Guide/Hunting & Gathering

Last updated for version `1.8.0-BETA-7`

🌀 *The content below transcludes to Special:WhatLinksHere/Guide/Hunting & Gathering.*
You can trade, produce and you can **hunt** for food. Every time you go hunting, your hunting skill increases and you get meat that is both edible and inedible. Both depend on your knowledge which is defined by Hunting skill. An inexperienced hunter gets next to nothing in the game, while someone with a lot of experience gets everything. Chances of getting food from animals 1-100 = 10-100% and creatures 1-200 = 5-100%. So higher skill means more food, up to twice the loot of food! Investing in hunting is also good to increase your Workshop Trading level, at least to 1 point..

💡 **Tip:** Increase your Hunting skill via active Skill Gain and/or through some points in Hunter perk and you gain more food items per enemy (animals, creatures, insects ...).

Radstags and Brahmin are great animals to hunt for food early game since they are easy to kill and dont fight back oftentimes. Also mole rats around Red Rocket Truck Stop and its More Rat Den, Starlight Drive-In, Robotics Disposal Ground offer even more mole rats.

Super Mutant locations are great too if you gain access to their meat bags, which will supply you with lots of random meat. With high hunting skill later, basically all animals offer high food loot and every hunt becomes a profitable business.. because you chop up the meat and sell it.

**Gathering** for food is much more easier, for this you don't need any skill except a little Jump 'n' Run skill. Worth mentioning are the eggs of Mirelurks, which can be found in very large quantities, especially on coasts and some caves. Mirelurk Eggs are of all food items the ones that can be acquired whole without fighting, so become an *egg thief*. Especially at the beginning of the game you can easily walk around the Boston Orbit and collect all the eggs you encounter. More than 100 eggs per run are possible, Omelette until you drop. Early game, run to the eggs, bring the hatchlings to hatch, collect them and throw a molotov cocktail or run away for a moment, run back and grab the eggs and keep running without fighting the mirelurk crabs. It doesn't matter if mirelurk are in the vicinity. If you do it skillfully, you can get to food very easily.

All Raw Meat (edible) is called "Meat Scraps" which you get more or less from hunting and slaughtering your enemies, you can grind into Ground Meat. Ground meat is generic raw meat that can be used to cook generic meals in the Cooking Station. There are two types of ground meat:

* animal (mammals)
* exotic (insects, amphibians, etc.)

💡 **Tip:** Every crafting action in the cooking station will raise your suvival skill by 0.01 skill pts.

Inedible meat is called "Gristly Meat" or "Diseased Meat" and both cannot be used for any cooking recipes, but can be converted to Compost and later to Fertilizer. Gristly meat can be used to craft Fishing Bait.

Of course you can eat irradiated food too, but you have to live with the consequences that the radiation bar increases. With Desolation Mode, the pressure on the player increases even further by making everything more scarce, loot becomes less.