Your favorite method of gathering food (EARLY)?

[meepmoop]

Hello everyone. I usually like just hunting koalefants (in addition to killing some spiders and picking a filler occasionally) which leads my favorite meal to be meat stew. I hope to mainly talk about this aspect in regards to *short* sessions. Dont want to talk about it in a sense of big camps. Just basic things.

Second favorite is getting about a dozen farms and living off pumpkins. However, maybe you find more methods more fun. Ill state some more options with my thoughts about them, please add your own thoughts and methods of food gathering:

* koalefants (with addition to spider meat and filler) - A hunt takes some time (something like... half a day maybe all things considered?) and each hunt like that can sustain a person for 5 days. So surviving this way you spend 1 / 6 of your time gathering food.

* pumpkins / dragonpie - harvesting, feeding bird, seeding. I didnt do any calculations but I think this method takes more time over all then some other methods.

* berry fields with gobbler traps - this is good too. I feel. the only things I dont like about it is that I dig and replant the berry bushes every 40 or so cycles. I was using this every time but started leaning more towards koalefants and since then I dont use this as often. Dont really know why. 20 bushes are more then enough for each person.

* spiders/pig farms - I... dont like this. I dont know why. Even with bunnys.

* Honey - I tried it several times. By the time you finish building it you dont have long time to benefit from this until the first winter. You can get it passively too but you need big amounts of hives for it to really be a comfortable food.

* bunnies/birds with boomerang (morsels) - The amounts I get are small and require a lot of time just to track enough food to satisfy me for more then few days.

* tallbirds - dont like it. they hit like hell so its not as ignore-able as pigs or spiders. and it takes ages to kill 1. Koalefants take more time to track down but they last for much longer and are not taking long to kill. I would avoid them myself.

* being nomand. harvester gatherer, just picking anything as traveling - it is fine, but requires a different style.

[Well-met]

planting 40 kelp stalks around a stray boat is an incredible, underestimated farm.

[Thomas Die]

watching my friends die and stealing their food, so i like to join on day 30

[NSAiswatchingus]

Exploring Caves early to locate a bunny village. The sooner I can get a group of bunnymen the sooner I don't need to worry about food. 

[GenomeSquirrel]

Lately I’ve been liking mushroom planters in caves, you switch between gathering hundreds of lightbulbs then killing spiders for werepig and tents. Although it loses large scale sustainability without Wormwood.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

Spiders to change the monster meat that i dont need into eggs and werepigs

[Dunk Mujunk]

We always stick with the tried and true rabbit/random filler method. Quick to set up, lets us focus on other things early. 

[meepmoop]

wow I am amazed by the amount of different answers. seems like no one is the same. Everyone has different preferences.

Klei did really good job on this.

[Owlrust]

Sh*t, you beat me to it; I WAS GONNA BE THE KOOL KID WITH THE BULL KELPS  

[ArubaroBeefalo]

8 minutes ago, meepmoop said:

wow I am amazed by the amount of different answers. seems like no one is the same. Everyone has different preferences.

Klei did really good job on this.

ye, i dont understand why other users talk about "meta" when this game its a sandbox :/

[.]

Butterfly is really good food source. I don't kill animals (except spiders) if I don't have to and I don't collect berries if I dont take it with shovel (yes I need help). So the best food source for me is butterflies. I kill 5-8 of them and eating them as a start snack.
And also cutting mature birchnuts instead other trees will give tons of food source in first exploring days. It's save me from huntinG

[Maxposting]

I use berry bushes and applied horticulture when I am wickerbottom.

[meepmoop]

32 minutes ago, Slagger said:

Butterfly is really good food source. I don't kill animals (except spiders) if I don't have to and I don't collect berries if I dont take it with shovel (yes I need help). So the best food source for me is butterflies. I kill 5-8 of them and eating them as a start snack.
And also cutting mature birchnuts instead other trees will give tons of food source in first exploring days. It's save me from huntinG

butterflies are animals too. You monster

[ShadowDuelist]

19 minutes ago, meepmoop said:

butterflies are animals too. You monster

Well, according to the game, they are flying flowers (Maxwell's Quote - Wurt can eat them, Wigfrid Can't) ...Yeah yeah, I dont know why either, ask the devs 

Back on topic, early on (before and during first winter) I tend to live off monster meat from spiders or desert hounds, and whatever else I can hunt or gather. 

Once I'm more settled, it depends on the character, but usually I focus on stone bushes, mass producing monster meat (somehow, depends on the character) and Werepigs.

Variants:

• With Wurt its just berries, ice, and stone bushes.
• With Wormwood its mainly my free crops, cactii and red mushrooms
• With Wendy I tend to rush Beeboxes, if killer bee biome spawns
• With Wortox its a mix of souls and meaty stew, from killing everything that moves

[Mike23Ua]

Birchnuts, and random carrots laying around.

I Don’t really NEED anything else Wurt lives just fine off random food laying around. But also because there’s no such thing as a dedicated server with more then 6 players on Xbox.. just leaving food laying around till you absolutely need it is a 100% viable option.

All it takes is 1 Berry, 3 Ice and you got a Fistful Of Jam. Or if your not Wurt.. 1 Monster Meat, 3 Ice.. Meatballs!

On a Harder Difficulty I would love to see an Ice Nerf personally... but yeah.

[Warlockadamm]

Butterfly genocide it is for me, usually end up in the early days with 10-15 of them per day. I complete this nice diet with some berries and roasted birchnut. Thats the true secret to keep a slim, healty and nice body.

 

~ a Wes player

[shadowDigga]

Butterfly wings restore 9.375 hunger each, 8 * 9.375 = 75 daily hunger. You kill butterflies as you walk by so it barely takes any of your time.

3 hours ago, Well-met said:

planting 40 kelp stalks around a stray boat is an incredible, underestimated farm.

That's not exactly an early food source unless you rush lunar island with Woodie; however, bunch of bull kelps are the best source of crock pot filler you'd ever find as long as you are fine with fps drop.

[Minitte]

I try to pat butterflies and they turn into food. Definitely didn't punch them.

Also borrowing seeds from birds.

[GetNerfedOn]

If i play solo I immediately:

 - setup a berry farm and murder groves of birchnut trees to amass metric tons' worth of trailmix as Wicker (or Rosalina hee hee hee) so that I can rush Fly first autumn

 - rush a birb cage and base near spiders and get berries otherwise, and live off Bacon and Eggs and Pierogi

 - have never tried early game honey

[Dunk Mujunk]

1 hour ago, GetNerfedOn said:

 have never tried early game honey

I figured out the Beeboxes right around the time I started getting decent at DST. I became obsessed with Honey Poultices and would rush Bees. It was horrible, I stressed myself out every map. I'd have 4 Beeboxes up by day 8 or so though. But now I don't feel like it was worth the trouble.

[Wumpus the 19th]

I've started playing on other people's servers, so as a good Samaritan, I always give out my food when people ask, namely on servers where food is scarce because of less experienced players or a handicap

my general method also involved spawning multiple koalefants,saving one for said large servers as we could use manure, then slaughtering most rest. before that is nomadic to self sustain.

i originally thought dirt piles were for gobblers, probably because i followed a trail and found a gobbler later on. now i slaughter and capture koalefants as my god forsaken past-time on a lot of servers.

[meepmoop]

1 hour ago, Dunk Mujunk said:

I figured out the Beeboxes right around the time I started getting decent at DST. I became obsessed with Honey Poultices and would rush Bees. It was horrible, I stressed myself out every map. I'd have 4 Beeboxes up by day 8 or so though. But now I don't feel like it was worth the trouble.

Yes I feel similarly. I just dont find it... comfortable for me, I suppose?

19 minutes ago, Wumpus the 19th said:

I've started playing on other people's servers, so as a good Samaritan, I always give out my food when people ask, namely on servers where food is scarce because of less experienced players or a handicap

my general method also involved spawning multiple koalefants,saving one for said large servers as we could use manure, then slaughtering most rest. before that is nomadic to self sustain.

i originally thought dirt piles were for gobblers, probably because i followed a trail and found a gobbler later on. now i slaughter and capture koalefants as my god forsaken past-time on a lot of servers.

Yea. Thats my preferred food as well.

However there is HUGE downside to using koalefants as a food and that is that they are ABSOLUTELY *CUTE* and INNOCENT.

Every koalefant I kill makes me feel more empty and evil inside. Sometimes I am not sure its really worth it.

[kiwikenobi]

I use traps on spiders for monster meat, and berries or mushrooms for filler for meatballs. I usually leave wild carrots I find growing as emergency food, since they don't grow back, but they never spoil if you just leave them in the ground. If it's slightly later in the game, I'll turn spider meat into eggs to use as filler. Or if I'm feeling saucy, I'll trap/boomerang a rabbit or a bird for a morsel to make bacon and eggs. If it's winter, I'll use ice with the monster meat.

And seeds, of course. Somehow you can survive almost solely on seeds for quite a long time, especially if you roast them first to get the tiny bit of healing from each one.

[Yuuko]

I usually forage for berries / cactus, kill spiders and feed those meats to pigs for normal meats which I continue even after setting up base.  I rarely relocate berry bushes preferring bide my time with foraging until I make it to the island and steal all the stone fruits.

[Nino123]

I try to find a dragon fruit as soon as possible then, it doesn't takes much time to harvest, feed the bird and plant again. something like 8-10 farms with only dragon fruits and it's ok for food, health and fit for vegetarians. If you're lucky,, it could be a early game way.

Also, honey is good (and you have food every season).

You can easily kill bunnies with a spear, so you can make meat balls.