Hunger management - when to eat and when to starve?

[michal.don]

Hello,

I'd appreciate a bit of help from more experienced players. I'm playing on a custom difficulty, based mainly on "Stalker", but I am thinking about having a go at "Interloper", too. My question is - when is it best to eat, and when to go hungry on purpose? Is it better to eat a bit only before sleeping to recover a bit of condition, or is it preferable to keep being well-fed during the day to be stronger for the potential wolf-wrestling fun?

Thank you for your insight,

Michal.don

[Doc Feral]

Daystarving and only eating before sleeping is a common strategy, but I prefer to keep the roleplay alive and avoid starving if I can. That said, I somehow never managed to get the "don't starve" badge meaning I'm a rather crappy gamer.

[ajb1978]

I'm of the same mindset--for the roleplaying value, I try to avoid going into starvation.  I will use the daystarving method to ration food if I find myself in a jam, but overlap my fishing marathons and moose hunting trips well enough that I always have at least a week's worth of food ready to eat.

Staying well fed also helps recover condition though.  You recover 1 condition per hour that all 4 of your needs are met, even when you're out walking around and otherwise being active.  But it's understandable, especially when you're early in your run and don't have piles of equipment collected and ready to go, that you might need to ration.

[ThePancakeLady]

2 hours ago, ajb1978 said:

I'm of the same mindset--for the roleplaying value, I try to avoid going into starvation.  I will use the daystarving method to ration food if I find myself in a jam, but overlap my fishing marathons and moose hunting trips well enough that I always have at least a week's worth of food ready to eat.

Staying well fed also helps recover condition though.  You recover 1 condition per hour that all 4 of your needs are met, even when you're out walking around and otherwise being active.  But it's understandable, especially when you're early in your run and don't have piles of equipment collected and ready to go, that you might need to ration.

Agreed, very similar mindset to my own. I will starve if I must, to get through hard times. But it isn't a tactic I use unless I must. Even on Stalker, there is enough food around usually to not starve. Loper however... I can see the need there.

[s7mar7in]

15 hours ago, michal.don said:

My question is - when is it best to eat, and when to go hungry on purpose?

All the above comments are right on target! What I would share is the following from my experiences. When you are early game and don't yet have enough food stockpiled, you must suffer hunger while awake and be sure to save enough food to get the maximum consecutive hours of sleep each day/night. This is so you will gain the condition you lost from working without taking time to eat, (plus recovering additional condition) . Kinda makes sense that you would actually do this in a survival crisis. As soon as you have sufficient food, it would be wise to keep your survivor fed as best you can for the reasons you have mentioned.

Good luck my friends!

[michal.don]

@Doc Feral, @ajb1978, @ThePancakeLady, @s7mar7in, thank you all for the answers - it all really makes sense.

My mindset on "Stalker" works quite similar - I like to be reasonably well-fed all the time, if only to not have to listen to my survivor's complaining how hungry he/she is....  On the other hand, I feel eating a whole deer in two days is a bit of a luxury I can't really afford, so there's a bit of a conflict between those two things.

But as you said, as soon as I try the "Interloper", there probably won't be much of a dilemma because of the food shortage and the starving will be pretty much mandatory....

Thanks again,

Michal.don

[MrWolf]

3 hours ago, michal.don said:

But as you said, as soon as I try the "Interloper", there probably won't be much of a dilemma because of the food shortage and the starving will be pretty much mandatory....

It's almost always like that during the first days or weeks of Interloper, depending how quickly you can get a crafted bow and arrows.  Until that point, I'll starve during the day and eat before sleep unless I get a bounty of rabbits and deer carcasses or run a deer into a wolf and scare the wolf away.  Once I get the bow and arrows and get to level 5 cooking (so I can eat the wolf and bear meat), I'll have breakfast, lunch, and dinner most every day.

[Stone]

@michal.don interesting question.. On interloper, I always prioritize travel early game to try and pick up good clothes before they decay and the weather turns bad. If you're moving like that you can pick up a lot of cattails, der carcass meat and free loot food as you move. So as long as I'm moving I find I rarely let myself starve as I need every % of condition to burn getting cold while moving quickly. It's only when I stop for a while and can't hunt that ratiining/starving is needed.

 

 

 

[Kayosiv]

As far as I can tell, your hunger meter doesn't effect your struggle ability with wolves, the only thing that affects that is your fatigue level, which doesn't decrease faster if you're starving I don't believe.

Personally, I set the condition recovery WAY down from the default levels, because I don't find it realistic or offer the best experience if you can just sleep off a bear attack and be fine the next day.

[Wintermut]

For Interloper like others said, some starvation is probably mandatory in the beginning because there just isn't that much food lying around. Once you get the hacksaw, it makes harvesting already dead deer much easier than waiting for them to thaw by a fire. There's also always the scare the deer into the wolf method of hunting, and then scare the wolf away with fire. It can sometimes be hard to find deer close to a wolf. Then other times it just happens right in front of you all on it's own. I never skip the opportunity when I witness it happening.

Many maps have an abundance of cattails. Some maps much more than others, like Forlorn Muskeg and Hushed River Valley. Hopefully you start on a map where there are many cattails to eat.