Potions, Food and Drink

What counts as a consumable

Anything you double-click in your bags that gets used up. In practice that is five groups, and they behave differently enough to be worth separating:

Two rules apply to all of them. You cannot use a consumable from your bags while you are in combat: put it in your deck first. And you cannot use one while mounted.

Consumable Power, and the refused potion

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and it is not explained anywhere in game.

You have a stat called Consumable Power Bonus. It starts at 1.00, and every health, focus or restoration potion you drink multiplies its own effect by it. It also docks itself by 0.25 for thirty seconds every time you drink one.

So the fourth potion in half a minute takes you to zero, and the fifth is refused outright. You get a message telling you your consumable power is too low. Wait for the penalty to lapse and you are back to full.

The practical reading: chugging is already heavily taxed. Two potions back to back cost you a quarter of the second one. If a fight is going badly, a single strong potion beats three weak ones by a wide margin.

The two elixir skills

Two skills change what consumables do for you, and they cannot both be trained. Learning either one sets the other to untrain, and the game tells you so when you try.

Extension climbs considerably faster than Receptive does. If you live on hour-long buffs, Extension is the better buy; if you fight out of potions, Receptive is, and it also softens the drinking penalty in section 2 by giving you more headroom before you hit zero.

Duration applies to anything the game treats as a consumable, so it stretches your food and your drinks as well as your potions. It does not stretch an instant heal, because there is nothing to stretch.

The six food slots

Food does not stack indefinitely. Every meal occupies slots in a shared budget of six, and heavier dishes take more than one.

Eat past six slots and the oldest meal drops off to make room, and it drops as many as it needs to. Two three-slot dishes fill you completely. Six pieces of fruit also fill you completely, and are worth a great deal less.

Drinks sit in the same budget as food, so a beer costs you a slot you could have spent on a stew.

Health, Focus and Restoration

Three ladders, five rungs each, sharing one naming convention. Lesser at the bottom, then the unsuffixed potion, then Greater, Imbued and Aether. All three are instant.

Potion of Health

Potion of Focus runs the identical ladder, restoring focus instead of health, at the same prices.

Potion of Restoration

Restoration does both at once, at roughly 60 per cent of what the single-purpose potion gives on each side. It is the better buy when you need both and the worse buy when you need one.

Attribute elixirs

Three potions, each raising one attribute for an hour and lowering the other two. The penalty is easy to miss and it is not small.

These are for a build that leans hard on one attribute. If two of your three matter, the trade is close to even and you are paying 500 gold for very little.

Resistance potions

Four schools at a time, for an hour. The elemental potion covers Fire, Water, Earth and Air; the magic potion covers Life, Death, Sun and Moon.

There is a PvP variant of each, sold as of the Obsidians. They last two minutes rather than an hour, and they buy their resistance by taking it off the other half: the magic version gives +25 across Life, Death, Sun and Moon and takes 30 off the elemental four. Read the tooltip before you drink one in a fight you did not choose.

Other potions worth knowing

The regeneration potions are the best value in the list by a wide margin if you are somewhere safe enough to let them run. They are also the worst value in a fight, because you only ever collect the few seconds of them you survive.

Food

A cooked dish gives you four things at once, and they scale together. Out-of-combat health and focus regeneration, a smaller combat regeneration, and usually a flat rise to your maximum health or maximum focus.

The combat numbers are the ones that matter in a fight, and they are roughly a third of the out-of-combat figure. A dish listing 6 health per second is giving you 2.25 while something is hitting you.

The strongest dishes in the game

Pumpkin Soup is the best meal a player can cook. It matches Dragon Stew on every regeneration number and costs a fraction as much to make. Dragon Stew's advantage is that it runs eight hours instead of four, which saves you eating twice, and it carries a little damage resistance on top.

Flat health and focus

Separately from regeneration, many dishes raise your maximum. This is a different axis and it does not track the regeneration numbers at all:

A big flat grant and strong regeneration rarely come on the same plate, and you have six slots. A common answer is one dish for the pool and one for the sustain.

Food that does something else entirely

A large part of the cooking book has nothing to do with fighting. Dishes carrying gathering, refining, cooking or experience bonuses are a crafter's tools, and they occupy the same six slots. Baked Pacu raises four fishing levels and your fishing range. Obsidian Bacon improves field dressing. Several cakes raise your skill learning speed.

Drink

Brewed drinks give one buff for an hour and a short spell of intoxication. Five of them carry something a fighter wants:

The rest of the cellar is for crafters. The aged whiskeys improve mining, forestry, field dressing, smelting, tanning and textiles depending on the vintage; Elven Brandy speeds up agriculture batches; Paladis White Wine reduces your fizzle chance and Kobold Spirits raise spell critical chance.

Every drink also raises Intoxication Level for fifteen seconds. The 25 Year Whiskey raises it by ten, which is fifty times what an ale does. That is the joke, and it is also a warning.

The level it was made for

Consumables are being given the adventurer level they were balanced for, and the tooltip will say so. At or above that level you get everything on the label. Below it you get a proportional share, and never less than a quarter.

The tooltip carries two new lines. One naming the level the item was made for, and, only when you are below it, one telling you what percentage you are getting. The effect numbers above them are already reduced to match, so what you read is what you will get.

The reason for the change is that a consumable used to do exactly the same thing at every level. A character an hour into the game could drink the strongest potion in it for full value, which left no reason to buy anything but the top tier and no progression in cooking at all.

What is not being gated

A good deal, deliberately:

• 1Bound potions. An item that cannot be traded cannot reach someone it was not meant for, so there is nothing to gate. Every bound potion works at full strength for everyone.
• 2Torches, and pet food. A torch is bought for light and the attunement comes along with it. Pet food buffs the pet rather than you.
• 3The Immortality Fruit. It already locks itself out for a day, and that restricts a veteran exactly as hard as a newcomer.
• 4Anything for crafters. Gathering, refining, cooking and experience buffs are untouched. A dedicated crafter can spend a whole career at a low adventurer level, and taxing their food would land on exactly the people it is for.
• 5Scrolls, dyes, bait, fireworks, cures and the growth potions. Nothing there has a strength to reduce.

How the level is decided

Potions tier by the ladder already in their names. Food and drink tier by how strong the buff is. An eight-hour dish is not automatically ranked above a four-hour one: a long buff means you eat less often, which is convenient rather than powerful. Pumpkin Soup ranks near the top of the food list because it is the strongest meal in the game, not because of how long it sits on you.

Two changes come with it. The top health, focus and restoration potions used to add a slice of your level on top of their listed amount, uncapped, which barely separated a new character from a veteran; that has been folded into the printed number, so an Aether Potion of Health now reads 525 to 625 rather than 400 to 500 plus a fraction of your level. And brewed beer, wine and whiskey have never counted as consumables in the code, which means Consumable Duration Bonus has never lengthened a single drink. It does now.

This page is one of a series of player guides at catnipgames.net/blog/guides. It describes the game as it stands on 23 August 2026, with the one exception marked in section 11, and will be kept current as things change. If a number here does not match what you see on screen, say so in the comments below and it gets fixed.

Questions and corrections

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