Hey guys, just wondering if anyone else is having this issue. It doesn't seem to matter which character i play on, or what dificulty (tried on easy, normal and hard). I am having a lot of trouble keeping my food supplies up.

I usually use my rations and food pellets first, and am trying to make all different types of sandwhiches by utilising the purifier and the cookers or EZcooker, but I am still finding it really hard to get past about lvl 10-12 without dying through starvation. Its really frustrating when you are doing so well, only to die because you haven't eaten a piece of cheese! GAH!

I have recently been trying to play psion, and I believe that through the manifestation power you can create food? The reason I ask that is because each time i play through, even though im putting as many points as i can into it.. I can never quite manage to get to 50 points.

So i guess, my question is.. Am i the only one having this issue? Am i just not playing correctly or is this a universal thing? Should the cost of manifestation be reduced? Or should food drops become more common?

I would say you're only been having some really terrible luck. In my 14 plays, only once has food been a real issue and that I would have to resort to eating moldy food. All the other times I've seen myself carrying tens of sandwiches and meat. Check every freezer and grab every food item a monster drops, and you should manage. Don't rest unless it's absolutely the only option. Avoid unnecessary backtracking: once you're in a new floor, immediately check your map to see where you are, try to guess where the exit point would be (usually on the completely opposite side of the map) and go there last.

Edit: Oh, and don't gobble on the food right after you get it. Save it until you can make a better item, like the Sotswich, because it gives more food. Try finding more food recipes from the deciphered messages: there are a lot.

Cheers guys! I was hoping I was just unlucky haha

I'll try your suggestions, sounds like I was doing it wrong :)

While this might be true, don't forget that at the end of the day it's still mostly luck that counts when finding items. In my last scout run, I found weapons ALL the time at one point, too much to even carry them all actually, and the Liir medallion and the Thonos Artifact, among some other great stuff. I didn't raise my Brains in the entire time except when I got a boost from a serum. I did put points into Foraging however in every level up, so that might be it.

Food is one thing I have had zero issue with, even getting to the final levels. It might get a bit tight if cookers are rare but I generally even have a rather large abundance of food. I'm not rubbing in my luxurious 1st world food supply in anyone's face, but I it means you've either had a string of bad dice rolling, or the more likely reason is you are doing something that is screwing you over.

First thing is don't waste your steps. By that I mean use your map, and avoid moving through a level in a way that is going to force you to back track. It's OK to do some backtracking ( no real way out of it ) but don't think it's fine to just wander about freely because you are just starving yourself. Just have the mindset that you need to not be wasteful with your steps, and that generally enough.

Try to increase your speed. That's not just more steps in a fight, it's twice as many steps before a food reduction. The same goes for decreased speed. One place you can screw yourself is the heavy armor. If you aren't the marine your speed is halved which means you get hungrier every single step you take.

Be careful of what you are crafting. Crafting food has a chance of failure, and in the long run losing sure food for always trying to get more food can end up leaving you with less total food over the course of the game. Foods that require a lot of ready to eat foods, and only yield 50% more food should be opted out of if you have alternatives. Pungent meat is a good food source. It's fairly safe to make, uses 2 easy to get items, and only one of them is food on it's own. If it fails you are out of one raw meat, but success doubles your food which is a better ratio than some other food items. It's low risk, and high payout percentage wise, which is a good thing.

My point of view is from the base version.

If I understand it properly in the expansion, the Biome levels are a great source of food. The nasty catch being that you'd best only enter the biome levels armed to the hilt and be ready to run back to ladder if things get nasty (very buffed baddies in a level with no walls).

Yeah, the biome levels have boatloads of food, but some of the toughest monsters in the game. The five I went through ate up all my ammo, but you also get a massive amount of experience in addition to more food than you can carry. I'm still trying to make a run relying on melee weapons instead of guns.

5 characters, all 5 died from food so far.
I'm saving food to cook/detoxify, and combine them into sandwitches, but I all ways run out.
If my next 5 characters die from staving... I'm seriously going to get upset.
(I even reduced my back tracking to near zero, and I rest in bed's very rarely now, still run out of food).

Some times I don't even get food on a level, is this normal? I went 2 floors without food only once.

btw, can we change a setting, so we lose half as much hunger over time?
Or at least set easy mode to do it, so I can get used to the game.

I know with Faster Than Light you could tweak stuff, I wish I could do it with this game.

just getting into pit...
I think good advice as said before is to not walk too much extra.
It kinda sounds... eh like boring or restricting.
But it can also seen as an element, the game has rules and you gotta follow them.
- Or cheat somehow :)
I find it now even better that I am watching my steps and my food-o-meter.

I haven't actually died of food but once I got from hungry to weak and that sort of drove me...
into madly looking just food and got chased and killed quickly.
At that point it kinda might be too late.

Now that I take care of the eating, it actually seems very easy not to go starving.
First two level-ups were brains and foraging. I even found some pistol ammo very early on.
And by the way of the recipes, you can pick the messages containing the recipes,
and not try to decipher them right away. You can try to do that anytime from the menu later on.
I am going to wait for a good success rate.

Oh goody, another "starvation simulator". I love roguelikes, but I quickly get tired of dying due to lack of food. How long do my characters stay in that dungeon anyway? Weeks? Months? I mean seriously, the rate of starvation is ridiculous and seriously detracts from the rest of the game. Oh, and increasing Might doesn't reduce food consumption. Raising the hunger cap is effectively pointless if the rate of hunger stays the same.

I've noticed that the random number gods are particularly fickle in The Pit. My #1 enemy has always been starvation, because there's never any food. It doesn't matter how efficiently I play if there's simply no food to be found anywhere.

I get the feeling that items and room types are COMPLETELY random. Some level of randomness is expected, but in order for the game to play properly, there needs to be a hard bottom as to the minimum amount of food on any given floor (or set of floors). This goes for other essentials as well, like ammo and weapons. That way you lose because your skill couldn't overcome the dungeon and not because you were doomed from the start because of a lousy die roll.

Of course, the more items that get added to the game, the less likely you are to be able to combine them into a better item. You could carry around a lobstercake for most of the game and never find the rest of the seafood platter. I think the code needs to be written so that item drops, while still random, are influenced by what's in your inventory.

I'm mainly just frustrated that I keep dying of starvation, which is about the lamest way to ever die in a game. I want to focus on delving into the dungeon and looting it, not skulking around eating mold of the walls. That's not epic. That's a starvation simulator. No thanks.

Hi all! I've played the pit for over 1000 hours and I've only died of starvation 3 or 4 times. That's I don't know how many hundreds of runs, 90-something percent of them not successful, but only a few deaths due to lack of food.

In light of these numbers, I have to assume that you guys have been extremely unlucky thus far, or are just not playing efficiently. You can't keep resting every time you get hurt, for instance, and expect to not run out of food.

What can you do differently ? Well, experience helps a lot. The more efficiently you attack your foes, the less you'll get hurt and the slower you'll run out of medkits and other heals. You might be surprised how differently it's possible for two people to play the same game, depending on their skill level. The Pit rewards players for being cautious and paying a lot of attention to their surroundings, including the sounds that enemies make when they're just hanging around, or moving to intercept the intruder.

Also, pay attention to how you utilize your level-up heal. You can use it on the enemy's turn, which means you can generally wait until you're in danger of dying before you heal to full. Only other thing you have to watch out for is double-leveling.

Then of course there's plotting an efficient course through each floor, skipping useless rooms (I don't even do this, but you might want to try if you're dying of starvation a lot).

Finally, but still very important, do you guys have all the food recipes? You can get much more out of each food drop if you know what other food items you can craft with them.

Not sure what else to say. The problem may be mostly that you're inexperienced and getting hurt needlessly. I dunno. If any of you feel like streaming/recording a run, I'd be interested to see why you're dying this way so often.

1. Some classes just go through food like mad. Striker, Mercenary, Warrior, and Shepherd have an extra hard time, and probably in roughly that order.
2. There are a lot of different resources that you have to balance against each other. If you have a ton of ammo but little food, then you probably didn't have enough foresight to fight aggressively enough and you probably took too much damage and rested too often. If you have food but no ammo, then you probably shot too much, and you probably should have been going into melee more often. And then there's also Psi if you have at least one expansion...

Anyway, it's hard. I've only won once on Normal, and I had Presence of Aias drop early. If you don't know what that is, it's just a really nice belt.

But you definitely have to save your level-up heals for later, and you can't rest every time you're hurt unless you've got a lot of surplus food, keeping in mind that you start out with a bit of a surplus and it can go fast. It *will* go faster than you can find it for a while until you can start completing Hero Sotswiches 10 or 15 floors later, and then you can maybe judge how you're doing long-term.