The only thing that gives health back.
You eat on your Account page, from the food itself: each food you hold is a card under What you hold, with an eat button and what it would give you.
| how often | up to five times a day |
| what it gives | 10 health per quality, so q1 gives 10 and q5 gives 50 |
| ceiling | 100, and a meal never carries you past it |
Raw food is not a meal. It is what a mill turns into one.
A meal at full health is wasted and still eaten. There is no warning and no refund: if you are at 100 and eat a q5, you have thrown it away.
It is not the exchange rate. A mill at any quality turns raw food into health at exactly the same rate:
a q1 mill: 200 raw food -> 20 meals x 10 health = 200 health
a q5 mill: 1000 raw food -> 20 meals x 50 health = 1000 health
so: 1 raw food = 1 health, at every quality
What quality changes is how much health one meal carries. With five meals a day, that adds up to how much you could put through your body in a day:
| you eat | one meal | five of them |
|---|---|---|
| q1 | 10 | 50 |
| q2 | 20 | 100 |
| q5 | 50 | 250 |
Your health still stops at 100, but that is the most you can hold at once, not the most you can take in over a day: spend health between meals and none of them overshoots.
Whether anything asks you to depends on the day you are having. A day's work costs 10 and a training costs 10, and a quiet day is those two: two q1 loaves cover it. But a swing on a front costs 10 (war), a duel 10 (dueling), a border 10 (travel), a spread 5 and an expedition 10 (religion), and a plague takes 30 a day on top of everything (epidemics). Five q1 loaves are 50 health a day and five q5 are 250, so quality is the difference between a day you have to choose in and a day you do not.
work a farm -> raw food -> work a mill -> food -> eat -> health
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v
work, and train
Three or four days of work fill a larder for twenty. A q1 mill eats 200 raw food in a day and a farm makes between 80 and 130, so two good days at the farm feed the mill, and a bad year costs a third. One day at the mill then turns that into 20 meals, and you may eat up to five a day. So the days you are not working are days you can train, and a larder lasts as long as your patience does.
Every character starts the same way, because nothing else feeds you:
day 0 found a farm and a mill -200 gold, of the 250 you were given
day 1 work the farm -10 health, +80 to 130 raw food
day 2 work the farm -10 health, and again
day 3 work the farm, if short only if the weather was unkind
day 4 work the mill -10 health, -200 raw, +20 meals
day 5 eat, and act the loop is closed
Watch the raw food rather than the calendar: the mill needs 200 and will refuse the day if it does not have it. Nothing is lost when it refuses.
That opening is forced only if you feed yourself. Food, raw and milled, is bought and sold on the goods market in a country's currency, so a character who can earn coin can eat without owning a field, and a forge can be a first building. What nobody can do is eat without food: a farm and a mill are the only way to make it from nothing.