Sarah loves RPGs, sandboxes, and sims. She's played every expansion of World of Warcraft and WoW Classic and spent hundreds of hours modding and playing Bethesda games.
Reviewed by Benjamin Barr
While Valheim doesn’t have a hunger mechanic, food is nonetheless essential to your success in the game, providing crucial buffs to your health, stamina, and eventually your eitr so you can gather, build, explore, fight, and survive. Without food, you’ll have only 25 health, 50 stamina, and no eitr. That will make even the most basic activities in Valheim difficult to perform if you don’t consume food regularly.
You can have up to three food buffs at a time. Every diet needs variety – you can’t have more than one buff from the same type of food. Different foods have different durations and buffs, so choosing the best food for your current level and activities is a good idea. We’ll help you out by listing the best food combos available at each level of the game, from the Meadows to the Mistlands.
The Best Food in Each Valheim Biome
Your progress in Valheim is determined by the biome you’re currently collecting most of your resources from and will determine the types of food you have access to.
We’ll be listing the best available food for each level of the game, but you won’t always want to use these items. Consider what you’re going to be working on and whether you need a lot of health or stamina to accomplish the task.
If you’re fighting a boss, you’ll definitely want the best food you can get, but if you’re just building or farming, you might want to eat something that won’t cost you as much time and resources.
Meadows
The Meadows is the first biome you’ll land in when you arrive in Valheim. Your early meals will be made up of raw foraged plants. Once you’ve built a cooking station, you can add in some simple meats.
Raspberries and mushrooms will be the first food items you’ll find. They can be picked throughout the biome and provide a small amount of health and stamina to help you get started. You’ll want to continue gathering these throughout the game, since they are used in more advanced recipes later on.
Honey is an excellent early game food, offering a solid buff to your stamina. To get honey, you’ll need to knock down some beehives, which you’ll find inside the dilapidated buildings scattered across the Meadows and Black Forest. This will net you a queen bee, which will allow you to build your own beehive.
Your beehives can be regularly harvested for honey and require no maintenance. Because of the ease of obtaining it, honey will remain a good “cheap” food that you can use throughout Valheim when you don’t need something more substantial. It’s your best option for stamina at this level.
The best food for increasing your health in the Meadows biome will be meat, which you’ll need a cooking station to prepare. You can cook boar meat, neck tail, and deer meat by putting them on the spit until they change color.
These animals should be easy to find and kill. You can also tame and breed your own boars for easy access. Cooked deer meat is the best option for a health buff in the early game.
Black Forest
The second biome you’ll venture into once you’ve established yourself is the Black Forest. After collecting some tin in this biome, you’ll be able to build a cauldron, which you can use to prepare more complex recipes.
You’ll find bukeperries in this biome, which don’t give any buffs of their own but do allow you to clear your current food buffs, allowing you to eat something else instead. You’ll also find blueberries and yellow mushrooms in this biome, neither of which provide significant buffs on their own, but which are useful ingredients for crafting more advanced food and mead.
You’ll be able to pick up some carrot seeds here as well, which will let you grow your first crops. Plant them and harvest the carrots, which can be combined with a mushroom to make carrot soup. This will be your best stamina food for the Black Forest biome.
Your best bet for increasing your health in the Black Forest will again be meat. Raw fish can be caught and turned into cooked fish at your cooking station. You can also make deer stew from cooked deer meat, blueberries, and carrots.
Swamp
From the Swamp onwards, the new foods you gain access to will be more complex to craft and more difficult to farm, so you’ll want to continue using food from the lower level biomes, except when venturing somewhere particularly dangerous.
You’ll find turnip seeds in this biome, and can begin growing these to combine with boar meat for turnip stew. This will be your new highest stamina food option.
You’ll encounter many draugr in the Swamp, and if the idea doesn’t gross you out too much, their entrails can be cooked with boar meat and thistle to make sausages. Technically this will be your best health option for the Swamp biome, but this is about the level that you might start killing serpents in the Ocean biome.
Serpent meat can be made into cooked serpent meat, a high health buff food that can be made even better by combining it with mushrooms and honey. This will make serpent stew, one of the best food items in Valheim for buffing your health.
Mountain
Another biome, another crop to add to your growing farm. You can now collect onion seeds to grow onions. These in turn can be can be cooked into onion soup, a very strong stamina food, without requiring any other ingredients. That makes it one of the easier higher-level foods to craft.
However, there is a slightly better stamina food you can get in the Mountain biome. Eyescream can be made from a freeze gland and some greydwarf eyes. Freeze glands can be obtained by killing drakes, so it won’t be as easy to get this food in large quantities.
Although cooked serpent meat continues to be your best option for health, you’ll now be able to tame wolves to raise for wolf meat, which can be combined with mushrooms and an onion to make a wolf skewer. This is the next best thing and much easier to acquire. You can also combine wolf meat with honey to make wolf jerky, which provides an above-average amount of both health and stamina.
Plains
On to the Plains, you’ll find one last type of berry to forage, cloudberries. These provide a bit more stamina than any other raw food you’ll come across.
You’ll also find barley, a crop that can only grow in the Plains, which makes it a bit more challenging to farm. These seeds can be found in patches of cultivated land inside fuling villages.
Barley can be ground into barley flour using a windmill, and then used as an ingredient for making some higher level foods. Among these are fish wraps and lox meat pie, which provide marginally less health than serpent stew.
You’ll also be able to make bread and blood pudding, the two highest stamina foods that you’ll have access to in the Plains biome. Bread is fairly simple, requiring only barley flour to make.
Mistlands
Here we are at last, with some of the absolute best food items in Valheim. The Mistlands is currently the last biome you’ll reach, and it adds an entire new resource pool for your character: eitr, which lets you use magic. Along with it, you’ll gain access to new food items that buff eitr as well as health and stamina.
The most basic of these are magecaps, a raw mushroom that offers a modest buff to all three attributes. You’ll find another type of mushroom as well, jotun puffs, that don’t provide eitr but are used in several cooking recipes.
There are currently three other items in Valheim that provide eitr: stuffed mushroom, yggdrasil porridge, and seeker aspic, the last of which gives the best eitr food buff currently in the game. All three of them require multiple materials from the Mistlands to craft.
The best stamina foods at this point in Valheim are salad, mushroom omelette, and fish n’ bread, the last of which gives the biggest buff of all.
And finally, the best foods for health – along with serpent stew, which is just as good as two of these – are meat platter, honey glazed chicken, and misthare supreme, the last of which is the best in Valheim for buffing health.
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