Food Quality is a 1–10 rating carried by every meal. While you're Fed, your character holds a buff whose size scales with the average quality of what you've recently eaten — more max HP and stamina, and noticeably faster HP and stamina regeneration. Keeping that average high is a cheap way to boost your combat stats. For the profession that makes this food, see Cooking & Herbalism.
Quality is one of food's three characteristics, alongside Nourishment and Digestibility. This guide is about Quality — the trait that sets the size of your Fed buff.
Stomach status
Fed, Hungry & Starving — the buff only applies while you're Fed — watch the stomach icon:
- Fed — buffed. You gain the Food Quality bonus in the table below.
- Hungry — no buff. Eat something to get back to Fed.
- Starving — a −10% Health and Stamina debuff. Don't let it get this far before a fight.
The Fed-status buff
Each quality tier grants the same bonus to max HP and max stamina, but the headline figure is regeneration — at the top tier you recover HP and stamina 25% faster. Qualities 1–2 give only a marginal effect, so they're barely worth eating. The example hot foods are meals that typically land in each quality band:
| Quality | Max HP / Stam | HP / Stam regen | Example hot foods |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | marginal | marginal | — |
| 2 | marginal | marginal | — |
| 3 | +2% | +8% | — |
| 4 | +2% | +10% | Rye Soup, Porridge, some Roasted Meat |
| 5 | +2% | +12% | Scrambled Eggs, Roasted Meat, Spiced Carp |
| 6 | +3% | +15% | Bread, Broth, Stew |
| 7 | +3% | +18% | Mushroom Soup, Lentil Soup, Fasting Dish |
| 8 | +4% | +20% | Fish Soup, Knight's Kettle, Fish Mix |
| 9 | +4% | +22% | Grilled Salmon, Roasted Boar |
| 10 | +5% | +25% | Codfish Filet, Knight's Chuck |
Keeping your average quality high
Your buff isn't set by your last meal — it's the average quality of the most recent things you've eaten. That has one important consequence:
Don't eat filler
If you only have low-quality food on hand, it's often better to eat nothing than to drag your average down. Cramming in Quality 1–2 filler when no high-quality food is available will lower the buff you'd otherwise be keeping from earlier high-quality meals.
Eat it fresh, eat it hot
- Eat fresh, hot food for the best effects — most meals are at full quality only while hot.
- Food stays hot for 4 hours after cooking, then cools.
- Reheated food is higher quality than cold food — if a meal has gone cold, reheat it before eating rather than eating it cold.
For the full hot → cold → reheated quality falloff and exactly how reheating works, see Cooking & Herbalism.
Digestibility & gout
Every food is either Easy or Difficult to digest. Eating too many Difficult-to-digest foods gives you Gout — so vary your diet rather than spamming a single heavy dish.