Considering the game is called Don’t Starve, it’s a surprise to no one that food is the most critical resource in the game. Gathering berries and carrots is all well and good,m but if you want to survive for the long haul, you may want to get some better things to sink your teeth in to. And if you want to do that, you’ll have to master the art of cooking and understanding recipes.
Once you start gathering larger quantities of food, you can combine them to make meals that will provide you with better benefits to filling your hunger, health, and sanity. To do this, you’ll need a crockpot, a cooking structure that takes three cut stones, six charcoal, and six twigs. The stone you get from mining and refining rocks and the twigs you can pick up basically anywhere, it’s the charcoal that is tricky to get. You’ll need to get a torch and light up some trees; be careful that you aren’t in a full-blown forest, or else you’ll burn everything around you. Once you burn six trees, you can chop down their burnt carcasses for some charcoal.
The way a crockpot works is that you need to fill it with four items and then cook said items into a meal. What you put into the crockpot doesn’t have to be food necessarily, as you can add filler items like twigs and ice. So if you add four berries into a crockpot and decide to cook them, you’ll get a fist full of jam. You don’t always need to add the exact ingredients either, as most recipes need certain food groups, not exact food items. For example, to make a fist full of jam, you can use four berries or one berry and three pieces of ice.
As a default, you’ll want to use food that is readily available to you so that you’re not spending too much time looking for certain food items. Fruits and veggies like berries, carrots, and anything you can grow on a farm, are great for adding to crockpot recipes. Having a steady supply of meat is also great, so position your base close to rabbit holes, catcoon stumps, spider dens, or a pig house.
The first and most helpful crockpot recipe you’ll use, is meatballs, as they fill 62.5 hunger and only need one piece of meat to make. For the three other food slots, you can fill them with simple things like berries, carrots, mushrooms, or other vegetables. Later on in your playthrough, you should have a steady supply of meat and an icebox filled with meatballs.
The second recipe is honey nuggets, which isn’t the most filling food, but it’s great if you need to get some health back. Honey nuggets give you 37.5 hunger and 20 health when consumed and take one piece of meat, one piece of honey, and two other food items such as berries, mushrooms, or ice. If you’ve built yourself some bee boxes, you can have honey nuggets any time you like.
If you want something even better, honey ham might be for you. It requires two meat of any kind, even monster meat, a piece of honey, and a filler item like berries or ice. It will fill 70 hunger and give you thirty health; it just might be harder to get since it takes double the meat.
There’s a recipe that takes even more meat though, and that’s the meaty stew. This meal will fill you with 150 hunger and requires three pieces of meat and one filler to make. If you’re playing as Wilson (as you should if you’re a new player), the meaty stew will fill your stomach.
While traversing the world, you may find some frogs hopping around little ponds. These frogs can be killed for their tasty frog legs. Use these frog legs to make froggle bunwhich, which gives you 37.5 hunger and 20 health. It takes one frog leg and three filler items, including berries, carrots, twigs, and vegetables. Frogs can be hard to deal with, so make sure to capture them in a trap instead of trying to fight multiple at once.
These are all simple recipes where the ingredients are widely available, so they’re great for beginners. Crockpot meals are much more beneficial than just eating plain food, so get cooking and make some wild creations. Don’t be afraid to experiment!
