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Aodhan

Guide To Feeding Yourself

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A long time ago, I made a cooking guide for GV. I have modified it a bit and offer it here for those new players trying to figure out how to feed themselves.

**Recent Changes to animal spawn rates and caps now makes obtaining meat from killing wild animals easier. Anywhere in this guide that refers to using a filet of fish, you can, of course, use a piece of cooked or raw meat.**








 

A Guide for New Players

:Feeding Yourself:


This Guide is for New Players in Wurm Online, specifically addressing the need to produce food to eat once the first 24hr grace period has ended. There are many guides available that cover all the various aspects of game play for the new player, but this Guide’s focus is food.


…..


So you are approaching the end of your first 24hrs in-game time. Congratulations! However, when you hit that magic mark, you will no longer be able to ask the food vendors for refreshment and it will be up to you to make your own food. You may have already discovered how to forage for items in the grass but also found that they give almost no food value and reduces your nutrition. Listen closely and discover the wonders of making food as a member of the Wurm Online community!

I will give you the skinny of how to make casseroles right now. You need:


1ea. Fishing pole
1ea. Pottery Bowl
1ea. Campfire/Oven/Forge


That’s all you need to catch and cook your food…well…almost.

You may have noticed that you don’t have any of the items I listed above except for the bowl. You get one pottery bowl to start with…Woopeee!!! But if you are going to make enough food to survive on, you will need ten times that many. Let’s look at ways to get what we need
.


Equipment - Fishing Pole

To make a fishing pole, you only need 3 things; a shaft of wood, a hook(wood or metal) and a string. No problem right? The string, it’s a problem. String comes from using a spindle on cotton. Cotton comes from two places. Either from planting cotton seeds, watching it grow over several real life days, and then harvesting it or, if you are very, very lucky, you might find one while botanizing a grass tile. (edit: Changes have made it much easier to find cotton now) So how do you get a fishing pole now? You ask the people of Freedom Isles for one. There is usually someone that will trade you some labor (making planks or digging dirt..ect.) for either a cotton or a fishing pole. Freedom chat can be kind of rough sometimes, but if you persist, someone will help you out.

Equipment - Pottery Bowls
Next, you need at least 10 pottery bowls. You make bowls by finding clay(*edit: a new clay tile has been found near Freedom Market*), digging the clay, and then using your hand (inventory window under body>torso>right arm>right hand) to shape the clay into a bowl. You may produce an unfinished bowl, so you may need to make a spatula and clay shaper from a wood log using your carving knife. Once you have made 10 bowls, you will need to fire them to make them into pottery bowls. Simply place the clay bowls in a campfire/oven/forge and light the fire. You need a kindling to light the fire. Use your carving knife on a wood scrap or log to make one. In a few minutes you will have your 10 pottery bowls.


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At this point, let me shout out to the other players that may say making Stew or Goulash should be the first food you make because Stew provides better skill gain at lower levels and Goulash provides better nutrition and you only need fish and water to make it. Both are TRUE. Stew does provide better skill gain at lower levels but you need containers to carry stew with you and it does not fill your food bar as fast as a Casserole will. Goulash is indeed very easy to make, with only the one fish with water in a sauce pan and it does make a good quantity. However, it’s the making of the pans that take a lot of time, and for the very new player, especially if they have just passed the 24hrs mark and need to make food fast, making pottery bowls is much quicker (plus they start with one already). Advancement to Sauce Pans and then Frying Pans will come in turn, but for this Guide, its Bowls first.
----


Ingredients - Herbs & Berries

Now that you have your bowls, you need the ingredience to place in them to make the food. Time to forage for some herbs and berries. These can be found on Grass tiles. Right click on a grass tile, select Nature and then Forage. You may get various messages like “This tile has been picked cleanâ€. If so, just move on to the next grass tile until you find one that produces either a foraged or botanized item. Keep doing this until you get about 10 items to put in your bowls.

(TIP: When Foraging/Botanizing grass tiles, you can forage not only the tile you are on, but all adjacent tiles.  This means you can check 9 tiles while standing in one spot).

Ingredients - Fish
Fishing is next. Once you have at least 10 herbs and berries, go to the edge of the lake or ocean, and try to catch 10 fish. With the fishing pole selected in your inventory, right click on one of the tiles that are fully underwater. You may notice that a 3 minute timer starts to tick down. Don’t worry, you will usually catch a fish in less time. One thing you need to make sure you do is repair your fishing pole EVERY TIME it takes damage. Fishing Poles are notorious for breaking so keep it repaired.

Butchery - Filets
Consider fileting your fish. Fish come in different weights with the small ones weighing in at only 0.05kg and with larger fish, like catfish and carp, weighing in at 2-4kg or more. If you have a fish that weighs 0.65kg or more, you can filet the fish using a carving knife or butchering knife and make 2 or more filets(Marlins can give you 72 filets per fish). Now, why not just throw the 0.65kg fish in the bowl? You can. But if you filet the fish, you get '2 filets' instead of just 'one fish', that’s 2 chances at increasing your Hot Food Cooking skill instead of just one. Get the idea here? It’s the same amount of food, but more chances to increase skill.

Cooking
Now that we have the ingredients, it’s time to start cooking! Place one fish in each bowl. Also place one berry or herb into each bowl with the fish. You will either need a campfire, oven or forge to place the bowls in to cook. With recent changes in the game, it only takes a few minutes for the bowls and ingredients to heat up enough to cook the food and soon you will find a casserole in each of the bowls.


Good News-Bad News
Now for a little bit of bad news. All the work you just did will make just about enough food to feed you once, with maybe a little left over. But very soon you will need to go foraging and fishing again to make more food.

Now for the good news. After your first batch of casseroles has cooked up, you will have received 2-3 points in your Hot Food Cooking skill. The more you cook, the higher the skill gets. The higher the skill gets, the higher the quality of the food. The higher the quality of the food, the less it takes to fill your food bar so that over a little bit of time, you will find you need less and less herbs and fish to make the food you require to feed yourself. (example..30hfc 1fish+1pumpkin = 4-6 game hrs of food)

One last note, food does not keep well in your invetory. Caseroles will take major damage or disapear entirely, in less than 24hrs, if kept in your inventory. So, if possible, store your food in a container, like a barrel, inside a house or other secure place.



You now have the knowledge to go out into the big wide world of Wurm Online and survive on your own. I’m so proud of you!!


Aodhan
(I am The Lego)

Edited by Aodhan
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When I started out about 4 years ago, you could filet fish with a carving knife. Don't think that has been changed.

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When I started out about 4 years ago, you could filet fish with a carving knife. Don't think that has been changed.

Yeah, carving knife still does the trick  ;)

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Yes, carving knife does work...change made.  I think somone told me that they can butcher animals with their shovel as well, but I have not tried this.

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Yes, you can butcher with many tools but you won't get as many meat back. Butchering knife is still the best tool for butchering.

Quote from wiki.

You can also butcher with other sharp-edged tools like carving knife, hatchet, pickaxe, shovel, sickle, stone chisel or sword, but using a butchering knife gives more items.

You can use a carving knife or a butchering knife to fillet.

Nice guide, but can you divide it into sections and fancy it up a bit? I just zoom through it.

List of useful links.

http://wurmonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hot_food_cooking

http://wurmonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Butchering

http://wurmonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Starvation

http://wurmonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Nutrition

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Ok..spruced it up a bit, adding some paragraph headers and color...but I'm more on content than the art side of the house.  ;D

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Ok..spruced it up a bit, adding some paragraph headers and color...but I'm more on content than the art side of the house.  ;D

Ah much better! It catches my attention! Sorry about that lol.

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Just a small spelling correction for you :3

Ingredients not ingredience.

I got sloppy..thanks for the catch.

Corrections made.

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Great guide.

Might be worth mentioning, I think you can make a dish by putting a fish in with a filet of fish. This negates the need for any of that tedious foraging or botonising!

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I'm at work right now and not able to test this.  However, I do beleive that 2 different types of fish(whole or filet) will make a stew, not caserole and I covered that in the 'shout out to other players' section.   But I will check this out when I get home tonight.

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True, that's stew, which is generally less useful for transporting etc as already mentioned, but it's a good way for a quick meal, or for grinding hot food cooking to start due to the low difficulty.

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True, that's stew, which is generally less useful for transporting etc as already mentioned, but it's a good way for a quick meal, or for grinding hot food cooking to start due to the low difficulty.

I know you covered this in your shout out but I wanted to say I still think stews and goulashes were my absolute favorite method, after trying both ways on several starter characters.

One nice thing about fish stew (which I lived off my first weeks as a solo player) is that mixing seems to reset decay timers. So you can keep a cauldron in a forge (or even a wood bucket in a cart if you are less established), dump your pottery bowls of stew into that, then  just periodically pour some into a flask and back again to prevent spoilage. Fish stew is also extremely useful if you want to work on animal taming skills, if you fill the flask first with several food items (1 potato + several other items) and use that .0001 or so of stew to tame then you can grind a ton without using up your main food supply. My fighting skills were generally poor but I soon found having a pet brown bear around to be a great equalizer in many fights, as well as a great way to pull carts.  I also used stew for feeding my meat eater pets as it seemed to me that stew actually filled their hunger bars better than just raw fish or meat filets (plus let me work on cooking without any waste). Because your cooking skill raises faster, you end up with higher quality stew and then can move on to fish goulash which i think has the same nutritional rating as casseroles, but now you have the higher skill to make better ones even earlier.  And you can start with pottery bowls for stew and don't need a saucepan right away.

Overall I found a fishing pole and fish stew worked out a lot better for me as a brand new player than casseroles which felt a lot more hassle and I could never keep from spoiling as easily. So there was literally zero food wastage. All the fish got used and I didn't end up with a lot of woad and branches and gunk. Also I never needed to worry about water being "picked clean" and needing to travel huge distances to resupply,

Of course if you don't have access to water, fish stew is less of a help than other methods. But don't discount fish stew as a very newbie-friendly way to feed yourself and level cooking :)

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I think guide is more of how to start grinding Hot Food Cooking then how a new person can feed themselves.

(I have not played in a year or so and am re-downloading the game now.  So I'm not sure if this still works.)

I found Raw Whole Fish was the easiest, fastest way to feed myself at the start.  5-10 minutes of fishing would feed me for 2-3 hours.  If I was mining/smithing I would make some Fish Stew.

Of course a higher level in anything will let you spend less time doing that task and this will give you more time to do other tasks.

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Unfortunately, eating raw fish will barely move your food bar and will significantly lower your nutrition.  Even if you caught 2 catfish and ate them raw, you would gain little progress on the food bar.  This may be a change from when you were last in game.

However, once you cook the fish, as in a stew or casserole, the amount the food bar will rise will increase.  Stew, though, still gives less increase to the food bar versus a casserole.  The same weight casserole will move the food bar more than twice as far and more than 4 times as far as eating fish alone.

So as I tried to cover in the guide above, there are other ways to make food, but for the purpose of this guide, and for the time spent and gain received, making casseroles still seems to be a new players best bet.

Note: If this WAS a grinding guide, I would advocate stew first, then casseroles, then goulash, then meals.  My guide simply provides a step by step way for new players to make adequate food for themselves while learning how to live in the world of Wurm Online.

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For your information, my botanizing statistics show that Cotton is a roughly 1/200 chance for tiles where you get an item. Depending on how recently the area you are in has been botanized, that becomes a 1/250 to 1/1000 chance of cotton.

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Whats the problem? All you have to do is kill a weaker player then butcher em for meat  ;D

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A combination of guide mixed in with the reply about fish soup is pretty well exactly what I did. I do not know if its worth adding but when I first started fishing it was frustrating at first. I caught nothing and I had images in my head of spending half of every Wurm day doing nothing but fishing trying to not starve. But once the skill hit the 2-3 mark(Maybe at most 10 minutes?) it started to function. In my mind though it took forever and I hated fishing and was tempted to give up and go forage thinking it might be the better newbie option. I might have had just horrid starter luck with it. Another thing that might be a nice addition would be mentioning how you can add actions to a queue... so you could fish->repair->fish and not have to watch so closely. Not sure how many items you can queue up at the start 2 or 3... 

Also while I feel the guild implies this it might be worth explicitly saying to start early and force yourself not to use the free food option unless you really need to once you can fish. Just to work up the skills. Learning to fish while starving I assume is not ideal.

That might have been rambling I hope not but I am to sleepy to read it over and find out.

Anyway nice guide.

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The other method would be to find or make some rubbish to sell to a spawn point trader, then come visit me and say "here is money, feed me". Hot meals and 80+ nutrition guaranteed. If you say "here is lots of money, feed me" then 95+ nutrition becomes guaranteed. If you say "here is gems, feed me" then you get the 95+ nutrition and a 90+ opulenced meal to take away. As a bonus for the last option guards will not kill you and I will allow your unbutchered meat to leave the deed.

Simples. :lol:

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Or just skulk around behind the deed of someone skilling up HFC and fight off the neighborhood dogs for some of the 5000 meals they toss out the back door to rot.

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Simples. :lol:

Please do not advertise your items for sale here.

Or just skulk around behind the deed of someone skilling up HFC and fight off the neighborhood dogs for some of the 5000 meals they toss out the back door to rot.

Yes, you can try and find stuff lying about, but that doesn't help new players learn to make it themselves.

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