In Forager, you need food to keep on surviving and thriving within the world. All day, as you work, your energy bar is going down. You can also find yourself being attacked from time to time, lowering your life, which can be refilled by eating once again.
Berries, Citrus and Fish
When you first start playing Forager, you’ll only have berries to work with. These simple little treats do replenish your energy, but you’ll need a lot of them to keep you going. After a while, they just aren’t enough — but they do pop-up randomly and require very little effort. They give you eight energy points.
When chopping down trees, you might find some citrus. Citrus is quite random, but does give you a whopping twelve energy before you eat them. You’ll just need to chop a lot of trees to find them.
Fishing traps can be made using minimal resources (four wood and four berries), to then be placed into water that you can reach. They then fire after a small amount of time, but what they catch isn’t always fish. You can get fish, sand or seaweed from inside traps. Seaweed gives you eight energy points — the same amount as berries.
Fish on the other hand, raw, give you sixteen energy points. Once you have used skill points to unlock the Fishing skill, under foraging, you’ll be able to cook them. If you take the time to cook them up with some coal in your furnace, however, they will give you 28 energy points, which is really quite a lot at the start of the game.
You can also start finding turnips around the land, if you have unlocked the base foraging skill. These give you 12 energy.
Farming
In a game where food ends up keeping you alive and moving, farming is not a bad place to start. One way to keep yourself sustained is through a nice, healthy farm.
You’ll need to start leveling up the Foraging skill, then unlock Gathering and finally Farming. Farming unlocks the two basic things you’ll need to, well, farm — a windmill and shovel. With your shovel, you can then dig patches in the grass.
The windmill is where you are going to get your seeds from. Handing over whole pumpkins, turnips and other veggies will give you seeds. You get many seeds for one item, so it’s very much worth trading them in. Seeds also do not take up space in your inventory — instead they appear on your toolbar, which comes in handy if you forget or struggle to actually upgrade your bag.
Once you have planted some seeds, they will start to grow painfully slowly. You can then use another skill point to unlock Agriculture, which allows you to create sprinklers and allows harvests to be 25% more plentiful. Sprinklers speed up the growth of the plots around them.
Crafting Food
If you have unlocked the mill, you can start harvesting wheat from around the grasslands and turning it into bread — which is much better than wheat as you can eat bread. You will use the wheat to make flower, then bake a flower with a piece of coal to yield a bread loaf. This loaf is worth 24 energy.
Once you have a bunch of random food ingredients, you might want to think about unlocking the cooking skill, again, under the forager skill set. This unlocks the ability to make a crockpot, as well as a bunch of other ingredients.
The crock pot is able to make:
- Sushi (32 energy)
- Fruit Salad (40 energy)
- Meat Skewer (50 energy)
- Ice Cream (50 energy), Cookie (52 energy)
- Soup (56 energy)
- Pizza (64 energy)
- Sandwich (100 energy)
Obtaining the cooking skill also allows you to produce mayonnaise and cheese with the windmill. These can be eaten or used to make some of the meals listed above.
Using Animals
Chickens and cows start popping up in the green lands, just waiting to be used as food! Chickens lay eggs, which you can eat for 16 energy or use to may mayo and sandwiches.
If you use the glass bottle on a cow, you will get bottled milk, which gives you 16 energy as well or use it to make cheese (24 energy). Cows can also be killed for their meat. At first, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to get steaks, as you have no way to cook them unless you start unlocking the Hunting Skills. In which case, you will unlock cooking meat and you will go from getting 18 energy per steak to getting 32, if you cook it with a piece of coal.
Other growing foods
As you unlock new biomes, you will also see new foods growing like cactuses (12 energy), hot peppers (12 energy), and pumpkins (20 energy). All of these can be used for bigger meals or be eaten as is.
More Skills for food
There are a few skills that you can unlock to help keep your hunger up, all of which are under the forager section.
- Voracity – gain 20% more energy when eating
- Gluttony – gain XP for skills when eating
- Calciverous – eating rocks gain energy
Don’t let your character go hungry!
