In Valheim food significantly determines how strong your Viking is. MeinMMO shows you the best foods with the strongest buffs and tells you which food combinations bring the biggest bonuses.
What is food good for? In Valheim, you don’t need food to survive – after all, you’re essentially already dead, as Valheim is the world after your demise. Instead, food provides you with buffs.
Food increases your maximum health, your maximum stamina, and the amount of health you regenerate regularly. Depending on how well and balanced your diet is, these buffs are better or worse. You can eat up to three different types of food at the same time and keep their buffs active.
The effect of food decreases over time, becoming weaker. Once the icon in your status in the lower left starts to flash, you can consume new food. As a rule of thumb: the more challenging the food is to make, the stronger it is.
The 5 best foods
These foods are the most worthwhile: There are five recipes that grant you particularly strong bonuses. However, you mostly learn these late in the game:
- Lox Meat Pie: +80 health and stamina each, 4 healing per tick, lasts 2400 seconds
- Serpent Stew: +80 health and stamina each, 4 healing per tick, lasts 2400 seconds
- Blood Pudding: +90 health and +50 stamina, 4 healing per tick, lasts 2400 seconds
- Fish Snacks: +60 health and +90 stamina, 4 healing per tick, lasts 2400 seconds
- Honey: +20 health and stamina each, 5 healing per tick, lasts 300 seconds
You can learn the Serpent Stew relatively early, as it only requires serpent meat. All other recipes you won’t learn until you can enter the Plains. Honey is on this list because no other food has such strong healing values. It is only worth consuming raw for this purpose – it’s better processed into mead for stronger buffs.
Where do I learn them? You should have already found most ingredients on your travels, and usually, only one ingredient is missing before you can learn the recipe. You can find mushrooms, honey, and thistles in the Meadows and the Black Forest. Blood Bags can be found in the Swamp with the leeches. In our guide, you can read how to survive in the dangerous swamp.
The serpent meat for the stew can only be obtained from sea serpents in the ocean. You can take them down by yourself, but it’s easier with a friend. A second player can harpoon the serpent, and you can jointly drag it to shore to take it down there.
Lox meat, as well as cloudberries and flour for the pie, can only be obtained in the Plains, the hardest of the currently playable areas. Flour is obtained by grinding barley, Lox meat can be found with the larger Lox (which you can also tame) and the berries are scattered throughout the Plains, such as raspberries in the Meadows. Flour is also an ingredient in the Fish Snacks and Blood Pudding.
For the Fish Snacks, you also need raw or cooked fish. You can get this with a fishing rod that you have to buy from the merchant Haldor. Haldor hides somewhere in the Black Forest and you can easily find the merchant on this map.
Recipes for all foods
These are all the recipes: For your convenience, we have listed all the recipes for prepared foods here. We left out simple foods like meat that is merely hung over the fire or raw mushrooms and berries, as these do not count among the best foods anyway.
- Berry Jam (x 4): 8 x Raspberries, 8 x Blueberries
- Carrot Soup: 1 x Mushroom, 3 x Carrot
- Sausages (x 4): 2 x Intestines, 1 x raw meat, 4 x Thistle
- Turnip Stew: 1 x raw meat, 3 x Turnip
- Bread: 10 x Barley Flour
- Fish Snacks: 2 x cooked fish, 4 x Barley Flour
- Blood Pudding: 2 x Thistle, 2 x Blood Bag, 4 x Barley Flour
- Lox Meat Pie: 2 x Cloudberries, 2 x cooked Lox meat, 4 x Barley Flour
- Serpent Stew: 1 x Mushroom, 1 x cooked serpent meat, 2 x Honey
How do I prepare food? To prepare food, you need a cauldron. You learn this as soon as you can enter the Black Forest and process ores there. You will need:
- 10 x Tin
- a forge (4 x Stone, 4 x Coal, 10 x Wood, 6 x Copper, and a Workbench)
You then must place the cauldron over a campfire or fire pit. You can interact with it as if it were a Workbench and simply produce the corresponding foods. Therefore, it is not necessarily worth making more than one cauldron unless several people want to cook.
You can learn how to mine Tin and Copper in our comprehensive guide for all ores in Valheim.
The 3 best food combinations for your travels
Since you can use up to three different foods at once, there are numerous combinations that result from the recipes. We present you some of the best combos.
The best stamina combo
- Lox Meat Pie
- Serpent Stew
- Fish Snacks
- total stamina bonus: +250
With stamina, you can attack more frequently and thus better strike or gather resources. Use this combination when you have a friend in the group who tanks bosses for you or when you want to gather ores and resources.
The best health combo
- Lox Meat Pie
- Serpent Stew
- Blood Pudding
- total health bonus: +250
With more health points, you can withstand more hits. Use this combination best when you want to play as a tank or venture into dangerous areas where you expect stronger or numerous enemies. Pay attention to the pesky mosquitoes, probably the most dangerous enemies in Valheim especially in the Plains.
The best combo starting from the Black Forest
- Turnip Stew
- Carrot Soup
- cooked meat
- total stamina bonus: +140
- total health bonus: +110
With this combo, you should be able to get through the game for some time and even survive the mountains quite well. Alternatively to the meat, you can consume berry jam, which gives you 10 more stamina and 10 less health. Once you reach the swamp, sausages are also worthwhile. These can be produced in large quantities and are comparably strong like Turnip Stew.
Bonus: The best combo at the beginning
- cooked meat
- grilled Neck tail
- mushrooms
This combo is best suited for brand new players because you can easily obtain all the ingredients. You only need the tails of the necks, meat from wild boars or deer, and mushrooms from the forest. With this combo, you reach 113 health points and a good amount of stamina to sprint longer or gather resources.
How to get even more out of your character
If you venture into heavier areas or want to specifically fight enemies, you should additionally supply yourself with mead besides food. Mead serves in Valheim both as a healing and stamina potion and as a buff against frost or poison damage. In our guide, you will learn how to ferment honey and make mead.
Additionally, you should always pay attention to your equipment. Pack strong armor and weapons when you set out. The best weapons in Valheim are listed here for you. The type of weapon you choose is also important – skeletons, for example, are vulnerable to blunt damage and resistant to piercing damage.
With our tips, you are otherwise ideally prepared to explore Valheim and face its dangers. The biggest challenges then are the bosses and their mechanics. We explain in detail how to find and kill each of the five bosses in Valheim.
