Starbound - Survival Food Hints

Starbound. I suggest you play the game a little bit on Casual instead of Survival. It takes a while to manage eating food and not dying, and Casual is much more forgiving. You die in casual and you lose 10% of your pixels (money) and respawn on your ship. You can teleport to your ship from anywhere.

Not so in Survival! You lose 30% of your pixels, all your gathered materials (you do keep your weapons and armor and I think most of "first tab" stuff). You have to eat to stay alive or you can starve to death. You can only teleport to your ship from the surface. That actually turns out to be a pain. The worst thing that can happen is to be in the bowels of the planet and you realize you have no food left and you need to get to the surface! Ouch.

HINT: If this happens, and you are fortunate enough to find a portal to a challenge level, you can go there and die. You'll then respawn on your ship with only pixel loss.

So learn to play the game a bit in Casual. Learn how to move the character, how to fight and how to craft items. Casual lets you take your time without dying of hunger.

Darling and I actually played together on Casual and defeated the final boss.

When you feel ready, move on to a Survival game.


So let's talk food. IMPORTANT - you eat food by opening your inventory (I), selecting the food to eat, and clicking on or near your character's hungry mouth. That one baffled me for a bit. You cannot eat if you're already full.

You have some cans of food from the starting sequence of the game. One can of food will fill you. Since it takes a while to earn enough to compress pixels, and you lose 30% of your pixels when you die, I liked buying more cans of food from the grocery store at the end of the world. They don't spoil. Only carry one or two with you into the depths, though. If you die, you drop them!

Rice!

Early in the game, you will find edible plants on the surface of your home planet. If you are lucky, you might find rice, but you will probably find tomatoes, potatoes and corn. Use E to capture your food, and your MM (Matter Manipulator) to grab the seed.






Make a hoe at your Foraging Table. Till the earth near your landing site. You do this by equipping the hoe and tapping the dirt near you. You can tell it is tilled because the ground changes texture. You cannot till stone, so you need to replace the stones with dirt - just like in real life.

Yeah, I grew food on my ship!

Plant seeds in the tilled soil. Equip the seed and click it on the surface. If the icon is red, you need to move the seedling until the icon is green. Some plants take more room than others. Potatoes and carrots don't take much room, but corn takes a lot.

Then you must water the plant to make it produce. Rain might help, but you should make a watering can at your Foraging Table and water the plants. I did that when I made my mini-garden on my ship.

My favorite food to plant is rice, because (like vine plants) you don't harvest the produce with the seed, and the rice stacks! Stalk plants like tomatoes and corn reduce the amount of time you need to maintain your garden. Harvesting potatoes and carrots also pulls up the seeds, so you need to replant after every harvest. Potatoes are almost vital, though, because one baked potato lasts you a long time. When you have some rice, tomatoes, corn or potatoes, use E on a campfire and you have some cooking options. Bake the potatoes, stew the tomatoes and pop the corn. Your food lasts a while in your inventory, but will spoil eventually. If you hover over the food item, you can see the ones that are starting to go bad. Eat those first.

Don't eat raw meat. You get sick. Some plants also make you sick if you don't cook them (I'm looking at you, Toxic Fruit). You can cook meat over a campfire. You have a better chance of the animal dropping meat (or crafting materials) if you use a distance weapon.

Carry a campfire with you. If you can find some rice - fabulous. Plant as much of that as you can. You can carry rice with you, uncooked, and it lasts a LONG time (I've never seen it spoil). When you get hungry, drop a campfire and cook a portion. The rice also stacks - the cooked rice does not. Potatoes, tomatoes and corn don't stack either.

Free kitchen.
You need an upgraded Inventor's Table to make one of your own.

At the Outpost, there is a cooking station you can use to make more advanced food, but by this time you can make enough food to keep you alive. Now you want to gather the seeds to feed you and start to make a profit from farming!

That's a future post!

Enjoy the game.