In Kenshi, your character eats food automatically. All you need to do is have food in your inventory or on the ground nearby. You can buy food from traders in towns or travelling trade caravans. Once your character hits a certain hunger value they will automatically eat food. If there is a food type located in a squad members backpack or a pack animals backpack, any member of the squad can eat directly out of it if they are close enough.
If you are looking for a guide on how to feed your dog, click here.
Where can you buy food in Kenshi?
You can talk to traders in Kenshi in order to buy food. You must first select one of your party members and then right-click on a trader to begin talking to them. From then, select the option ‘Let’s trade’, as seen in the image above. This will open another screen where you can trade items from the character you initiated the dialogue with and the trader. Be aware that buying food in Kenshi costs Cats. You will either have to have something to trade for the food or some cash.
In the image above we are talking to a trader and purchasing one Foodcube for our hungry survivors.
When will my character eat in Kenshi?
Your characters will eat automatically when their hunger goes down to a certain threshold. They will only eat enough food to fill them up. Some food items may be eaten from multiple times, for example one food cube may have 3 separate characters eat from it, before it is used up, depending on how hungry they are. You character will automatically consume food that is in their inventory, in a nearby backpack or storage container or on the ground.
How often will my character eat?
Your characters hunger rate is influenced by multiple factors in Kenshi. As you can see in the previous image some of the effect are shown. If your character is walking around with too much weight for their strength level they will get hungrier quicker. Depending on your characters race they will have a multiplier to hunger as well, for example Sheks need to eat more often than humans, who have a base hunger level of 1x. The Hiver race will need to eat even less as their hunger rate is 0.5x, meaning they will get hungry half as quick as humans. Skeletons, on the other hand will never have to eat at all.
Why you should keep your party well fed
Keeping your characters well fed in Kenshi is an integral part of keeping them free of capture or death. When your character is hungry in Kenshi they will have a negative multiplier on some of their stats, regardless of race. For example in the image below, this Outlaw Farmer has a stat penalty of 0.88x. This means that all of the skills are multiplied by 0.88 from their base level.
Keeping your characters well fed will keep them alive! You can quickly see how hungry a character is by viewing their thumbnail at the bottom of the UI. As you can see in the image above, the yellow highlighting indicates that a character has a mild hunger. This ranges from yellow, being the least severe, to red meaning badly malnourished.
I hope that this guide has helped you figure out how to eat in Kenshi. If you have any more tips or tricks in the game let me know in the comments below.
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