In Crimson Desert you use food items to heal during combat. This is especially important for boss fights, especially from Chapter 5 onward you’ll want to bring 100+ Grilled Meat to every boss fight.
What’s the best food item for healing?
The best choice is Grilled Meat that restores 80 health per use. This is the “cheapest” type of grilled meat that only takes 1 raw meat to make. It can seem counterintuitive at first, but the best meat “Hearty Grilled Meat” that restores 220 health costs 10 raw meat.
So with the same resources you could make 10 x Grilled Meat = 800 health total restore. Whereas the expensive Hearty Grilled Meat gives only about a fourth of the healing for the same 10 raw meat.
Since you can consume food items every 2 seconds in combat, it’s better to just stock up on lots of the cheap Grilled Meat, this will get you further through the boss fights as it provides more total healing.
Note that you can use the cheapest raw meat “Tough Meat” to make Grilled Meat. It doesn’t make a difference what quality of meat you use, there’s no advantage to using the expensive “Marbled Meat” or “Tender Meat”. This can also seem counterintuitive at first, but the raw meat quality is irrelevant for cooking and all turns out the same.
How to get Grilled Meat and other Food Items?
Method 1 – Buy Meat: You can buy meat from the meat vendor in Hernand town. It’s a green goblin woman on the southwest edge of town. She’s marked with a “?” icon on the map’s “environment” tab.
The meat vendor sells:
- 10 Lean Meat
- 9 Fine Meat
- 6 Tender Meat
- 7 Marbled Meat
- 12 Tough Meat
- 10 Bird Meat
- 15 Lean Bird Meat
To the immediate right of the meat vendor you find the cooking pot. Look at it with L1/LB and click the “Cook” prompt. Then select Grilled Meat (the one for 80 health), click “Make” and choose the Maximum quantity. Repeat this for each type of raw meat in your inventory.
Buying the cheap Tough Meat, Lean Meat, Fine Meat is enough. They all give the same quality of Grilled Meat. No need to waste money on Marbled/Tender Meat. Also see How to Get Money Fast in Early Game.
The meat vendor restocks her inventory every night at 0:00 ingame time. You can rest at the cooking pot for 12 hours to speed it up.
Method 2 – Hunt Animals for Meat: Hunt and skin animals. Ride through the woods and attack any group of big or small animals. You will often find groups of 5+ deer together, each gives 3-4 meat, that’s a quick 20 meat in one spot. Small animals gives meat too. It will take a few minutes but when the meat vendor runs out of meat and you need lots for a big boss fight, it’s well worth the work. Better to spend 15 minutes stocking up on meat than to get stuck for an hour at a boss.
Other Food:
- Sometimes you find food as loot from defeated enemies when searching their bodies. Though each different type of food item will take up inventory slots, so it’s not always practicable when you hit the inventory limit.
- When you fell fruit bearing trees (apple trees etc) with an axe to get wood, the fruit will fall down and can be collected. Though this is much slower than hunting for meat.
- Other merchants also sell fruit.
- Later in the story you unlock a second meat vendor in Pailune (Chapter 7). Then can double dip between the Pailune and Hernand meat vendor each day.
For more guides check our Crimson Desert Wiki.
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