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« on: September 06, 2018, 07:23:21 PM »
Note that turnips, mushrooms, and berries are all on the pretty-low end of nutritious. (145 calories / pound for turnips, 132 for mushrooms, and 73 to 222 for berries).
I spent a bit of time collating all the nutrition of foods to figure out what was worth gathering. A summary:
Crops
Barley and rye are both highly nutritious, at greater than 1000 calories per pound, and hemp seeds are nearly as nutritious. Hemp seeds can be used as seasonings, but barley/rye need to be ground into flour to be eaten, so will take a bit of extra processing. Broad beans and peas are decent, at 490 and 367 calories per pound. Of the two, broad beans just produce a lot more weight per plant, and so I usually grow those for preference. Turnips and hemp leaves are filler - it's worth keeping them on hand (turnips are good trap bait) but very hard to live on them.
Of wild plants that can be grown, nettle, yarrow, and sorrel are all low-nutrition (36-186 calories per pound), but clayweed is up with barley, rye, and hemp for being fairly nutritious (1125 calories per pound).
Wild Edibles
As above, wild mushrooms don't have many calories (132 / lb), but they can be worth gathering since it doesn't take much time for a reasonable weight of mushrooms. Berries are comparatively lightweight (10 bushes for most to gather a pound) and take a long time (5 minutes per bush) so that in many cases you burn more calories gathering the berries than the berries are worth. Cloudberries are the best - they're large, so they're twice as heavy (5 bushes per pound) and have the best nutrition (222 / lb). Other berries I only gather if I want to use them to bait birds into my traps.
Lake reed is up there with the grains as a nutritious crop, at 1089 calories / pound. It's also wildly overabundant in the vanilla game (1 lb reed per plant, due to an error with the coding). Well worth gathering a bunch in autumn for the winter. It's also grindable into flour, and can be eaten as a vegetable. Marsh calla and bogbean are decent (939 / pound) but have to be boiled to be made palatable. Other wild plants vary. Some like meadsweet, goldenrod, and heather have almost no nutrition (18 / pound) and are only useful for their medicinal properties. Others vary around the lowish to midrange of plant nutrition (~200 to ~600 calories / pound). Milkweed isn't half bad, and mother and bear pipe are both quite useful both for calories and for their medicinal properties.
Fish and Meat
Fish vary a fair bit, but are in the middle range of nutritious. The least nutritious fish is the pike-perch, at 290 / lb, and the most nutritious is the salmon, at 585 / lb. The biggest benefit of fish is that they are generally pretty big, and so you'll get a fair bit of food with just one decent size fish - a whole pike is 2433 calories, enough to sustain a man under not too heavy exercise for a day.
Meat varies quite a lot as well. The most nutritious meat is bear, at 1057 calories per pound, and several tie for least nutritious at 395 (including squirrel, dog, lynx, and badger). Elk and forest reindeer, the most likely catches, are middling at 503 and 581 / lb. Fat is by far the most nutritious (raw) food available, at 4082 calories per pound.
The other benefit of fish and meat is that you can dry or smoke them, which not only preserves them, but concentrates the nutrients as well. It is actually slightly non-physical right now, but dried meat is 1/10th the weight and 10x the nutrition, while smoked meat is 1/8th the weight and 8x the nutrition. You can get all the way up to dried bear meat, which has 9934 calories per pound (twice that of raw fat!)
So in summary, plants are among the most nutritious foods in the game (barley & rye flour in particular), but not all plants are equal. Things like turnips, berries, and mushrooms, while easier to gather, are really only worthwhile for stretching out the supply of more nutritious foods.
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