Acquiring Food

In Unreal World, one of your major concerns is getting enough food to stay alive. Luckily, there are a couple of methods to do so.

Foraging
The most basic method of getting food, Foraging simply entails picking up different kinds of edible plants. There are three kinds of edible plants in URW: berries, vegetables and mushrooms.

Berries start ripening in summer, when blueberry bushes start growing. They grow until late autumn/winter. The different kinds of berries are:

Both the cranberry and cloudberry can only be found marshes. They are easy to find, but yield little in the way of food. However, it's an easy way to feed yourself day to day. Around 10 fistfuls are enough for one day.
 * Blueberry
 * Northern bilberry
 * Cranberry
 * Cloudberry

In the normal course of a game, you will find little use for berries as they do not give much energy, and collecting them is tedious. However, in certain starting condition (for example winter, no weapons, wounded) berries can be the key to survival. Gathering them in marshes for a few days while waiting for your wounds to heal is very productive and beneficial as long as you stay warm. A day spent gathering cranberries at a marsh can provide enough food for several days.

Update: In the latest version (3.13), berries have no nutritional value raw. They must be cooked into berry porridge to give nutrition.

Another form of foraged food are mushrooms. There are many different kinds of mushroom in the game, ranging from delicious to deadly. Many a poisonous mushroom has meant the end of an otherwise successful character. Remember to boil all mushrooms before eating them, as chances are they will be poisonous otherwise, and never, ever even think of eating a sand mushroom.

Fishing
One of the better ways of getting food, there are two kinds of fishing, Active and Passive.

Active fishing means that you actually stand by the lake/river shore, with a club/spear/fishing rod, waiting for a passing fish. The best tool to use for this is the fishing rod, followed by spears (javelins count) then the club. A complete session of fishing lasts about 3 hours, less if you manage to catch something.

Passive fishing uses nets, which you must trade for. Use the fishing skill to set a net, and also to check it. After setting the net, wait for a few days, then check it. Hopefully you will have caught something. Nets, especially multiple nets, are a very good way of getting food. However, if you forget to check it, the fish inside the net will rot, and you will have nothing to eat. Nets should be checked every two days at the latest. A good trick is to check your nets on every even or odd-numbered day so you don't forget. (You can check your character log; it will show when you set your nets.) If you can get more than 6 nets at one rapid water tile, you will have an almost guaranteed food supply. Just dry your surplus catch to preserve it.

One thing to remember is that active fishing with javelins is a slow way to starve to death. You just can't get ahead with this method even if you use rapid water tiles. Either buy/rob/steal a fishing rod and/or net, or get food another way. However, with a high enough fishing skill, javelin fishing can help your character along until a better source of food can be found.

Hunting
Everybody's favourite way of getting meat, hunting can be a daunting challenge. While hunting for small game (squirrels, hares, foxes and badgers to name a few examples) may be easy, larger game is not and can easily injure or even kill you if you aren't careful.

To find an animal, either climb up on a tree and scan the surroundings, or use your tracking skill to locate some tracks. Follow the tracks to the animal, where you can choose whether or not to zoom in and look for it. An animal will always be on the same screen as you when you first zoom in, but may be obscured by trees or they might not be where you're looking.

Different animals behave differently. For example, squirrels like to jump from tree to tree, while hares take off as soon as they see you. Forest reindeer tend to run, but will attack if enraged. Bears and lynxes are deadly, and can kill you with a single swipe. For this reason, it's a good idea to hide to get close enough to attack to attack them from a distance. Most of the times it's effective to strike them on the legs to prevent running away. With Bears and Lynxes it might be a good idea to try for headshots.

The weapon of choice for many hunters is the bow. Failing that, javelins with Oath of Iron performed on them are also very effective. In any case, attacking from a distance is much safer than trying to get up close and personal, unless you are doing it on purpose. Javelins have one advantage, in that they can be used as a melee weapon.

Dead animals give great rewards in the form of meat and hide. Meat is very nutritious, and hide can be worked into a number of useful items, such as clothing and cord.

If an animal runs, it is possible to find it again just by wandering on world map in the direction it ran in. However, this is very hit or miss, and not guaranteed to succeed as the animal does not always run in a straight line. It is possible to follow tracks left behind.

Note that since version 3.12, tracks can appear on the zoomed in view if an animal has been moving around nearby. This is dependent on the terrain type, e.g. it is very easy to track animals in the snow, but only large game will leave tracks on harder ground. You can use your tracking skill whilst on the same tile as these tracks to find out which direction the animal is travelling from this point.

Once you have encountered an animal on a zoomed in view, if it runs out of sight, it is possible to encounter it again on the zoomed-out map nearby.

Trapping
Perhaps one of the best ways to get food, trapping basically means setting traps in random locations and waiting for an animal to stumble into them. Traps are very easy to set up, and can yield huge rewards. One of the most popular types of trap is the trap-fence, a long line of fences and trap pits, designed to force animals (usually herbivores like forest reindeer or elk) into the pits. Trap-fences are set up as follows: ==O==O==O== where = is a fence or obstacle and O is a pit Naturally, there is a lot of individual variation on the precise spacing of the trap pits. The most common trap pit used is the trap pit with sharp stakes, as it often kills whatever animal stumbles into it, which is advisable if something dangerous such as a bear or lynx has been caught. However, if you don't have the time (or don't want to check the traps every few days) it may be more useful to set a plain trap pit as they incapacitate, rather than kill. Since corpses are wiped from the map after a period of time, this will give you a greater margin of time to kill them, and also provides skill gain. You cruel, cruel player.

Traps can be baited with raw or cooked fish or meat. Predators are known to try to steal food from the player, and if food is placed on a trap, they will wander into it.

Agriculture
A more civilized way to produce food is through agriculture. The type of farming practiced in the Unreal World is slash-and-burn agriculture, where an area of land is cleared by burning, which fertilizes the soil for planting crops. In game terms, this means that you must first burn something--firewood, wooden blocks, stick, etc--over the spot you wish to farm, and then plant your seeds. These plants will take some time to mature (a few months) before they can be harvested.

There are many kinds of crops in URW. The main vegetables are turnips, broad beans and peas. Other useful plants include hemp, meedsweet, nettle and yarrow. Cereals such as barley and rye can also be grown, but not wheat. They are all grown with the Agriculture skill. You can acquire seeds by either harvesting and then threshing crops, completing the Agriculture task in the Living in the Wild course, or by buying them from stores. Occasionally, general stores will also sell rare vegetables such as cabbages.

Trading
Trading easy-to-make goods such as wooden bowls for flat rye bread or rye flour can be a very easy way to get food, provided that you find a village with a food shop. However, version 3.13 has adjusted the values of traditionally easy-to-make trade goods like wooden bowls, making it harder to trade for food. For more information, go to the trading page.