Best food items and dishes in the game. What are they?

[Swiyss]

I'm up for debate for what is the very best food and crockpot dishes in the game. Some think it's honey ham or bacon and eggs, however we need to categorize food in 3 segments. Efficiency, Value and Spoilage.

Some characters like wx-78 can have spoiled food inside a bearger bin and still get 100% of their benefits but we won't count that to be fair.

Best ingredients in the game:

• Bananas, they're easy to get a bunch of once you raid the moon quay, they grow on winter, they grow very fast, and they can be kept as ingredients inside a salt box. Once you farm moongleams and give them to the unnatural portal at the moon quay, you can get up to 100 bushes very fast. They make Daiquiri, Banana shake and Banana Pops.
• Ripe Stone Fruit, then can be kept indefinitely in chests, and 1 use of a gunpowder will quickly break around 400 stone fruits. Once ripen, they provide a veggie value, which is super useful. They don't have any specific recipes, but the fact that they grow on winter and doesn't require fertilization (the small bush dropped from stone fruits) makes for an insanely strong food item, specially for wurt.
• Honey, the single best versatile solution for hunger. With enough bee hives, you can eat honey for the rest of the game, and store enough to make it last the whole winter. 1 honey will make very great food such as Jelly Salad, Taffy, Honey Ham and Honey Nuggets. I'm going to be honest here, if you're playing as Woodie, this is the best food in the game for you since honey nuggets will restore additional hunger for him.
• Figs, they come at a surprise on this list, since I wasn't going to include it here, but once you set up enough of those giant trees, you'll never need to worry about them. They grow on all seasons and can be made into one of the best crockpot recipes in the game (after the buff), Figatoni.
• Leafy Meat, the fact that wormwood can craft these is really a blessing. These leafy meats will grant you so many options that you're gonna be overwhelmed by it very quickly. You can cook an insane amount of Bacon and Eggs and Pierogi by simply giving leafy meat to a bird in a cage, then collect frog legs from a frog rain and wait 4 days for all leafy meat to regrow. They can be made into beefy greens or leafy meatloaf (also veggie burguer but that dish is not as good since they require farming onions).
• Kelp, one trip to the lunar island will get you around 40 in a default world. After putting them all in a small space with a boat, you can pick all of them at the same time with a reaper and collect your loot with a Forager, they can also be hand picked. They grow on winter and can be dried in 2 minutes for a quick sanity bite. They also have veggie value which is precious. Kelp dishes are not that great in my opinion, cali rolls will give you 20 hp, 37.5 hunger and 10 sanity, but it also requires fish. Barnacle niguiri are very nice in terms of value, they give 40 hp, 37.5 hunger and 15 sanity, but the casualty of having sea stacks around your base with rng, then collecting these only at night is too much of a pain in practice to actually make it worth it imo. Kelp is better used as filler for me, and it's a way better filler than berries.

Now I didn't include any meat here in this list since I value way more casualty of harvesting than the difficulty of setup. For example, bananas come with a bunch of problems, you need to first find the moon quay, then pacify or destroy all powder monkey houses, then find a way to kill monkeys that come from using moongleams, and then finally you can start planting them. However all of this is not count because when they're set for production, it's just harvest time and that's it. And for me, meat will require you to set up some farms, like tallbird farms, pig farms and spider farms, all which can very easily done, but the harvesting is what requires more intricate solutions, like using fire and flingo to kill pigs or winona's catapults (character specific).

• The best crockpot dishes in the game in my opinion are Figatoni, Frozen Banana Daiquiri, Jelly Salad and Pierogi. But why? Well,
  • Figatoni will give you 30 hp, 56.2 hunger and 15 sanity. With a fast eating animation, this food will provide insane value for such an easy recipe to make since it's just figs and veggies. You can do (2 Kelp, 1 Ripe Stone Fruit and 1 Fig), (2 Ripe Stone Fruit, 1 Twig and 1 Fig). Each fig is a figatoni, each above average tree has 3 to 4 figs, and they grow every 2.5 days including winter. If you setup 3 trees (which is the amount of tree nuts you'll get from 1 trip to the waterlogged biome), that's 9 to 12 figatonis every 2.5 days. Counting how hunger works, you don't even need a bearger bin to fully have a fast eating animation food that'll also give you sanity and health at insanely great values. Every 2.5 days is 187.5 natual hunger loss, that's around less than half the amount you can craft, so basically with one trip to the waterlogged biome and the lunar island for kelp and stone fruit, you get enough of all 3 stats for 3 people constantly without having to farm anything else.
  • Frozen Banana Daiquiri will grant 30 hp, 18.5 hunger and 15 sanity. Although banana shakes are also very great, they cost 2 bananas, which is not as efficient. 1 single trip to frostjaw island will fill up an ice box to the brim, that's 360 ice, enough to make 360 Frozen Banana Daiquiri. Now the reason this is one of the best dishes in the game is not only because of it's food value, easy to amass ingredients and efficiency, but also because it will spoil in 15 days, has a fast eating animation and Wigfrid can consume it. Having a better alternative for the dragonfruit or flower salad shouldn't be this easy. If you actually calculate the sanity, it's 15 sanity per banana. Banana shakes will give 16.5 sanity per banana which is just a mere 1.5 sanity increase, but they don't heal at all.
  • Jelly Salad will grant you 50 sanity which is the highest in the game, and the reason it's included here is because this item is just another byproduct of having those ingredients I listed earlier. Even though it will spoil quickly, it's ingredients can be store in a salt box and ice box for more than 2 seasons. Once you get a bee farm going, you'll have more honey than you can possibly use unless you have like 6 people playing. And once you get enough lureplants (which will eventually happen) you can have this sanity food indefinitely. It also grants a cute 37.5 hunger and 8 health.
  • Pierogi is a better alternative to Bacon and Eggs. It will also last 20 days, require less meat, give you more health, and all of this for 1 additional veggie. The strategy is to have kelp and stone fruit around, then wait until you have a substantial amount of Lureplants in your world (alternatively you can use the meat from a pig farm, tallbird farm, hounds, spiders, giants, birds, rabbits etc.. if you happen to make those or have spare meat around). You'll then farm the lureplants religiously every 2 days, use the stale meat and leftovers as eggs, fresh meat as ingredients and kelp as veggie and filler. Now with this setup in my world, after saving meat from all sources and farming 25 leafy meat and 20 stone fruit bushes for 18 days religiously, I made 266 pierogi. This dish is also best described as a byproduct of these setups, and even though it has a slow eating animation, the sheer amount you can make in one go is absurd.

Banana shakes are not as efficient with ingredients and it's a veggie which wigfrid can't eat. Bacon and eggs require 1 additional meat which will grant less hunger value total because the amount of pierogi you can make otherwise with leafy meat will suffice it's 37.5 hunger value, Honey ham requires 2 big meat (some farm setup to have consistent meat) which I don't see as being as easy as raiding the lunar island (which you're gonna do anyways) and has a long eating animation.

Sure, I have to be honest here and tell you that Figatoni will spoil quickly. The sole reason I included it here is because this item is just figs and veggies, It's a yet another byproduct of having these ingredients around, and it can be made whenever you want since figs won't spoil while in mossy vines. They can be stored for a long time in salt boxes as well to make a massive amount of this dish whenever you want. Kelp can also be stored in salt boxes so I used this parameter in consideration as well.

Now I will say that from time to time, as long as it's situational, I will cook some honey ham and meatballs, especially in the early game. But really for early game, I'm honestly just better making trail mix for quick healing, meaty stew for hunger and cooked cactus or green caps for sanity.

I haven't talked much about bundling wraps or icker preserves since although they can be used to store dishes and ingredients indefinitely, it defeats the purpose of food spoiling at all. So to combat this problem, spoiling rates are made more impactful when you don't have these items. And although the bearger bin is also a very late game item and will slow down food a lot, it still won't stop food from spoiling like icker preserves or bundling wraps.

I know most of this post is highly opiniated, but I've experienced a lot of setup in my whole life and nothing beats those ingredients I listed there, so I felt safe using my experience and my opinion. Not every server will have a Merm killing arena with catapults Joe, but I'm sure you'll have kelp, stone fruit bushes and bananas inconsequentially after doing the celestial champion quest.

I also get that you can turn into Warly, make a bunch of his best dishes and then store them, but I don't believe this is fair so I didn't include it. If you wanna discuss what warly's best dishes are as well feel free to mention them here because I didn't really played as Warly as long as I wanted to make those insane dishes or have an idea of what's his best dishes.

Just let me know of a farm setup you have, or some other dishes you think are more efficient, has more hunger value and last longer.

Edited April 4, 2025 by astareus

[hyoton123]

Ingredients: probably farm crops. scale almost infinitely with available land, available very early, low risk, low exploration, and you get appropriate rewards for tryharding but still get good rewards for randomly clicking. seeds are an absolute pain in the butt but at least they come to you. 

If not farm plots, kelp. Runner up stone fruit.

 

crockpot: surf and turf or wobster bisque, that mushroom anti sleep thing, daiquiri, pierogi, meaty stew, scotch eggs, bacon and eggs. Anything requiring non mainland ingredients is a hard sell to me for “best” except for daiquiri, which is universally available big heal with a fast animation which you can get from cave bananas. Pierogis and bne have 10 day yellow, which is good especially when multiplied by 20. scotch eggs can be made from 3/4 unrotting ingredients. meaty stew is meaty stew. surf and turf and the bisque can be made from wobsters which can be infinitely stored, and heal so much you dont generally need a lot (which is good because getting a lot takes a few days)

[Well-met]

recently discovered surf n turf. I'm a fan.

[mima_]

breakfast skillet need to be in top 3 
with only an egg and a veggie up to two twig in recipe u can get decent amount of stat.

[Walrusst]

If you find a good base location where a river meets up with the ocean, this makes fish 30 tiers higher as having that chokepoint near you almost guarantees 8 trawler fish every time you enter base if you block the river off completely and are close enough to the river to use a fig tree.

Surf and turfs one of the strongest strategic food sources (Slow eat time, big effect,) it isn't frozen bannanas or figaton where it heals fast and its cheap, but what it is is just a huge decently preserved big ball of hunger and sanity.

A butterfly pen in a no-flower biomes also incredible, just 8 or so flowers protected from fire in a fenced off area where you can punch all the butterflies to death easily while having their mobility restricted (Bonus points for adding a caged catcoon to one corner of the pen so there is always an immense mountain of free wings.)
For those that don't know, catcoons can attack 1-4 walls outside of an enclosure, so if you trap a catcoon in a 1 wide wall box and put a 2x2 butterfly pen on one of the corners to it, it will kill ALL the butterflies while being unable to collect them. You also get the occasional unfortunate bird. All you need for this setup is to bait the unfortunate cat you will be putting in the cage.
Butter muffins give so much value off of the wings this thing generates....

Picking the blue mushtree forest as a beefalo rider is insane as well, because welllllllllllll..... A bunch of 80 health stat pops you can just spam for essentially free.

Edited April 4, 2025 by Walrusst

[oregu]

meaty stew is the only recipe i rly make. it gives 12 hp and 150 hunger. even if it goes stale, it gives a lot of hunger.

meatballs are good to extend the longevity of meat but meat already lasts a long time considering u can cook over a fire to make it last longer or convert to eggs for golds or some versatile rotten eggs (or even meaty stew filler if ur feeling spicy). you dont gain that much or time using crockpot dishes considering you have to gather four ingredients and bring to a crockpot, but if other players gather the ingredients. may as well make if you can. i dont get hurt as much so i dont need as much healing foods or try to rely on them as much.

as for sanity foods, i try to make them when i can but its rare when i can and want to utililize them. passive sanity from prototyping and clothing comes easily.

other than that, i eat everything as normal and rely on non-crockpoot foods or regular items/interactions to heal. i dont rly think u could stockpile food until you have bundling, so its better to eat everything regularly before it goes to waste. cooking foods together may often give more hunger but less longevity to foods for what its worth.  because its better to eat 4 stale foods than to eat a stale crockpot food imo or worse yet have the crockpot food spoil into 1 rot instead of 4.

if ur at the super endgame point i guess eggs and bacon or even tall scotch eggs could be good to have in a bearger bin if u work towards that? but theres no reason why u cant stockpile and eat meaty stews from bundling still. the reason i dont rly use tall scotch eggs regularly is because it doesnt come up as much cause rocky biomes are usually out of the way early to mid game. it does seem pretty fun trying to make a tallbird farm early on though.

obvious exceptions are when im wicker/wurt, then id most likely rely on crop foods. imo pumpkins and corn are my favored crops.

Edited April 4, 2025 by oregu

[Swiyss]

1 hour ago, mima_ said:

breakfast skillet need to be in top 3 
with only an egg and a veggie up to two twig in recipe u can get decent amount of stat.

yep, that dish has one of the best ingredient to hunger conversion rates. 1 red cap and an egg will grant 37.5 hunger, 20 health and spoil in 20 days.

1 hour ago, Walrusst said:

For those that don't know, catcoons can attack 1-4 walls outside of an enclosure, so if you trap a catcoon in a 1 wide wall box and put a 2x2 butterfly pen on one of the corners to it, it will kill ALL the butterflies while being unable to collect them. You also get the occasional unfortunate bird. All you need for this setup is to bait the unfortunate cat you will be putting in the cage.
Butter muffins give so much value off of the wings this thing generates..

It's great for wx since it's his favorite food but idk about other survivals. I like surf n turf but as I said, by the time I ate 4 daiquiri I only had 1 surf n turf and the trawler kit to surf n turf ratio still requires you to use 3 fish per dish, where bananas are 1 to 1 30hp, 18.5 hunger and 15 sanity and last as long as surf n turf.

Edited April 4, 2025 by astareus

[Walrusst]

Best still takes a mix of strategic availability and general effect. Otherwise tall scotch eggs would be a necessary contender for strongest.

A few often forgotten foods that might be worth mentioning is the temperature jumping foods, as some of these are remarkably cheap or have good HP characteristics. (Say, you have fish traps.... Spicy chili is easily farmable with a morsel fish + monster meat + stone fruit.)
With good insulating clothing the temporary temperature shifts can be life savers.

Edited April 4, 2025 by Walrusst

[Gashzer]

Cooked monster meat or raw regular meat.

Crockpot foods are seriously overrated.

[Walrusst]

38 minutes ago, astareus said:

It's great for wx since it's his favorite food but idk about other survivals. 

Its like, 12 rocks and a gate to properly set up. Its one of the most dirt cheap farming methods the universe has ever granted us.
(+a butterfly net to plant the flowers, and the bait to get the catcoon to follow you to base. Optional extra walls to lock hounds out but really I put this near my werepig farm so the cats protected.)
 

24 minutes ago, Gashzer said:

Cooked monster meat or raw regular meat.

Crockpot foods are seriously overrated.

Fastest way to kill a newbie is to show them the crock pot, the magical device that turns a resource shortage from inexperience into a far bigger resource shortage.

That being said, once you know what you are doing you can turn almost anything into a higher food in/food out ratio version of itself, and few naturally occurring non-dish foods (Fish steaks, butterfly wings) are good healing without notable drawbacks.

Ocean contents made cheap filler excessively available, and god tier crock pot foods inevitably accessible and spammable.
Foods with an honorable excellent cooked state like potatos got unfortunately nuked by the oceans bounty, drying racks are sort of hit with a crowbar with the worldgen being grass scarce outside the badlands (Since someone with a speed boost can go through the badlands and make 9 drying racks in like a day from the tumbleweeds/spiky tree charcoal, but.... the rest of the playerbase doesn't have this luck.)

Edited April 4, 2025 by Walrusst

[hyoton123]

10 minutes ago, Walrusst said:

A few often forgotten foods that might be worth mentioning is the temperature jumping foods, as some of these are remarkably cheap or have good HP characteristics. (Say, you have fish traps.... Spicy chili is easily farmable with a morsel fish + monster meat + stone fruit.)

Chili is a good one. I’d often rather have bunny stew than a meatball.

 

22 minutes ago, astareus said:

by the time I ate 4 daiquiri I only had 1 surf n turf and the trawler kit to surf n turf ratio still requires you to use 3 fish per dish, where bananas are 1 to 1 30hp, 18.5 hunger and 15 sanity and last as long as surf n turf.

Surf n turf is good for extended stays on the ocean, areas with wobsters, eels in ruins if you dont feel like messing with the splumonkeys. Daiquiris need ice, which sometimes isnt a problem and sometimes is. Bananas arent guaranteed outside of ruins, either, until you get to monkey island and unlock its secrets. Daiquiris should be good, they require two unique ingredients whereas surf n turf has extremely generic requirements (and high priority so you can toss in double monster meat)

[Prinha]

4 hours ago, astareus said:

pig farms and spider farms, all which can very easily done, but the harvesting is what requires more intricate solutions, like using fire and flingo to kill pigs or winona's catapults (character specific).

The developer's graveyard pigfarm doesn't require you to do anything besides loading up the area during a full moon. 
Since Wendy can relocate and craft headstones now this farm can be build without the setpiecs and also made much bigger in scale if anyone so desires. 
From experience I can however tell that it produces so much meat and pigskin that I stopped harvesting it after a while.

Other than that half and full meats are usually a byproduct of killing bosses. Spring especially with its combination of moose + frograin.

I quite like your list. Maybe ice should be added.

My most used crockpot dishes are:

- Meaty Stew, Bacon and Eggs, Honeyham

- Jelly Salad, Vegetable Stinger, Banana Shake 

- Pierogie, Tall Scotch Eggs, Jelly Beans

- Volt Goat Chaud-Froid

Edited April 4, 2025 by Prinha

[gaymime]

12 hours ago, astareus said:

bananas come with a bunch of problems, you need to first find the moon quay, then pacify or destroy all powder monkey houses, then find a way to kill monkeys that come from using moongleams, and then finally you can start planting them.

soooo you can go in winter to avoid all the monkey's already on the island(they stay inside as long as you dont bother them) and there is a setting in the game to specifically turn off portal monkeys so if you are the host you have the ability to entirely negate monkeys as a hazard

 

as for a GOAT ingredient? it has to be ice. in an icebox or in ice chester they last forever so for the low low price of a couple pickaxes you can have an eternal food that never spoils and only has one weighted recipe(bunny stew when used with morsel) it can also be consumed raw in an emergancy to lower your body temp for a couple seconds so if you are overheating a couple ice can give you some time

11 hours ago, Well-met said:

recently discovered surf n turf. I'm a fan.

in solo i am the biggest surf n' turf fan, it is so good~

Edited April 5, 2025 by gaymime
specified ice chester

[_mylilsunshine_]

5 hours ago, astareus said:

• Honey, the single best versatile solution for hunger. With enough bee hives, you can eat honey for the rest of the game, and store enough to make it last the whole winter. 1 honey will make very great food such as Jelly Salad, Taffy, Honey Ham and Honey Nuggets. I'm going to be honest here, if you're playing as Woodie, this is the best food in the game for you since honey nuggets will restore additional hunger for him.
• Figs, they come at a surprise on this list, since I wasn't going to include it here, but once you set up enough of those giant trees, you'll never need to worry about them. They grow on all seasons and can be made into one of the best crockpot recipes in the game (after the buff), Figatoni.
• Leafy Meat, the fact that wormwood can craft these is really a blessing. These leafy meats will grant you so many options that you're gonna be overwhelmed by it very quickly. You can cook an insane amount of Bacon and Eggs and Pierogi by simply giving leafy meat to a bird in a cage, then collect frog legs from a frog rain and wait 4 days for all leafy meat to regrow. They can be made into beefy greens or leafy meatloaf (also veggie burguer but that dish is not as good since they require farming onions).
• Kelp, one trip to the lunar island will get you around 40 in a default world. After putting them all in a small space with a boat, you can pick all of them at the same time with a reaper and collect your loot with a Forager, they can also be hand picked. They grow on winter and can be dried in 2 minutes for a quick sanity bite. They also have veggie value which is precious. Kelp dishes are not that great in my opinion, cali rolls will give you 20 hp, 37.5 hunger and 10 sanity, but it also requires fish. Barnacle niguiri are very nice in terms of value, they give 40 hp, 37.5 hunger and 15 sanity, but the casualty of having sea stacks around your base with rng, then collecting these only at night is too much of a pain in practice to actually make it worth it imo. Kelp is better used as filler for me, and it's a way better filler than berries.

*looks at my base*

yep that checks out, about 20 kelps, a boat of bulbs, 03 bee boxes give me more than enough food to sustain myself indefinitely, add i do like figatoni as a dish because of how efficient it is, although fig is not walter's favorite

[GetNerfedOn]

If farming, potato and tomato are busted  and unless you are enthusiastic about farming the other crops for whatever reason they're all you have to farm especially given they combo with each other.

20 hp, can convert into sanity options or be used as vegetable filler, doesn't stack to 20 or interfere in recipes

Dragonfruit can come close to being as busted but its convenient to grow only in on the later half of the year and its deceptively tricky to tend to in summer especially if you pair it with tomato because that's probably the thirstiest plant combo 

[Swiyss]

2 hours ago, Prinha said:

developer's graveyard pigfarm doesn't require you to do anything besides loading up the area during a full moon. 
Since Wendy can relocate and craft headstones now this farm can be build without the setpiecs and also made much bigger in scale if anyone so desires

I understand where you come from. Still it requires you to have luck with world gen or play a specific character which are not fair parameters. And unless you have a wickerbottom doing full moon cycles every 3 days or moonstorms activated, you're gonna have to wait 20 for this farm to work. 20 pig houses will grant you 40 big meat, which is just 20 honey hams per 20 days on a regular character or 10 bacon and eggs. Unless you make yet another spider farm (which I would feel like would be manual) or save every hound wave scraps. So once you're done with all spiders in the overworld, consequent monster meat is not that abundant, especially in a group.

2 hours ago, Prinha said:

Other than that half and full meats are usually a byproduct of killing bosses. Spring especially with its combination of moose + frograin

yep, I mentioned that and usually those meats go to making pierogi or bacon and eggs for me. Other than that I'll hardly make anything else other than situational rabbit stews, meatballs, meaty stews or surf n turf. But really those are very situational and not very... "farmable" in my opinion. Meat is overrated.

3 hours ago, Gashzer said:

Cooked monster meat or raw regular meat.

Crockpot foods are seriously overrated.

And like sure, people can eat raw honey, cooked monster meat or regular berries, but sometimes the added time you spend making food will 10x real quick. Basically, a whole season of collecting resources and cooking (like spring and autumn) will give you more than 2 full years without needing to constantly take scraps and make things here and there all the time, having to stop what you're doing to make or cook food will add up and you're not gonna have that casualty +30 hp bites or +33 sanity which trust me, will definitely make a difference.

51 minutes ago, GetNerfedOn said:

If farming, potato and tomato are busted  and unless you are enthusiastic about farming the other crops for whatever reason they're all you have to farm especially given they combo with each other.

20 hp, can convert into sanity options or be used as vegetable filler, doesn't stack to 20 or interfere in recipes

Dragonfruit can come close to being as busted but its convenient to grow only in on the later half of the year and its deceptively tricky to tend to in summer especially if you pair it with tomato because that's probably the thirstiest plant combo 

I love farming as well, but sometimes is really annoying to know how useless some crops are. Namely corn, eggplants, melons, pomegranate, durians etc.. Unless you're Wortox or Wurt, those are more useless the  berries because of how much time and preparation they take to grow. I guess you can make a bunch of spicy chilli with those.

I love dragonfruit, I made 160 pies and bundled them for later, I used all of it in around 3 years, for hunger and for health. For sanity I had around 80 puree, 80 veggie stingers and 40 salsa fresca, and it lasted me literally like 1 ruins clear and misery toadstool haha. I like veggies as they're very rewarding, and you can farm 12 plots at the same time for maximum efficiency, it really gets better and better with more knowledge.

If you're wickerbottom, I believe that a 33 sanity food is better than a 15 because of her 250 sanity cap. As Willow (120) I see no real reason to have more than that.

Edited April 5, 2025 by astareus

[Maxil20]

13 hours ago, astareus said:

I'm up for debate for what is the very best food and crockpot dishes in the game. Some think it's honey ham or bacon and eggs, however we need to categorize food in 3 segments. Efficiency, Value and Spoilage.

I think while these are some very good points (spoilage especially, it kinda shocks me how many people omit this, or at least used to), but I think one that's also very important, at least to me, is categorizing options based on How Far Along progression you are.

I think while your choices are good, they seem to focus towards the more midgame parts. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but I do think this shows a bit of distinction of what you think are the best dishes and what I think are the best dishes in the game, as I personally play in the very ender-than-endgame and I judge various dishes by how many full bundles worth of them I can make at a time.

I also personally don't like to restrict farms based on character choice, when possible. While I understand that there's merit to universal character options, I feel like it also inhibits what options Are and Are Not the best, especially when it comes to mob/crop farms. In addition, if you are playing multiplayer, it's exponentially more likely that one player is going to play a character that allows you to pull off X strat, and likely the same if you play a long term solo world and want to use the portal for lategame production.

One more minor tangent is I really don't think the difference between the "short" eating time of .5 seconds and the "long" eating time of 1 second isn't really that impactful all things considered. At worst, you spend ~1 extra second every 2 days to eat some crockpot food to recoup hunger, and a few seconds recouping health in boss fights. I've never really had a scenario where I went "man, I died from (insert cause of death here) when I was using (insert slow eating dish here), and I would have survived with (insert quick eating dish here)!" It's not really going to impact too much, IMO.

I think it's kinda fun to discuss this, so I'll try writing it based on how you listed your options, with my personal points:

Best Ingredients/Fillers
-Honey is easily my most used ingredient/filler/general food item by 2 miles. While slow to setup (I had to work with ~10 beehives in my world at the start, and had to slowly grind the 1-2 honeycomb from BQ before the crown could be deconstructed...), the payoff you get in turn absolutely makes it worth it. I personally rely on the winter harvesting strat, where you make an obscene amount of beeboxes and harvest all of them during winter to avoid aggroing the bees/having them be outside of the hives. My current setup gives me enough honey to rely on it alone for well over 1000 days.

It doubles as an excellent non-meat (and meat, if you go with honey ham) filler choice, to the point I consider it the best in the game, tied with ice. One thing that is great about honey is because the spoilage time is so absurdly long, you are pretty much always going to use ~95% or higher freshness honey when cooking in the crock pot. Compared to using twigs, which don't count toward the spoilage calculations at all, using honey is pretty much always going to positively improve the resulting dishes freshness when it comes out of the pot. I use this heavily for just about every single non meat dish in the game.

-(Monster) Meat is a distant second. The thing about meat is there are so many options to get it, and a good chunk are not even the main thing you want to kill the mob for. For instance, I have a marroter farm I primarily made to grind the 5% bottle chance from, and while I net 2-4 bottles per use, I also net over 40 meat/morsels each. Whenever I kill deerclops/bearger/varg for the triple spark arc cycle, that's 16 meat and 10+ monster meat per year. Those passive hound/worm attacks? Free ~7-20 monster meat! Whenever you farm most "raid" bosses, you get ~4-8 meat as a byproduct of killing the boss. While each individual source isn't a lot, having several sources you consistently farm overtime due to various reasons rapidly adds up the amount of meat you'll have. Thanks to the icker preserve, it's also realistic to build a couple where you expect to farm these bosses/get attacked by wave mobs, and just passively stockpile enough overtime without needing to constantly unbundle/rebundle.

This isn't even taking into consideration about farms where you actually want (monster) meat as the main item. I have a moonstone setup where on a non autumn full moon, I consistently get enough meat to wrap over six bundles worth of meat at once, along with a 20+ varg farm that outputs roughly 6-7+ monster meat bundles daily if needed.

-Stone fruit is also a source I frequently use, though exclusively as veggie filler (which inherently isn't a bad thing). While kelp can accomplish a similar goal and lasts much longer, I personally prefer stone fruit's whole value and the fact that blasting them neatly stacks it for you (Fun fact, Slurtle slime both works for this and is identical to gunpowder in terms of breaking 20 stacks at once!)

-Figs are also pretty nice, especially once you have several trees going at once. The biggest downside to me is harvesting them, as it's impossible to set them in a specific spot, so I planted a ton to brute-force my way to being able to farm stacks of them at a time via either Maxwell or a reaper with winbots. I do wish they had a better fruit value, but given there are not too many fruit dishes that rely on 1 fruit value, let alone many that are super good, I think it's fine.

-Ice is another great ingredient filler, especially since it's the only one you can consistently have at 100% freshness at all times. The only downsides is obtaining several stacks worth for bundles can be a bit time consuming, and you either must be in winter or next to a crystaleyezer to obtain mint 100% freshness ice.

-Bananas are another well known one, there isn't too much to say about these that hasn't already been said. You could say it's kinda Bananas! (I swear I make better jokes than this)

-Honorary mention to farm crops, though I personally exclusively do all my farming as wormwood to bypass the tilling and 80% of the planting animations, along with his blooming perks making tending while planting much quicker, especially since my personal setup relies on farming 7+ bundles of seeds at once and would be painful to do otherwise. For harvesting, I do a reaper + winbot combo to greatly ease the collection process. I do not go for giant crops, as this provides me way more then enough crops for all of my needs.


Best Non-Warly Crockpot Dishes

Before I begin, I cook all of these dishes in a kitchen that is always within range of an ice crystaleyezer and shove items into a second polar bearger bin I have until I have 4 stacks of dishes to wrap, to preserve the freshness as much as possible. I use a 24X crockpot setup as that is essentially the perfect amount to cook 40 second or less dishes with, which works for me as there are very few dishes that take longer than 40 seconds (the only ones being jellybeans at 50, and turkey dinner/mandrake soup at 60).

-You could probably tell from the first 2 ingredients I mentioned alone that my most used dish ATM is Honey Ham. It basically checks all the boxes you want for a "staple" crockpot dish: Easy enough to cook/spam, supplies both of the 2 main stats that decrease (hunger and health), and lasts a good while at 15 days. I have currently been in the process of converting dozens of meat/monster meat and honey bundles into this dish during the summer, and my goal is to make 50 bundles worth, which would set me for ~8K days. Did I mention I like pulling off stuff like this yet?

-Because I use the enlightened crown constantly, I rarely worry about using sanity food as is, but during the times I need to (which is usually after the bearger/deerclops), I have been using Banana Shakes. I typically only down 3 per year: 1 for each phase of bearger, and 1 for crystal deerclops (I kill the normal phase with a BQ crown on). I keep ~7-8 shakes in the bin at a time, as even with their spoilage of 15 days being turned into 300 days, my extreme infrequency of needing to eat them consistently leads to them spoiling if I add any more. Sidenote, shakes do heal 8 health, which isn't a lot, but it's something.

-Jellybeans are another one, though this one's pretty obvious and there isn't much to say since it's pretty undisputed at it's role. At least it's the only dish you can put in an elasticspaced chest so you don't have to rely on bundle storage...?

-Figatoni is another great choice, I personally used to use it a lot myself for ~4-5K days given it's arguably one of the easiest dishes to make. However, one thing that consistently crept up on me was Figatoni's spoilage time of 6 days. Even in the bin, I had several times where it becoming stale crept up on me, especially when using things like Warly's food buffs for various things and getting hunger from those. It wasn't super noticeable outside from that, and being able to take care of all 3 stats with 1 slot has some great merits. I just personally like the more set/forget nature of honey ham, since you need to try really hard to get those to go stale before you eat all of them, even with constantly restocking the stack.

-Any of the farm crop sanity dishes (Salsa Fresca, Creamy Potato Puree, and Vegetable Stinger) Are pretty good all things considered, especially since all of them have easy-enough giant combos (potatoes and toma roots especially), All of them heal 33 sanity, and last 15 days, so it comes down to personal preference of which one you want to get based on what ingredients you want to produce and/or which stats you want to restore. I personally chose Puree as while it can be considered the most "expensive" (requiring 2 potatoes and a garlic), it gives a bonus 20 health and 37.5 hunger, which isn't too bad as a quick stat topper.

-Frozen Banana Daiquiri is also a pretty nice choice. I don't use this dish too much as I much prefer having sanity healing than health healing (as honey hams keep me topped off and I can binge eat those/down a jellybean in an emergency), but the dish is cheap and puts in a lot of work for it's cost in fights where keeping health topped is important, and sanity up is ideal. Also gets some bonus points for being the best all round "goodie" dish.

-For the boring mention, Meaty Stew exists and is still really good if you just want to keep the hunger stat up. It's powerful enough that eating the dish when stale is likely going to give you more bonus hunger than any other meat based dish you could have made at the time. Given that hunger is the only stat that constantly goes down and you can use other dishes to supplement the health/sanity stats, it's an extremely powerful dish, even in the endgame.

I think it's kinda neat to see where things are similar/differ of what I think is good, or what I don't think is too good. I think it's clear play styles can be similar/different simoltaniously, and that's just Neat. Given our similarities in ingredients/dishes it's pretty clear we value similar things (other than meat, I'm personally impressed you really don't like it : P)

Might discuss Warly's dishes later since my bin uses 4 of them (For reference, It's Honey Ham, Banana Shakes, Chili-spiced Volt Goat Chaud Froid, Honey spiced Glow Berry Mousse, Fish Corden Bleu, and Hot Dragon Chili Salad), I just preferred not to since most of his dishes are buff dishes, and you are using those much more for the buffs they provide than any of their stats. Moqueca/Bone Bouillon has some interesting potential, though.

Edited April 5, 2025 by Maxil20

[Guille6785]

jerky gang represent

[HowlVoid]

My favorite is honey ham, honey grows at base and Uber eats charlie brings me monster meat often.

The one meat needed is also accumalated passively from bosses, pigs, beefalo, etc 

The game just constantly throws these ingredients at me while I play the game.

2nd favorite isnt really a dish but to just eat raw monster meat.

[hyoton123]

1 hour ago, Guille6785 said:

jerky gang represent

Hey, I want to change my answer now!

[readkey]

10 hours ago, oregu said:

meaty stew is the only recipe i rly make. it gives 12 hp and 150 hunger. even if it goes stale, it gives a lot of hunger.

The problem of meaty stew is some characters would not wait until their hunger to be 0, namely Wolfgang and Winona, thus rarely benefit from the huge hunger value it provides. Some characters also have less than 150 max hunger so meaty stew is more expensive than usual. 

13 hours ago, astareus said:

Bacon and eggs require 1 additional meat which will grant less hunger value total because the amount of pierogi you can make otherwise with leafy meat will suffice it's 37.5 hunger value,

Bacon and Eggs are best made with morsels and/or monster meat only. Using any Meat reduces its efficiency. It is best used for long travel since it is better to eat pierogi when you are really injured as a healing food. 

[gaymime]

12 minutes ago, readkey said:

The problem of meaty stew is some characters would not wait until their hunger to be 0, namely Wolfgang and Winona, thus rarely benefit from the huge hunger value it provides. Some characters also have less than 150 max hunger so meaty stew is more expensive than usual. 

Bacon and Eggs are best made with morsels and/or monster meat only. Using any Meat reduces its efficiency. It is best used for long travel since it is better to eat pierogi when you are really injured as a healing food. 

100% this. zero out of the three characters i play have a high enough hunger even at 0 to benefit from meaty stew

[Crimson Hollow]

2 hours ago, gaymime said:

100% this. zero out of the three characters i play have a high enough hunger even at 0 to benefit from meaty stew

Same here *nods in walter main

I get how convenient it is to fill up the entire hunger bar w one single dish, and maybe 10 ish wasted hunger is not that bad, but 40? Golly gee thats a shame. And the fact that it requires a meat value of 3 to make... Nope, honey ham and jerky for the win.

Tall scotch eggs too, and by eating the tallbird egg this way your also missing out on Walter's song

Edited April 5, 2025 by Crimson Hollow

[Swiyss]

5 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

I typically only down 3 per year: 1 for each phase of bearger, and 1 for crystal deerclops

oh I usually use the void robe, it completely removes the sanity aura. Feels like killing antlion, I highly recommend.

 

5 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

I think while these are some very good points (spoilage especially, it kinda shocks me how many people omit this, or at least used to), but I think one that's also very important, at least to me, is categorizing options based on How Far Along progression you are.

I think while your choices are good, they seem to focus towards the more midgame parts. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but I do think this shows a bit of distinction of what you think are the best dishes and what I think are the best dishes in the game, as I personally play in the very ender-than-endgame and I judge various dishes by how many full bundles worth of them I can make at a time.

I also personally don't like to restrict farms based on character choice, when possible. While I understand that there's merit to universal character options, I feel like it also inhibits what options Are and Are Not the best, especially when it comes to mob/crop farms. In addition, if you are playing multiplayer, it's exponentially more likely that one player is going to play a character that allows you to pull off X strat, and likely the same if you play a long term solo world and want to use the portal for lategame production.

One more minor tangent is I really don't think the difference between the "short" eating time of .5 seconds and the "long" eating time of 1 second isn't really that impactful all things considered. At worst, you spend ~1 extra second every 2 days to eat some crockpot food to recoup hunger, and a few seconds recouping health in boss fights. I've never really had a scenario where I went "man, I died from (insert cause of death here) when I was using (insert slow eating dish here), and I would have survived with (insert quick eating dish here)!" It's not really going to impact too much, IMO.

I think it's kinda fun to discuss this, so I'll try writing it based on how you listed your options, with my personal points:

Best Ingredients/Fillers
-Honey is easily my most used ingredient/filler/general food item by 2 miles. While slow to setup (I had to work with ~10 beehives in my world at the start, and had to slowly grind the 1-2 honeycomb from BQ before the crown could be deconstructed...), the payoff you get in turn absolutely makes it worth it. I personally rely on the winter harvesting strat, where you make an obscene amount of beeboxes and harvest all of them during winter to avoid aggroing the bees/having them be outside of the hives. My current setup gives me enough honey to rely on it alone for well over 1000 days.

It doubles as an excellent non-meat (and meat, if you go with honey ham) filler choice, to the point I consider it the best in the game, tied with ice. One thing that is great about honey is because the spoilage time is so absurdly long, you are pretty much always going to use ~95% or higher freshness honey when cooking in the crock pot. Compared to using twigs, which don't count toward the spoilage calculations at all, using honey is pretty much always going to positively improve the resulting dishes freshness when it comes out of the pot. I use this heavily for just about every single non meat dish in the game.

-(Monster) Meat is a distant second. The thing about meat is there are so many options to get it, and a good chunk are not even the main thing you want to kill the mob for. For instance, I have a marroter farm I primarily made to grind the 5% bottle chance from, and while I net 2-4 bottles per use, I also net over 40 meat/morsels each. Whenever I kill deerclops/bearger/varg for the triple spark arc cycle, that's 16 meat and 10+ monster meat per year. Those passive hound/worm attacks? Free ~7-20 monster meat! Whenever you farm most "raid" bosses, you get ~4-8 meat as a byproduct of killing the boss. While each individual source isn't a lot, having several sources you consistently farm overtime due to various reasons rapidly adds up the amount of meat you'll have. Thanks to the icker preserve, it's also realistic to build a couple where you expect to farm these bosses/get attacked by wave mobs, and just passively stockpile enough overtime without needing to constantly unbundle/rebundle.

This isn't even taking into consideration about farms where you actually want (monster) meat as the main item. I have a moonstone setup where on a non autumn full moon, I consistently get enough meat to wrap over six bundles worth of meat at once, along with a 20+ varg farm that outputs roughly 6-7+ monster meat bundles daily if needed.

-Stone fruit is also a source I frequently use, though exclusively as veggie filler (which inherently isn't a bad thing). While kelp can accomplish a similar goal and lasts much longer, I personally prefer stone fruit's whole value and the fact that blasting them neatly stacks it for you (Fun fact, Slurtle slime both works for this and is identical to gunpowder in terms of breaking 20 stacks at once!)

-Figs are also pretty nice, especially once you have several trees going at once. The biggest downside to me is harvesting them, as it's impossible to set them in a specific spot, so I planted a ton to brute-force my way to being able to farm stacks of them at a time via either Maxwell or a reaper with winbots. I do wish they had a better fruit value, but given there are not too many fruit dishes that rely on 1 fruit value, let alone many that are super good, I think it's fine.

-Ice is another great ingredient filler, especially since it's the only one you can consistently have at 100% freshness at all times. The only downsides is obtaining several stacks worth for bundles can be a bit time consuming, and you either must be in winter or next to a crystaleyezer to obtain mint 100% freshness ice.

-Bananas are another well known one, there isn't too much to say about these that hasn't already been said. You could say it's kinda Bananas! (I swear I make better jokes than this)

-Honorary mention to farm crops, though I personally exclusively do all my farming as wormwood to bypass the tilling and 80% of the planting animations, along with his blooming perks making tending while planting much quicker, especially since my personal setup relies on farming 7+ bundles of seeds at once and would be painful to do otherwise. For harvesting, I do a reaper + winbot combo to greatly ease the collection process. I do not go for giant crops, as this provides me way more then enough crops for all of my needs.


Best Non-Warly Crockpot Dishes

Before I begin, I cook all of these dishes in a kitchen that is always within range of an ice crystaleyezer and shove items into a second polar bearger bin I have until I have 4 stacks of dishes to wrap, to preserve the freshness as much as possible. I use a 24X crockpot setup as that is essentially the perfect amount to cook 40 second or less dishes with, which works for me as there are very few dishes that take longer than 40 seconds (the only ones being jellybeans at 50, and turkey dinner/mandrake soup at 60).

-You could probably tell from the first 2 ingredients I mentioned alone that my most used dish ATM is Honey Ham. It basically checks all the boxes you want for a "staple" crockpot dish: Easy enough to cook/spam, supplies both of the 2 main stats that decrease (hunger and health), and lasts a good while at 15 days. I have currently been in the process of converting dozens of meat/monster meat and honey bundles into this dish during the summer, and my goal is to make 50 bundles worth, which would set me for ~8K days. Did I mention I like pulling off stuff like this yet?

-Because I use the enlightened crown constantly, I rarely worry about using sanity food as is, but during the times I need to (which is usually after the bearger/deerclops), I have been using Banana Shakes. I typically only down 3 per year: 1 for each phase of bearger, and 1 for crystal deerclops (I kill the normal phase with a BQ crown on). I keep ~7-8 shakes in the bin at a time, as even with their spoilage of 15 days being turned into 300 days, my extreme infrequency of needing to eat them consistently leads to them spoiling if I add any more. Sidenote, shakes do heal 8 health, which isn't a lot, but it's something.

-Jellybeans are another one, though this one's pretty obvious and there isn't much to say since it's pretty undisputed at it's role. At least it's the only dish you can put in an elasticspaced chest so you don't have to rely on bundle storage...?

-Figatoni is another great choice, I personally used to use it a lot myself for ~4-5K days given it's arguably one of the easiest dishes to make. However, one thing that consistently crept up on me was Figatoni's spoilage time of 6 days. Even in the bin, I had several times where it becoming stale crept up on me, especially when using things like Warly's food buffs for various things and getting hunger from those. It wasn't super noticeable outside from that, and being able to take care of all 3 stats with 1 slot has some great merits. I just personally like the more set/forget nature of honey ham, since you need to try really hard to get those to go stale before you eat all of them, even with constantly restocking the stack.

-Any of the farm crop sanity dishes (Salsa Fresca, Creamy Potato Puree, and Vegetable Stinger) Are pretty good all things considered, especially since all of them have easy-enough giant combos (potatoes and toma roots especially), All of them heal 33 sanity, and last 15 days, so it comes down to personal preference of which one you want to get based on what ingredients you want to produce and/or which stats you want to restore. I personally chose Puree as while it can be considered the most "expensive" (requiring 2 potatoes and a garlic), it gives a bonus 20 health and 37.5 hunger, which isn't too bad as a quick stat topper.

-Frozen Banana Daiquiri is also a pretty nice choice. I don't use this dish too much as I much prefer having sanity healing than health healing (as honey hams keep me topped off and I can binge eat those/down a jellybean in an emergency), but the dish is cheap and puts in a lot of work for it's cost in fights where keeping health topped is important, and sanity up is ideal. Also gets some bonus points for being the best all round "goodie" dish.

-For the boring mention, Meaty Stew exists and is still really good if you just want to keep the hunger stat up. It's powerful enough that eating the dish when stale is likely going to give you more bonus hunger than any other meat based dish you could have made at the time. Given that hunger is the only stat that constantly goes down and you can use other dishes to supplement the health/sanity stats, it's an extremely powerful dish, even in the endgame.

I think it's kinda neat to see where things are similar/differ of what I think is good, or what I don't think is too good. I think it's clear play styles can be similar/different simoltaniously, and that's just Neat. Given our similarities in ingredients/dishes it's pretty clear we value similar things (other than meat, I'm personally impressed you really don't like it : P)

Might discuss Warly's dishes later since my bin uses 4 of them (For reference, It's Honey Ham, Banana Shakes, Chili-spiced Volt Goat Chaud Froid, Honey spiced Glow Berry Mousse, Fish Corden Bleu, and Hot Dragon Chili Salad), I just preferred not to since most of his dishes are buff dishes, and you are using those much more for the buffs they provide than any of their stats. Moqueca/Bone Bouillon has some interesting potential, though.

I find interesting you mentioned figatoni spoilage time, it really can mess you up if you really really want to, I never got it under 80% tho since it's 56.3 hunger so you're eating it more often than honey ham. And while you don't consider the faster animation better, I just got nothing to say really. I believe it's something very impactful. Being able to eat 3 dishes in 1 second is kinda insane, that's like 90 hp in 1 second for daiquiri and figatoni. Honey ham is great, I do that dish as well very consistently, is just that I prefer to "farm" for these other veggie ones since it's easier to maintain a big amount of them, especially in multiplayer since it's easier to feed everyone by having 1 guy collect bananas, figs, stone fruits and leafy meat and cooking with them. And if we cheat here a bit and do consider Warly as an option, then honey ham is just insanely better since I can have Winona's catapult farms of merms, pigs, tallbirds etc.. for a lot of meat, still tho I could consider more of a mix between dishes really since wigfrid and wurt can both eat daiquiri. I would also consider then Moqueca because of wickerbottoms fish farms.

In my longest world on wormwood, I was constantly doing bacon and eggs with the biggest collection of lureplants on boats you would probably ever see, and using honey to make jelly salad with the leafy meat instead was proving to be a way better option for me especially because wormwood has a lot of sanity (200), but I was playing solo. I guess the "meta" and the best dishes will always be the best ones you can make at that time, and for me, I can't really not consider how easy it is to get a mass of bananas, stone fruits and kelp. Figs on the other hand are really just a personal preference on my worlds since I will pretty consistently (every 2.5 days) have more than 80 figs in 1 trip around my base, so this one kind of IS an end game biase as well.

But thanks for commenting mate! I really love when people share their ideas like you did there and I loved reading all of it. And don't be scared to pull off dad jokes, they're the best ones.

13 minutes ago, Crimson Hollow said:

Same here *nods in walter main

I get how convenient it is to fill up the entire hunger bar w one single dish, and maybe 10 ish wasted hunger is not that bad, but 40? Golly gee thats a shame. And the fact that it requires a meat value of 3 to make... Nope, honey ham and jerky for the win.

Tall scotch eggs too, and by eating the tallbird egg this way your also missing out on Walter's song

I recommend you try trail mix for him then. You can get as many birch nuts as you can possibly plant from bearger, and it gives us a purpose to farm berries. And with a big enough berry farm, you can pretty consistently one shot turkeys with his slingshot and do turkey dinner instead of honey ham and can be prepared really early game. You can also do that butterfly farm @Walrusst mentioned and stock on flutter strips with your slingshot while you collect berries.

[Crimson Hollow]

9 minutes ago, astareus said:

recommend you try trail mix for him then. You can get as many birch nuts as you can possibly plant from bearger, and it gives us a purpose to farm berries.

this is actually my go-to healing food, even better than pierogi in my book.

It's a decent hunger food as well.