Best Food Combos [Updated to 0.9.2]

Overview

Food is the most important source of skill points in ECO. The better your diet the more skill points you get from nutrition. It’s not only about calories but also about balance. I revived this algorithm I wrote two years ago to provide my knowledge to the community. This guide tells you what to eat and how to eat and it will help the provisioners to sell the most efficient meals.

Food Quality and Specializations

When you enter the world for the first time you don’t have a choice, you’re bound to eat raw food you find growing somewhere. Raw food gives the least skill points and usually plants don’t regrow fast enough to support a large number of players for a long time. So your first way is to build a campfire and cook your first food. In the beginning your choice mostly depends on the available ingredients. But as a provisioner you should settle somewhere near a farmer of trust or start with planting your own ingredients. Campfire food gives a good bonus over raw food and should be considered one of your first priorities. With more skill point coming along you’ll progress to higher levels of Campfire Cooking quite fast which gives another reasonable boost to your skill point gain.

When to Eat

Always carry a whole meal with you and eat it en bloc when you’re hungry. This way you avoid a drop in skill point gain when a single food is removed from your stomach (after 24 hours) leaving an unbalanced diet and you have to wait for some minutes or even hours until the next food is removed that you’ve eaten to balance out the previous one.
Sometimes it happens to me that I accidentally eat a Camas Bulb or a Bean instead of planting it. Don’t try to balance it out (unless these raw foods are a part of your diet anyway). After 24 hours the Bean is gone and balance is restored.

Meals aka Food Combos

When it comes to the personal diet it usually depends on availability. But as a chef you have the power to provide the best food combos one can get and thus you are responsible for progress on the server. The following table gives an overview which food combos give the highest skill point gain a chef with the respective skill level can provide.
The values are based on a default configuration of 12SP Base Skill Gain and a Skill Multiplier of 1.0x. Changing Base Skill Gain and/or Skill Modifier won’t change which food combos work best (at least from my experience). I computed these values based on a stomach size of 3000cal which is the start size.
The two numbers on the end of each line are nutrition balance/skill point gain. The nutrition balance (possible values between 0.5 and 2.0) only gives a hint that with a better balance there could be a higher skill point gain. But the crucial number is the skill point gain.

Food Combo Reference Table – The Basics

Food Combos – The Path Of Cooking

Food Combos – The Path Of Baking

Food Combo – Best Of Both Worlds

Increased Stomach Size

With increased levels of the Self Improvement skill your stomach size increases up to 4250cal at level 7. Here’s a selection of the best food combos per skill with that stomach size. The combinations of Cooking and Baking don’t give better results with higher calorie limits.

Notes

• The guide was first written for 0.7. With 0.8 the levels for a skill are gained with practice. The SP multiplier is taken into account and increases the speed of leveling.Thus I stick to computing levels 1 and 2 because you’ll want to practice with useful meals.
• With 0.9.1 the Baking path really got pushed so there is no clear order any more. Up to 0.9 Cooking was clearly better than Baking and Advanced Cooking topped Advanced Baking. Now it’s a completely different story. Baking is slightly better than Cooking, Advanced Cooking is slightly better than Advanced Baking, and the best values come from the combination of both paths
• Some of the raw foods are harder to get than others. You really should get a campfire soon so you don’t have to gather different meal parts only to gain a ridiculous 30something skill points.
• To all Smelters: Please sell Cast Iron Stoves so your chef can provide the “better food” you’re constantly crying for. Same goes for Kitchens (Carpenters) and Stoves (Advanced Smelters). In 0.8 chefs could also use the anvil for the Cast IIron Stove but at a very high material cost. From 0.9 on chefs depend on smiths again
• The next guy asking for an update of the guide 4 hours after release of the new version will just get blocked. FU