There are many different ways to get food in Aska, from foraging for vegetables, berries, and eggs yourself, or using your farmers to grow a regular supply of crops. You'll need to keep your character fed, but as your village grows, your friendly NPCs will also require feeding.
Different foods provide different qualities - for example, Garlic is a good way to heal in the early game, whereas cooked meat can provide better health and strength buffs. This guide covers everything you need to know about food in Aska.
Early Game Food
From the moment you wake up next to your shipwreck, you can immediately start collecting food - primarily mussels, which can be found on rocks along the shoreline.
When you venture into the woods, you can start collecting berries from bushes. Berries provide both hydration and food.
Deeper in the woods, you can find Carrots, Cabbages, Onion, Garlic, and Beetroot. You can also find different mushrooms, like regular Mushrooms, Yellow Mushrooms, and Grey Mushrooms. You can also get Eggs from Fallen Nests, which are more likely to appear after a storm. Likewise, mushrooms will only appear after rain, but they will appear all year-round, unlike other vegetables.
When harvesting Carrots, Cabbages, Beetroot, etc, you can also get Seeds which can be planted at your NPC farm building.
Gatherer's Pit
The Gatherer's Pit should be your priority for incoming NPCs - assigning a worker to the Gatherer's Pit will mean they scour the surrounding area for any vegetables and other items they can collect. Make sure to build a foraging marker if your NPC tells you that they can't find anything to collect, as this will expand their radius deeper into the woods.
Farming
As your village grows in size, it makes sense to place some farm plots for food. You can grow Carrots, Onions, Garlic, etc, anything that you can get seeds from by foraging. Farmers will need Rakes to level and till the soil, and will need a regular supply of Compost and Water to tend to the crops.
Hunting
You can go hunting yourself (we recommend crafting a bow and plenty of arrows) by finding wild deer or Smolkrs. Meat can be harvested by using a knife on the corpse of an animal.
As your village grows, you can also build a Hunter's Hut which an NPC can be assigned to. You'll need to provide them with a bow, arrows, and a knife, and they will head out in the radius of the hut to find animals. They'll bring back any meat and place it in the hut's storage.
Fishing
Fishing is another source of reliable food year-round. You can fish yourself by crafting a fishing rod and crafting some berry, meat, or fish bait. The bait will automatically appear on your rod if it's in your inventory.
You can find fish along the coastline. Just cast your rod out, catch the fish, then drop it on the ground to harvest the fish meat with your knife.
Similarly to hunting and farming, fishing can be automated with the Fishing Hut. This needs to be constructed along the beach and your NPC given a rod and some bait.
How To Cook In Aska
To cook food in Aska you need to build a barbecue on the top of your Campfire. You can do this from the building menu. This will allow you to cook raw meat from animals and fish, so that it won't make you sick. Cooked foods also provide better buffs to your hunger bar and overall strength.
Yellow and Grey mushrooms also shouldn't be consumed without cooking - Yellow mushrooms are poisonous and will damage your health, and Grey mushrooms will cause your character to get sick with visual hallucinations on the screen.
Once constructed, you can assign a worker to the barbecue who will collect food and cook it, and then store anything cooked on the cooked food rack next to the fire.
Feeding Your Village
The NPC buildings provide a degree of automation as they become more developed. Hunters will collect the meat, and then the barbecue worker or cook house workers will grab the meat and cook it, then store it. NPCs will help themselves to food during their leisure hours, so make sure to always keep an hour free in their schedule for them to get food and water.
All the NPC buildings require tools to function, which means you'll need to build a Workshop Hut and set up tasks for fishing rods, bows, knives, rakes, pickaxes, axes, and so on. Some micromanagement can't hurt here, but as long as the workshop is stocked with essentials like fiber, rope, blades, and so on, your NPCs should get through these tasks pretty quickly. NPCs will collect the tools they need on their own.
