Meat Gathering tips?

[Rosten]

So, i've been working on a few worlds lately, and each of them i always end up dieng because i have to constantly scavenge for food and am never able to prepare for anything else, so whenever it rolls around to hound attacks and winter, im completely unprepared, what i'd like to know is how can i consistently gather meat to feed my character for 3-4 days in one day, so i can spend the rest of those days preparing for winter/ making my base etc.

 

 

 

-Edit : Reduced whiny-ness by 52%

[negaman]

I don't recommend relying on meat. instead, try to get some farms set up and a ice box or two, then use manure to get as many fruits and veg as you can. (berries and carrots are good to if you have extra.) and set up some crock pots for when you do get meat so you can make meaty stew and meat balls.

[gnarlytreeman]

great edit! there are a few methods, and a lot of people look down on them as "noob" but w/e, survival has to happen before you worry about that.

 

trap rabbits, and put them in a few chests, keeping them from spoiling.

then make drying racks, at least 10.

 

go dig berry bushes and replant and fertilize them, or base close to a pre-made berry patch.

 

lastly if you have a logsuit and spear go hunt the koalaphant, it yields 8 meat and a trunk which when cooked yields good health and hunger points. (drying racks are for koalaphant meat to make jerky for easy heals) this is not bad to setup before 1st winter, as farms have gotten harder to do w/o force feeding pigs.

[Grumpy]

First of all, are you using crock pots?  They make the food you eat more filling so you ultimately need less of it.  There are a few basic recipes you should learn but meatballs are the easiest and are more filling that most.

 

Set up camp near rabbit holes and set a trap on each hole.  You can go off and do other things all day and when you come back you'll have a rabbit in each trap.  This is by far the easiest meat source early in the game and it produces year-round.  You can store live rabbits in chests and they'll never spoil so it's an easy way to stock up for Winter when there's less veggies.

 

Likewise you can lay out some bird traps though they're a little less consistent than rabbit traps.

 

If you really want life to be easy, hunt Koalefants.  They drop 8 full meats and the trunk is useful for making Winter clothes.  It can also be cooked and eaten once you have enough clothes.

 

Hunt spiders.  Draw them out one or two at a time and take them out.  Draw them far enough out that the remaining spiders in the den won't notice and attack you.  Leave the den unless it's a tier three and then take it out too.  A tier one den will have five spiders so you'll probably get two or three monster meats from a single harvest.  Monster meat can be safely used in crock pot recipes one at a time.  Use more than one and you get Monster Lasagne which will hurt you.

[Rosten]

great edit! there are a few methods, and a lot of people look down on them as "noob" but w/e, survival has to happen before you worry about that.

 

trap rabbits, and put them in a few chests, keeping them from spoiling.

then make drying racks, at least 10.

 

go dig berry bushes and replant and fertilize them, or base close to a pre-made berry patch.

 

lastly if you have a logsuit and spear go hunt the koalaphant, it yields 8 meat and a trunk which when cooked yields good health and hunger points. (drying racks are for koalaphant meat to make jerky for easy heals) this is not bad to setup before 1st winter, as farms have gotten harder to do w/o force feeding pigs.

Thanks, 

Yknow, i never thought about the keeping trapped rabbits, i may have thought about it around the time i learned about krampus, but then i was so terrified of invoking him i tried to keep my animal-murdering to a minimum, i guess the idea just died with the fear :/

 

One of my biggest problems about digging up stuff and replanting it is because i can never get a steady stream of manure, between farms and fertilizer i rarely have any to spare,

 

Hunting the koalephant sounds nice, especially because of the 8 meat which could (with monstermeat and morsels) total up to around 4 meaty stews, or more honeyed hams

[HoneyHam]

HOOOOONEEH HAAAAAAAAMZ

Just go butcher some beefalo and set up some bee boxes.

[gnarlytreeman]

btw farms are harder to setup cause you have to have the beefalo onscreen for them to produce manure now, otherwise i would have recommended setting up farms, but at this point thats too time consuming to do by day 20 now. unless you setup base near the pig king which is usually far far away from a lot of other good resources. wait to setup your farm until after you get the rabbit traps, and berry patch setup, otherwise you'll be a hair too scarce on food.

 

btw rabbit + berries = meatballs in a crock pot

 

and after you get a few pig houses berries = tons of force fed manure.

[DeadpanQuinkan]

Ultimately meatballs are just about the simplest, cheapest, and most efficient food to make, given early game.  Almost any combination between 1 of any type of meat and 3 berries and/or veggies.

[gnarlytreeman]

also jerky as well for the easiest to achieve most stable form of healing.

[the truthseeker]

Pretty much what was said above. Remember, manure is not as dropped as it used to be from beefalo, so if you need it for farm creation, pigs fed flowers are great! 

 

I'll just recap basic management and add stuff here for meat management also:

Edit: Spoilered reply due to length. 

• • When you start, gather as many resources as possible, especially: Grass, twigs/saplings, flint, berries and try to save the naturally growing carrots for the winter.  If you have to use them for emergencies before then, that's when you pick them.  Due to the required traps and drying racks (see below) having a ready three stacks of grass and two stacks of twigs minimum is a good start when you are ready to lay you meat factory groundwork. 
  • Chop enough wood to make fires, but also use torches to explore at night. This helps you explore more before winter starts. Make a campfire to cook your gathered food (around 5-6 cooked berries) and you can eat gathered cooked seeds to help too. Then switch to the torch and explore the rest of the night. remember, night is 2 segments for the first four days and four days before winter (which on the first winter is day 18.) You may need to make sure you can make more than one torch on those days sometimes.  
  • If you don't find all the resources you want to make a basic base, make a science machine, pre-build the structures you can and/or the items, make a hammer, and smash the science machine. This is also true if you have all the resources but not the location. If this is the case, don't make any (non-structure) items that you can't take with you or you don't mind leaving behind (so you don't need a machine to prototype one.) 
  • Sanity management an issue and don't have a base yet? Try delaying in prototyping items until you can get some sanity back. (Hold off on the pickax until you discover rocks for example.) Or (following the previous tip) if making items for later, wait until your sanity is down before starting. of course, you can always pick flowers, make a garland and/or eat cooked green and blue mushrooms.  
  • Once you find a place to put a base (a cleared out area near Beefalo, pigs and/or bunnies is great, especially if there are grasslands nearby, or you make a base in grasslands with the pigs/savanna nearby;) to help manage a constant berry/twig/grass replenishment. Some alternate/expert people also make their homes in the Marshes or swamp-lands. This is not simple, but it takes care of your meat constantly. The link has more details.  What is not nearby (and is not animal) transplant with a shovel. Remember, grass and berry bushes must have one manure used after transplanted to regrow them (and transplanted plants do not grow in winter after harvested.) 
  • Okay, you have a base? Make a crock pot ASAP! Combining foods gives you both better hunger  filling as well as heals you and (sometimes) even restores sanity (or should I say more than 5 sanity.) Try and experiment for what you can do, but if you absolutely need help, a full recipe guide is here. The Honey ham (2 meat, 1 honey and 1 filler not twigs) is the most popular and highly effective for most characters. (Upgradable characters like Wolfgang and WX-78 after consuming 5 or more gears may do better with the meaty stew (3 meat no twigs) if purely filling up hunger from a low amount.) Until you get some of the higher meat totals (1.5 to 2) meatballs will be your likely base food. Don't use more than one morsel (or 1/2 meat) until you can make better things.) 
  • Start placing your (ground) traps! You did place a base near rabbits, why? This is an excellent starting meat gathering item until you can successfully gather (non morsel) meat (from pigs/tallbirds/beefalo (all types of) pigs and [the grand prize of meat] the Koalaphant.) It's been debated whether to place one trap per hole with multiple holes or multiple traps at one hole (far enough away not to trigger each other when one is sprung)  with a few holes only needed farmed. What's important is to get multiple meats. Also, if you need help fighting frogs and spiders, these traps work on them too with no combat needed!
  • While some worry about killing innocent creatures like rabbits for summoning Krampus, it takes a MINIMUM of slaughtering 31-50 of them (in rapid succession) before he is even summoned. Not killing that many or waiting between gathering/killing will resolve that. Even if this number is updated for lesser amounts, you can easily slaughter 12 rabbits or two to three Pigs/Beefalo without summoning him. Conversely, make a chest just to gather rabbits which never spoil and can be killed quickly if you wish to hunt him and/or kill Beefalo and pigs to quickly summon him. 
  • Found frogs? Go fish! The ponds can be fished for another food--fish. While not classified as a " regular meat" like the other things in game, it can be cooked to last longer (as well as frog's legs) or (not cooked and) dried on the rack for small jerky. Both of them make crock pot recipes and those dishes heal a nice starting amount too! If you still can't fish in safety when frogs are around, you can fish at dusk or go to swamps and fish in the (black) ponds during the day.  
  • Make sure you get drying racks! Meat spoils after after 6 days and 10 if cooked. This doesn't even count between that when it goes stale and is spoiling (yellow and red graphics.) By drying your meat/morsels, they become jerky and last twenty days! Make as many as you can ASAP, let alone before winter (a suggested minimum of four, but the maximum is whatever you can store without harvesting since unharvested crock pot and drying rack food does not spoil!) The catch with drying racks is each one costs three rope (which is 9 grass total) 2 charcoal and three twigs each. 
  • Need help with all those ingredients? Build farms! If staying around base a lot, improved farms grow faster and need less "regeneration" manure/rot/guano to refresh them after a certain number of harvests. if exploring a lot and just popping back into base, simple farms are cheaper but grow slower and require more "regeneration" after a certain number of harvests. Both of these require manure to build. The easiest way is to follow beefalo and get manure, but it's a lot slower in their drop rate. The faster way is to gather a bunch of petals and find/feed them to pigs, especially a village (which may have both.) Certain food is considered "filler" and some food is considered "primary" This is the difference between say dragon fruit/pumpkins and carrots/corn if you will. Rarer food can be harvested with specialty seeds and specifically always  grown (and not randomly grown like generic seeds.) How?
  • Make a birdcage (with a bird in it!) Not only can they eat meats (and cooked monster meats) for eggs, renew spoiling meat/eggs for new eggs (and fed to the pig king for gold if you ever need to,) they can make specialty seeds! Just feed it a harvested crop and it may give you that crop's specialty seeds. or it may just give you regular seeds. it's recommended to grow multiple crops of that type to feed one(or more) to the bird and keep the remaining to yourself for cooking/consumption. This really works well if you like keeping a lot of (unharvested) Dragonfruit/Pumpkins (especially for the pie and cookies respectively.) 
  • Build bee boxes! I'd recommend at LEAST two to three of them, and long before winter. This way you can gather and store a lot of honey which spoils very slowly, make great food recipes (honey ham, pumpkin cookies, taffy, or just eat the honey) and make the honey healing poultice. Bees do not produce during the winter so gather early and often! 
  • Learn what dishes spoil slower when exploring! For instance, the (before-mentioned) jerky, and bacon and eggs last 20 days and honey 40 before spoiling, and are excellent for both explorations as well as winter stockpiling. 
  • Make an ice box (if you find gears in time!) This DOUBLES your food duration as well as has a place to store food when not carried without it spoiling faster. Gears can be dug in in graves, found in the Clockwork biome or found in the caves' ruins (not recommended when just starting on the game's first season.) 
  • Horde food, but only when it's about to start winter! Mass producing at this time means food lasts 1.5 times longer in winter (and 2x longer on top of that if kept in an ice box.)
  • Finally, leave a bunch of food unharvested on the farms/crock pot/drying racks for emergencies. Of course, having multiple structures of these makes this possible if you need to use one or more actively during winter. 

   

That out to do it. If still starving at winter, let us know!

[gnarlytreeman]

WHOA THAT WAS A MASSIVE WALL OF TEXT!

 

BTW i thought the pig fed flowers was from a mod, i havn't tried in a long time for multiple reasons(i like butterflies), but i thought that was disabled a few months ago.

[the truthseeker]

Nope, you could always feed them flowers, but nobody did so when they just got it from Beefalo.

 

Now, based on the "I don't want to follow the Beefalo around for potentially days for a stack of manure" rate change, I now can gather a bunch of petals, drop them and come back for pig manure...or just feed it to them quicker if I'm picking that flower diamond at a pig village. 

 

BTW i thought the pig fed flowers was from a mod, i havn't tried in a long time for multiple reasons(i like butterflies), but i thought that was disabled a few months ago.

[TeoSS69]

I don't recommend relying on meat. instead, try to get some farms set up and a ice box or two, then use manure to get as many fruits and veg as you can. (berries and carrots are good to if you have extra.) and set up some crock pots for when you do get meat so you can make meaty stew and meat balls.

Why advise a noob the hard method when he's having trouble with the easy one?

 

Pretty much what was said above. Remember, manure is not as dropped as it used to be from beefalo, so if you need it for farm creation, pigs fed flowers are great! 

 

I'll just recap basic management and add stuff here for meat management also:

That out to do it. If still starving at winter, let us know!

I never liked how you reply to things. Someone asks for the time and you explain how a watch works. 

The beauty of don't starve is discovering things for yourself, so just nudge them into the right direction instead of spoon feeding them the whole thing. At least that's how I view it.

@Blazingice26 the important thing about your issue in that long post is :

"Learn what dishes spoil slower when exploring! For instance, the (before-mentioned) jerky, and bacon and eggs last 20 days and honey 40 before spoiling, and are excellent for both explorations as well as winter stockpiling."

Bacon and Eggs requires two eggs and 1.5 meat. So the most efficient way to make it is : 2 Eggs, 1 Monster Meat and 1 Morsel. Keep in mind that Tallbird eggs count as 4 normal eggs and this recipe can accept Twigs as filler.

That said, dishes will only be beneffitial for half their spoiling time; while they're in the green zone. So Bacon&Eggs last for 20 days, which means you should only make 10 of those to take with you.

As for Meat gathering  your best bet are Koalefants. Keep a boomerang handy to aggro them and only hunt them in big deserted areas like Savanna or Rocky turf, so you can spot the tracks easily. You can also kill Beefalo later on when you have too many in your herd.

[Cynical Cynicist]

The first thing you need to ask yourself is whether or not you specifically need meat, or another form of sustenance. Food comes in plenty of forms out there, so you should choose what suits you best. I'd start with farming, because it provides a consistent supply and it's easy to manage.

[TeoSS69]

 and it's easy to manage.

What you need to get meat : A weapon and some traps.

What you need for farms : Multiple Farms, Lots of manure, Birdcage, Summer.

[Cynical Cynicist]

What you need to get meat : A weapon and some traps.

What you need for farms : Multiple Farms, Lots of manure, Birdcage, Summer.

 

He complained about having to "constantly scavenge around for food," so I thought it was one of the best solutions. Besides, it's possible to have at least 3 advanced farms, a birdcage and some leftover manure before winter. It might be difficult to survive solely on a vegetarian diet for the first winter, but it compliments meat well. Tending or expanding the farm won't be an issue after the initial construction.

 

Also, if you're having trouble surviving even on the first summer, remember that berries and carrots should be enough to keep you going. Concentrate on getting long-term sources of food up and running by then.

[TeoSS69]

He complained about having to "constantly scavenge around for food," so I thought it was one of the best solutions. Besides, it's possible to have at least 3 advanced farms, a birdcage and some leftover manure before winter. It might be difficult to survive solely on a vegetarian diet for the first winter, but it compliments meat well. Tending or expanding the farm won't be an issue after the initial construction.

Well farms need constant tending too, especially if you want them to hold for winter too, so I don't see how that's an improvement.

[Nyx_Overkill]

great edit! there are a few methods, and a lot of people look down on them as "noob" but w/e, survival has to happen before you worry about that.

 

trap rabbits, and put them in a few chests, keeping them from spoiling.

then make drying racks, at least 10.

 

go dig berry bushes and replant and fertilize them, or base close to a pre-made berry patch.

 

lastly if you have a logsuit and spear go hunt the koalaphant, it yields 8 meat and a trunk which when cooked yields good health and hunger points. (drying racks are for koalaphant meat to make jerky for easy heals) this is not bad to setup before 1st winter, as farms have gotten harder to do w/o force feeding pigs.

All of the above.i ll suggest about 20 so when u go rabbit harvest u have a lot of meat at once.also fridge is very important but u need to fight 1 clockwork to take the gear to make it.also later when hounds comes more ofter and more at each wave u end up give 7-10 montster meat.thats a good resource when u set up ur tooth traps.

everything cook it with crock pots.best recipes for me is meatballs(easy recipe),honeyham,meaty stew and eggs with bacon the best for me to pick,keeps longer till spoile and has good stats.

another good idea is to keep honey for winter.its difficult to spoil and with 2xhoney + meat + anymeat makes honey ham.

the best animal to hunt is koelephant.gives a looot of meat.

 

[Cynical Cynicist]

Well farms need constant tending too, especially if you want them to hold for winter too, so I don't see how that's an improvement.

 

Harvest, feed bird and get seeds, plant, fertilize when necessary. Rinse and repeat. It's an improvement in the sense that without any other means, it's more reliable than hoping to find some Koalefant tracks in time, or engaging in combat (if that's somehow remotely challenging). I would not rely this heavily on farms, either, but this guy seems to be having a curiously large amount of trouble with food.

[TeoSS69]

Harvest, feed bird and get seeds, plant, fertilize when necessary. Rinse and repeat. It's an improvement in the sense that without any other means, it's more reliable than hoping to find some Koalefant tracks in time, or engaging in combat (if that's somehow remotely challenging). I would not rely this heavily on farms, either, but this guy seems to be having a curiously large amount of trouble with food.

So, emergency food. Now I get you... And he just hasn't discovered the OP-ness of honey yet.

[gnarlytreeman]

honey is good, but bees cause fps drops on a lot of laptops, so beware of that tactic if you play on a lappy, or base them 2 screens away so you only suffer the fps drops for a short while when harvesting. i personally don't use bees for this reason. just a personal play style choice. 

 

 

@ the truthseeker : yeah i knew that the petals did make poop, but for some reason my memory seems to be off, i seem to remember an update that removed that for a while sometime around "launch". although the site search doesn't pull anything up, may have been part of one of the optional betas... not sure. for some reason i'm remembering tehmugwump having a mod to re-enable that function. but maybe i'm just brain farting here.

[Cynical Cynicist]

So, emergency food. Now I get you... And he just hasn't discovered the OP-ness of honey yet.

 

Let the youth enjoy their innocence and vulnerability, before they are corrupted at the hands of sweet, sticky deliciousness...

 

Also, @gnarlytreeman, I play on an ultrabook but don't really have those issues with lots of bees. I prefer a high concentration of bee boxes, because the consequently large bee population makes it look more alive.

[Nyx_Overkill]

So, emergency food. Now I get you... And he just hasn't discovered the OP-ness of honey yet.

This. xD

And also dig n' make a big berry bush farm.For me its better than farms that requires a lot of materials to built em and make seeds and plant em.

[TeoSS69]

And also dig n' make a big berry bush farm.

Those give Turkey Dinners too.

[Norman1346]

Lots of people have answered the question by pointing out that meat is not the best option.

 

Probably fair.

 

In the medium to late game meat can be used just ask this person asks though, gathered on one day to feed for four days.

 

Near my base I usually establish a tooth trap pit for hounds, some pig houses, and some spider dens a little way off. Every 4th evening I kill spiders until I have 20 monster meat. Then the next morning I feed 4 monster meat to 4 pigs each in turn and pull them over the tooth trap pit. Each dead were-pig yields two meat and one pig skin.

 

Then the 8, meats and 4 left over monster meats can be made into 4 meaty stews with the addition of only 4 morals from rabbit traps around my camp. 4 meaty stews will feed you for 4 days.

 

That leaves 3 days when you are fed and can focus on other things for less than one day of work.