Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General A Fairly Definitive Guide To All The Foods In BG3 Early Access

Okay, so I recently finished a 100-hour playthrough on a single character, in which I gathered almost everything of any value from the entire EA game. That included an awful lot of food items. I decided it would be cool to list them all, and determine how much each of them heals for. So I spent a few hours testing in my camp, which unfortunately meant I had to stab and burn Lae'zel hundreds and hundreds of times so she could continuously stuff herself with food to heal up. Since I only had 1 or 2 units of certain foods, I had to re-load my save and keep doing it over and over. But now I have datums to share!

(I know, the plural is data, but datums is fun to say. Go ahead, say it out loud right now. See?)

I managed to find 53 different food item types, and a total of 662 individual items across those 53 types. Actually, I found a bit more than that. 662 is how much I had left at the end of the playthrough. I ate food VERY sparingly though, so probably didn't consume more than about 10 food items in the whole playthrough. So maybe I found about 670 or so all together.


Here's what all that food looks like gathered together in an inventory:



(A few of the items don't stack properly, so some of those are actually duplicate icons of the same item type.)


As you can see, all that food is really heavy! This character has NOTHING on her except for food, no equipment at all. So I probably found over 750 POUNDS (this is Imperial measurements, not Metric, by the way . . . hold on, doing some quick math . . . okay, about 340 kilograms) of food, just in the Early Access area of the game. That seems like a lot.

But what about the results of my testing? Right, here we go. On the left, you see the number of that item that I found (minus a very few that I ate), and on the right, you see the range of healing amounts that I got from that item, each item having been tested between 8 and 16 times. They are ordered in descending order of healiness. (It's a word, get off me.) Leg of Mutton is the champion of foods! Too bad I only found one of them.


662 food items across 53 food item types:

1 x Leg of Mutton - 9-16
11 x Pig's Head - 7-15
6 x Grilled Pork Belly - 7-15
3 x Whole Chicken - 5-14
7 x Roughly-Cut Ham - 7-14
13 x Pork Loin - 7-14
6 x Pork Shoulder - 7-13
10 x Grilled Pork Ribs - 6-12
1 x Potato Wedges - 6-12
1 x Gruel - 7-11
1 x Mashed Potatoes - 5-11
2 x Fish Tail - 5-11
3 x Fish - 5-11
1 x Fish Fillet - 5-11
1 x [Basic Fish] - 4-11
2 x Potato Porridge - 4-10
1 x White Bread - 3-8
3 x Sourdough Bread - 2-8
18 x Waterdhavian Cheese Wheel - 2-8
8 x Sunmelon - 2-8
2 x Pumpkin - 3-7
1 x Spicy Sausage Links - 3-7
3 x Dried Sausage Links - 2-7
2 x Carnival Squash - 2-7
2 x Coffee - 1-4
1 x Milk - 1-4
3 x Tea - 1-4
78 x Red Apple - 1-4
1 x Green Grapes - 1-4
1 x Kiwi - 1-4
17 x Lemon - 1-4
1 x Sunmelon Half - 1-4
15 x Orange - 1-4
39 x Pear - 1-4
40 x Garlic - 1-4
2 x Cabbage - 1-4
65 x Carrot - 1-4
1 x Onion - 1-4
138 x Potato - 1-4
3 x Sweet Potato - 1-4
14 x Zucchini - 1-4
2 x Bagel - 1-4
4 x Baguette - 1-4
8 x Butterbun - 1-4
17 x Waterdhavian Cheese Wedge - 1-4
1 x Chicken Egg - 1-4
2 x Rotten Chicken Eggs - 1-4 (no ill effect)
46 x Dried Pork Sausage - 1-4
2 x Dried Rope Sausage - 1-4
46 x Spicy Pork Sausage - 1-4
2 x Dried Beef Sausage - 1-4
1 x [Basic Drink] - 1-3
3 x Raw Steak - cannot eat


So, looking at these numbers, it seems most likely to me that foods are built in four tiers. They seem to heal for 1d4, 2d4, 3d4, or 4d4 hit points, respectively. My numbers didn't always hit that full range for each item, but it's reasonable to assume that they COULD have, just by analyzing the patterns.

So, this isn't 100% proven, but I think it's quite likely that the following is true, based on my testing:

4d4 HP foods: Leg of Mutton, Pig's Head, Grilled Pork Belly, Whole Chicken, Roughly-Cut Ham, Pork Loin, Pork Shoulder

3d4 HP foods: Grilled Pork Ribs, Potato Wedges, Gruel, Mashed Potatoes, Fish Tail, Fish, Fish Fillet, [Basic Fish], Potato Porridge

2d4 HP foods: White Bread, Sourdough Bread, Waterdhavian Cheese Wheel, Sunmelon, Pumpkin, Spicy Sausage Links, Dried Sausage Links, Carnival Squash

1d4 HP foods: Coffee, Milk, Tea, Red Apple, Green Grapes, Kiwi, Lemon, Sunmelon Half, Orange, Pear, Garlic, Cabbage, Carrot, Onion, Potato, Sweet Potato, Zucchini, Bagel, Baguette, Butterbun, Waterdhavian Cheese Wedge, Chicken Egg, Rotten Chicken Eggs, Dried Pork Sausage, Dried Rope Sausage, Spicy Pork Sausage, Dried Beef Sausage, [Basic Drink]


So there you go, and now you know. Did anyone find any other foods I didn't include here?

Whoa, I had no idea Waterdeep was so famous for its Cheese Wheels & Wedges. They must have a special breed of dairy cows over there. I wonder if the full release of BG III will have a sub-quest related to the Waterdhavian Cheese Factory?

My favorite icon shown here is the onion ... that image is just perfect. But that makes me wonder about my all-time favorite icon from BG I & II, the Goodberry. Will that be in BG III? Those beautiful lush purple/blue berries, bursting with torrents of sweet tangy flavor to restore mind and body ... for a total of 1HP.

You missed the dwarf meat in the goblin encampment. It also heals for quite a bit.

Man you took it upon yourself to dissect this game lol

Apples and cheese, apples and cheese, all my character eats are apples and cheese.

I bet everyone has probably given Astarion Garlic to eat.. garlic and onions ... so when he tries to sneak up to bite you you'll smell him before he's able.

Lae'zel likes lemons. (because that's fun to say)

Bruh, now I feel a lot less original for having force fed Astarion all that garlic

Thanks for the thread OP!

An interesting guide, thanks!
OP, you forgot about the "special" apples in the swamp next to the teahouse, add information about them please

Oh yeah, I never looted the dwarf meat because I was grossed out by the thought of it.

Oh right, another thing I never looted. I knew those apples were sus from the outset, so I never picked any up.

We are waiting for the update of the theme with dwarf meat and strange apples

Nice. Can we please get rid of ALL of it? PLEASE?

As if the game needed sixty more things cluttering our inventories even more to cover the exact same function.
On top of books, letters, and keys, of course.

I agree, honestly. I was kind of angry when I saw how many food items there were in the game. I was like, "Why did they have some developer spend THIS MUCH time making different foods, when they could have been making something actually interesting and/or relevant to D&D?"

A lot of people might say, "If you don't like having all those things in your inventory, just don't loot them." But they have function within the game, and it FEELS bad (for some players, at least) to just NOT loot things which are potentially useful. It's like leaving money on the table.

I ended up shoveling off most of the food to my camp stash, but that's not really great either, because then your stash is clogged up with a million items that you will probably never use, but which it feels bad to just leave behind.

Food shouldn't even heal, really. And if it's going to heal, it should NOT be eatable in combat. "Hold up a second, Mr. Bulette, I gotta take a moment to dine on this rack of ribs real quick."

If they gave each food a sort of "nutrition value" and then made it so you had to consume a certain amount of food per long rest, then it would have a point and not mess up the basic design of D&D by providing unlimited free healing to everyone.

To be clear, I'm not even asking to eliminate their function (and there could be an argument for that too, but that's ANOTHER discussion to have).

I'm simply saying that we absolutely do NOT need sixty versions of it.
If you really want food in the game, give us ONE generic resource called "food", or "rations" or whatever else.

Make managing these bags and their content less of a nightmare, because right now that's how it feels like. A goddamn chore.

Personally, I'd probably just make "food" an abstract resource counted in a corner of the UI (think of Lords of Xulima as reference) and make it necessary for short and long rests (and so consumed on these).

I really like the idea of an abstracted food counter. Like, you could still have ALL the million types of food items sitting in the game world and able to be looted. But as soon as you loot them, instead of an icon going into your inventory, it just raises that food number by X amount. That would be nice and clean.

I actually like the food, especially the meals. I get hungry just looking at some of these.

Mmm... spicy wedges.

I had the same thought about those potato wedges, haha. They do look good.

I'm in awe. +1 inspiration point.

I think one of the developers took a picture of their lunch and put it in the game. Looks very appetizing

Awesome work, thank you!

Some of the porky items are obviously placeholders. I think I got a pork shoulder off the owlbear. .. I also picked up a pigs head from somewhere that definitely wasn't piggy related. Heads in general I find kind of gross to carry around so I just dropped them. I kind of hate it when video games make you take heads for a bounty or something and all I can imagine is how disgusting it would be to be carrying a head around in your backpack. Squeamish Mercenary would be a class that I could really excel at. "Eww, .. sorry, sorry, sorry" would be my battle cry.