How do I expand with limited food?

[Victor]

So I'm on day 30 and in an awkward phase where I want to explore but can't due to food. Here's my map:

http://i.imgur.com/aUnGn.jpg

The only reliable source of food I have are bunnies at the very bottom of the map (where I started). I have tried exploring, but it's never too productive because I'm always short on food.

How do you go about exploring far away from your base? Should I just save up like 80 pieces of rabbit morsels and head out?

[A Bad Feeling]

Hello Victor. Welcome to the forums.

There's quite a lot of reliable food sources in Don't Starve at the moment. You can always build farms and plant vegetables, plant berry bushes near your encampment, kill Pigmen for meat, steal a Tallbird's Egg, slaughter rabbits, frogs and birds, fish on ponds and so on.

You can stack one food source in a slot and carry with you in your journey. Oh, and of course, remember to always cook your food

[Marak]

Personally, I'd strongly recommend getting some farms going.

First, consider either moving your base, or making a secondary one. You want to hang out by the biggest Beefalo herd you have found. Take a couple of days to scoop up as much poop as you can, and then be sure you have a stack of Rocks, as well.

Now, build 2-4 Turbo Farms in a convenient location (making them near the Beefalo will make it easier to keep them manured), and start planting Seeds. In a Turbo Plot, you get a crop every 16 in-game hours (or close to that), so with four farms, you can easily make 1-2 Crock Pot foods per day with fruit, veggies, and your existing stores of Morsels.

If you don't have a Crock Pot yet, make that your next priority after getting your farms up and running. Experiment with recipes, but even something basic like 2 veggies + 2 morsels will yield some food that can restore 40 or 50 Hunger (enough for an entire day, really) and that you can make several of. Making a Chest or two to store ingredients and cooked meals isn't a bad idea, either.

There are other methods you can use, but Farms will give you widest variety of options. If Farms seem like too much work/trouble, a simpler method would be to use a Shovel to dig up about 16 Berry Bushes and then re-plant them next to your Fire Pit. Get some Manure to revive them, and you'll be able to live off of Cooked Berries for a long, long time. Just watch out for Gobblers.

[RadekBonk4ever]

Is that.... a tallbird nest in the middle of the bridges ?

OT: I find that if you intend on relocating due to lack of ressources you usually don't need to bring too much with you. A full stack of berries and a honey ham or two will probably last around a week or so. Remember that even though you are moving, you are still a very capable hunter... and berries don't run very fast.

[Syd]

How are you catching the rabbits you've been eating? If you've been using traps, I suggest you try killing them with an axe/spear/etc instead by intercepting them when they try to run back to their burrows (like this thread shows). I find that it's a lot quicker. If you manage to build up stack of food before you set out, and supplement it with berries you find while you're out adventuring, you'll be set for a while.

[sirmentlegen]

one of the best ways to get food is to chase birds around i can get around 20 seeds per day.

[Solnaga]

An additional source of food for hunger is uncooked monster meat. It provides a nice chunk of satiety while damaging your health for ~8. Unless it's changed do not eat cooked meat since it provides only slightly more satiety but hurts your health a lot more.

[Defer48]

Eh.... I wouldn't really eat monster meat...... Just dig up some berries and make sure to give them manure and take care of them and you will do just fine!

[Solnaga]

Well if you're ever struggling with food supplies it's definitely a great idea. Once you've changed the game from Don't Starve to Don't Choke, then yes, I wouldn't be eating monster meat either.

[sirmentlegen]

the easyest food to get is berries seeds and rabbits.

[winddbourne]

Monster meat isn't bad once you have the crock pot, assuming your going the hunter path with a log suit, a football helmet, and a spear. Four monster meat makes a very tasty meal and doesn't hurt your health at all.

Spider nests are a great source for both monster meat and spider silk. When you poke the nest they generally come out four or five at a time. Dogs are also a great resource when they spawn, and you can track them down by listening for their barks and this also prevents them from littering the screen in larger, more dangerous, packs.

Another good hunting spot is a pig village. Attack lone pigs at away from the village center and kill them quickly holding down the space bar to auto attack then go onto the next pig who will be charging you fast, they seldom go far enough away for you to get JUST one. Normally I take out pigs three at a time. If you get enough pig skins to make pig houses as well as football helmets do NOT place the new house on a bridge as there currently is a bug where pigs spawn in the water and then can not go back onto the land. Items they drop when you kill them also land in the water and you can't pick them up.

Bird traps around your camp also tend to be fairly prolific IF your not farming. Just leave a few seeds laying around on a bridge and the birds will come to eat them, they also will drop more seeds so it's fairly self sustaining. The bird traps give you ten birds to a trap and they also provide you with feathers as well as the morsels you get for killing rabbits.

Speaking of rabbits never dig up their holes. If you leave them be and mix up your hunting strategies you allow the different creatures time to respawn and/or build back up. This game seems to have a very environmentalist bent to it and you get rewarded as a hunter/gatherer for NOT digging up berry bushes and for not hunting everything in sight until it's extinct.

Also there are some things that currently don't respawn so you want to try not to kill them. These are the beefolo and the tallbirds. If you kill them eventually there will be none left and both spawn other resources, namely poop in case you get bored and want to try your hand at farming, and tallbird eggs which restore a lot of health should you be sneaky enough to snatch one. So far this game I've avoided farming at all costs as I like to wander around exploring, trying new things, and knowing that I've survived without "turtling". I'm around day 50 right now, which is small change compared to some people who are around day 300, but . . . so far it works.

[RadekBonk4ever]

You can get poop from feeding pigs with flower petals or seeds.

[Raveneye]

Seems like you got a lot of buses you replanted nearby, are they fertilized? You need manure if you replanted them to grow berries again. With 20 berry bushes, you will never starve with a crockpot because it makes fruit cocktails, which restore 30 hunger and 5 of them should last you until the next harvest. That should give you time to explore, yet not tie you to any one place too much, not to mention you can turn harmful monster meat into harmless meaty stew or do the same with just the morsels you have.

tl;dr: Crockpots= gaurnteed survival.

[Palpetinus]

Why does nobody just put the monster meat into the crockpots? Am i missing something bad when doing that?

Edited December 10, 2012 by Palpetinus
I knew there is something wrong with my "Clockpots"

[InSpace]

My fav source of food is the frog sandwich (Froggie Bunwich), all it requires is 1 frogleg and 3 cooked berries put in the crock pot. Frogs respawn at the water holes each dawn I think and die in 1 hit, and berries are easy to get, they fill 70 hunger and 53 health ea.

[OmegaJasam]

Why does nobody just put the monster meat into the crockpots? Am i missing something bad when doing that?

Uh, there are like 2-3 posts in this thread saying it is a /good/ idea to crockpot ya monster meat.

Though there are better recipies. Honeyed meat if I recall right is an easy one.

[Palpetinus]

Uh, there are like 2-3 posts in this thread saying it is a /good/ idea to crockpot ya monster meat.

Though there are better recipies. Honeyed meat if I recall right is an easy one.

Oh darn. I read the most posts, but not all. Expecially the long ones because i am in work here and there are only small times where i have nothing to do at all.

[cprodrigues8]

Build a Crock Pot and cook:

4 Monster Meat (Kill Spiders to get that, is very easy)

1 Frog Leg (Get from frogs near lakes, it makes a GREAT food)

And ALWAYS cook your food.

[horatio_svetlana]

Kill spiders for silk, make a fishing rod, and fish in the ponds in the swamp.