I'm eating my way through Baldur's Gate 3, and there's nothing you can do to stop me

Lawful Good, or Chaotic Evil? Martial Class or Magic Class? Origin Character or rolled from scratch? There are hundreds of different ways to create a character in Baldur's Gate 3, and while I'm running a nifty little Deep Gnome Ranger in my current Early Access foray, I've still got no idea what I'm going to play once the full release comes around. What I do know, however, is that no matter what class, race, or personality I eventually decide on, one aspect of my playthrough will remain the same: I will be scooping up every piece of food I come across.

Whether it's Skyrim's cheese wheels, Fallout's irradiated junk food, or The Witcher's array of medieval snacks, the RPG tradition of snarfing down as much food as possible in a pinch is well-established. But in all of those games, a time comes when you don't really need those snacks anymore: In Skyrim, my off-hand rarely used anything except a healing enchantment; in Fallout, I was rocking around the Wasteland with an entire backpack full of stimpaks; and Geralt's potion-making skills certainly come in handy when facing down the Wild Hunt.

In Baldur's Gate 3, just like in D&D itself, you'll eventually find plenty of ways to implement a little self-care. Health potions, temporary hitpoints, healing spells, and short rests all offer your characters a chance to fight another day. Food, on the other hand, will do nothing to help you get out of a fight unless you plan to throw it at your opponents. Instead, it's part of a far more useful mechanic - one that I'm very happy to exploit.

Long Feast

To get the most out of a Long Rest in Baldur's Gate 3 - an extended period of downtime where you'll sleep, interact with companions, and restore all your health and spell slots - you'll need to go to bed on a full stomach. To do that, you'll need 10 Camp Supplies per character, and to get those, you'll need to collect food. So with that in mind, I'm holding on to every loose vegetable and random haunch of meat I can find.

Raiding one goblin camp, I found two whole pigs heads. To look at, they were deeply unpleasant. To contemplate eating, even worse. But to feed to my party? They offered 15 camp supplies each. It would be a crime not to eat these heads, and only partially because they also weighed several kilos each and I only have so much room in my pack. I rounded out my party's meal with a haunch of mystery meat that might have been another piece of one of those unfortunate pigs, although I can't be 100% sure about that.

Since then, I've been grabbing up everything I can find. My character's pack is now just as full of dried sausages and bread rolls as it is of health potions and magical items. A potato might not be much use on its own, but if I happen to stumble upon a sack of tomatoes, a barrel willed with some carrots, and find a zucchini in an abandoned kitchen, suddenly my ranger will be dining on a wholesome vegetable medley, with an apple or two for afters.

It's not a perfect strategy - a Long Rest takes eight hours, and I've been caught out by the world moving on around me as I chow down more times than I'd care to admit. It's also a literal burden - all that meat does mean that my diminutive ranger is struggling to hold onto her financially valuable items as opposed to her nutritionally valuable ones. There's also the literal time constraint - a Baldur's Gate 3 campaign is said to take 75 hours to complete at the short end, and if I'm spending hours rootling through every barrel, bag, and body I can find for an extra snack, that number is only going to get bigger. If it means the difference between getting all my spell slots back for that next big bossfight, however, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. 

Baldur's Gate 3's lead writer on the "spiderweb" formation of the game's 17,000 endings