your other buffs. So rather then eat multiple pieces of meat or regular earthyams. Itās one pie and back to work.
Eating energy pies is useful if you have a build that boost energy skills. If youāre not maxing out on energy attributes, then pies arenāt needed.
As a shop owner who used to sell all of the food items, they need to scale this down quite a bit. Itās just excessiveā¦more work to keep track of and grinding as well. And freaking spreadsheets.
Maybe for stuff like energy, shrink it down to 3 instead of 5 items and apply it elsewhere, when appropriate.
Earthyam stew all the way for energy. Quite cheap, and restores a good amount of energy too.
When Iām doing things like mining or gathering, I usually go for starberry pies or some level of persisting food.
In terms of brews, I sometimes go for a mega strength. Very rarely will I use mega fast brews. I find that greater fast brews are a much cheaper alternative, and they still give a 60% increase in action speed which will be more than enough if you have the right skill page and tool forges.
Though the fast brew thing isnāt for everyone. It really depends on what you use them for
And I have gases after viscous. 