Food, snacks and meals and well-being

As you get older, in terms of Avalon years and experience level, you will need more food to sustain yourself. Food comes in two types - solitary quick-sustenance snacks and full meals. Snacks will slake your hunger but not your physical well-being, which will gradually deteriorate unless you eat a full meal regularly. Full meals slake both hunger AND keep you at full capacity, though your appetite will allow you but one full meal (without dessert) per Avalon timezone, or one dessert-inclusive meal every two timezones. You will find if you allow your physical well-being to deteriorate too much your health, mana, skill usages and general performance in the land will be subject to all manner of very evident weakness.

Syntax: EAT MEAL or EAT MEAL WITH <beverage or container with beverage>.

Examples: EAT MEAL WITH MILK, EAT MEAL WITH TANKARD.

Full meals are cooked at stoves, generally by kindly souls from city or guild with Respected (or above) Labours skill. They are made from ingredients, many of which can be the snacks you find about the land. Often a cook appreciates being brought ingredients, to make light work of the provision of the repast. Desserts are an optional extra, but its inclusion will augment the restorative qualities of the meal greatly - the two courses being greater than the sum of their parts. If you include a beverage with a rich vitamin content (milk, cider and the like) you will further augment the sustenance value of your meal. Consider each component as offering 1% of a body's entire wellbeing, so with a dessert you hit two percent and with a beverage you strike at 3%. Employing the Survival skill of 'sustain myself' can take this up as high as 4% from a single meal - the very maximum attainable at one sitting.

Thus: subsist at times on snacks, by all means, but breaking bread with your fellows over a full meal is always the more worthwhile; doubly so as eating in a group augments, even further, the diverse (and not simply physical) boosting effects of the meal. Snacks and ingredients for cooking full-scale meals can often be found in shops and stalls, or via the employment of Farming and Labours skills. Fresher raw materials are also of benefit to the finished meal, thus fish newly caught, or bread newly baked... these make for a superior repast to some year old fishcake alongside a mouldy roll.

See also HELP COOKERY for details on the specifics of cookery ingredients, and HELP WELLBEING for the impact of well-being on your character.