Salem Humours and Gluttony Guide

Salem Humours and Gluttony Guide by Sevenless

The gluttony system is by no means a simple thing. It has probability, purity, four event categories. The works. To a new player this can seem overwhelming, even with the helpful (if tiny fonted) tutorial that pops up for you. Lets start our review with a brief discussion of what humours do for you, and why you want them.

Blood

Blood is often considered to be a “dump” stat by many players. Very early on (5->20 or so) the stat is incredibly easy to get because *many* forageables and forage based recipes give blood as a primary attribute. I’ll get into details of what I’m referring to by “primary” later on. Furthermore, blood doesn’t have many direct uses, so the benefits are somewhat hidden.

Blood is lost when picking thorns, when failing to light a fire with a tinderdrill (this seems to be a % of your total though, so raising blood has no influence), and when taking damage in combat. The difference between being able to solo a beaver compared to someone who can’t early game is quite heavily influenced by your base health and ability to take a beating. A 10b 10yb character can’t kill a beaver in a straight up fight, but 20b 10yb can quite easily. By no means am I suggesting to pump any stat 10 above the others (yet again, will explain why later), but the point stands that blood has uses. PvP warriors can see the obvious requirements for the stat I’m sure.

Phlegm

Phlegm is the work horse stat of the four. This stat is drained when doing nearly any crafting action: digging, building, chopping, crafting items. Just to name a few. It’s also used by the run and wander movement modes, which are quite crucial at some points in time. Without phlegm heavy duty work like terraforming is nearly impossible to do in any timely manner. For the warrior side of things, phlegm is required to bash down structures such as walls and claim defenses.

Yellow Bile

Yellow Bile is by far the most combat oriented stat in the game asides from perhaps blood. Yellow bile is directly responsible for your damage dealt with your various aggressive attacks, and is used in small amounts in some of the movement styles. Most attack moves have a fairly small base damage, so pumping this number for hunting either creatures or other pilgrims is a must.

Black Bile

Black Bile is an interesting stat. It is roughly equivalent to your “state of mind”. Activities like studying inspirationals will lower it. This might seem small, but the speed of studying is directly proportional to the amount of BB you have left out of your total. So studying 1BB worth of inspirationals at 100BB will only drop you to 99% study rate, but with 10BB it’s a 10% reduction in study speed. At low levels this means you’re eating every minute or two and significantly hampers your ability to study effectively. BB is also used when placing structures. This can be quite draining in the case of long lines of fences, and some of the more costly buildings actually require a significant amount of BB to place (If I remember correctly, a windmill took 7.5bb to place).

In combat currently Deer and Bears are able to cast an ability that drains BB. Since hitting 0 in any of your stats is a KO, this obviously puts requirements for BB minimum levels in order to fight these creatures one on one. Furthermore, BB is the base value for raiders to use when committing crimes. All crime actions against a claim have BB costs, and claim defenses attack the BB stat of the intruders. This naturally means that raiders will not be combat weakened when dealing with claims, but they can get KOed quite easily if they make a mistake or get delayed while under fire from braziers.

I’m currently unaware if any of the player based moves influence BB levels.

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To erstwhile mayors: Don’t forget your noobs!

Now that we’ve reviewed the different humours and what they do, lets talk about an over-all need to level humours. Even the lowliest of villagers should aim for 20 stats just to avoid food waste. For things like BB, you never really want to drop below 50%, because your studying starts to crawl at that speed. In order to go from 50->100%, you need food that’s the right size. For a 5 stat new character, even purity 1.00 waxing toadstools are overkill and result in lost healing. Higher stat characters also regenerate more quickly (regeneration seems to be a % of your total/time unit). This is important for heavy work like digging, and for living in the Darkness, where the regeneration currently seems to have a flat penalty against it. This means where low humours characters can’t survive, higher characters still could.

Suffice to say, you’re saving yourself food in the long run by ensuring there aren’t 5 stat characters wandering around trying to do work.

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How the Gluttony System Works

Gluttony mode is activated when you fill all of your humour bars to the full. You then click on the green circle that is your humours. At this point you will get the almighty fork of feasting as a cursor, and may commence to gobble food to your heart’s desire. Food may be eaten from the inventory or from an open container, but moving will break the feast mode. If you ever get to this point, another character can come along and dump food into the open container in question if you so desire.

When food is consumed, it has a static amount of time it takes to consume. This is very important because some foods are very slow to eat. Many meats fall into this category, cooked meat and plank steaks as some easy examples. Why is this relevant? As you feast the gluttony points you earn are steadily drained away. As time passes, a “varience penalty” to the right of the humours ball will start to tick upwards. The higher the varience penalty, the faster your points will be drained. It’s quite easy when eating just one food type to get to a point where gluttony points are drained faster than they can be produced by eating the food. And it should be evident at this point that slow to eat foods are generally speaking a bad thing here. Each unique piece of food that you eat pushes the varience penalty down by one point. Roasted bear cuts and roasted rabbit cuts are both considered unique for example. As are Bear steaks compared to bear cuts.

So how does this earn you more humours you might be asking. If you manage to get enough points to fill the bar for one humour type, you will earn a point of humours for that particular category. The size of the bar is equal to your highest stat, so raising stats in large batches is going to cost you more food in the long run. At first there’s little harm in raising humours 5 points at a time until the 20-30 mark, after that it becomes much more difficult to raise stats and more care should be taken.

Now here’s the complicated bit. Each food has four different events. These events correspond with the elemental purities. That is to say, if you had a Witch’s Hat that is 100% salt (purity multiplier of 10), you will always get the salt event. Furthermore, the base stats of the Witch’s Hat for that event will be multiplied by the purity multiplier as well. In the case of the Witch’s Hat, you’re still out of luck because the salt event actually gives no Gluttony points of any kind. If we had a Lead Witch’s Hat however we would get 120 points of black bile and 30 points of yellow bile. An incredibly potent food there, sadly they only come in the bland purity 1.00 variety.

This raises a second question as to what happens if you eat said mythological Witch’s Hat as a 5 stat beginning character. Do you get YB or BB? Some say that it goes to the lowest stat (or random if they’re equal). But to be honest, I’ve never noticed that. Without running specific tests, I assume that the points are distributed randomly. And this means that filling two bars at the same time is a bad idea because it might push up a humour you don’t want to go up just yet.

This takes us into the discussion of reliable vs unreliable foods. The witch’s hat is a reliable food. In all of the events where it gives gluttony points, it gives more black bile than anything else. So if you eat a crate of witch’s hats, the only stat you will get is BB, assuming your stats aren’t low enough to double fill a bar. Most reliable foods tend to be rather modest in their stats. Unreliable foods are a completely different ballpark. Usually they have higher base values, but the primary gluttony they give out varies by the event that is randomly selected. Bluebeary gives B/YB with a salt event, just YB in a mercury event, just B in a sulfur event, and just BB in a lead event. However, the base stats on these events are 17.5-35, compared to the max value of 12 on a Witch’s Hat. Of course, Bluebeary is also harder to acquire, but the Witch’s Hat is probably the best singly foraged food item in the game.

This is all fine and dandy for foods with 1.00 purity, like all of the forageables and hunted meats. The situation gets… well messier when you start to include the fact that as a player we can influence purity to a degree. More so as the game progresses from what we’ve been told. Currently we can influence farmed food purities by growing seeds and carefully selecting which purities are replanted. Now when we’re looking at Oatmeal Crackers for example, their primary input is Oatmeal, which we can play with. If you started raising your cereals and pushing them to lead purity, the oatmeal crackers give a base of 9.5 BB. If we got our crackers up to 2.00 purity, that means we’d see 19 points of BB coming from them on a lead event. Mercury based crackers of the same purity would have a preference towards blood as mercury events would give 18 points towards Phlegm.

Purity multipliers influence *ALL* food events. So a mercury cracker will still give 19 points of BB if the lead event happens, the lead event is just less likely. The 2.00 purity point is reached roughly when you have 50% of one element, and a mixture of the other three. Using the example from the wiki, 20% salt, 50% mercury, 15% sulfur and 15% lead gives a 2.02 multiplier. What this means is we will get mercury events half the time, and other events half the time. For oatmeal crackers, both salt and mercury give blood, while sulfur and lead give black bile. Since our salt + mercury concentration pops up more than 50% of the time, oatmeal crackers of this type should give primarily blood. Yes I know it’s complicated, I’ll leave you to stew over the more intricate concepts on your own though. There’s just too many food types to analyze in this manner fully at this stage of the game. Each crop type that you choose to level a certain element in takes a significant amount of work to do so. And furthermore we don’t know which of the non-farming ingredients we’ll be able to increase in purity yet. Hopefully I’ll have more to say as the system is more developed.

Your First Sin – Beginning down the path of a Glutton

But lets bring this back to the beginning for all the newer pilgrims out here. Just started the game, how do you get those crucial first points of humours to make your life easy? Black bile is always my first target since it lets you skill up more quickly, getting you those initial foraging skills. To do this, simply keep ~10 spaces free in your inventory and wander between berry bushes until it’s full of black berries. Feast when you’re full up and repeat until you have 10 BB. At this stage, advanced movement modes just drain too much of your humours to really use except perhaps foraging, so a good target to aim for next is phlegm. Phlegm however is not an easy stat to get as a beginner. Milkweed roots and Wild garlic are the only singly foraged items that give P reliably. The real keys to unlocking easy P foods is the ability to hunt rabbits (roasted rabbit cuts and steaks are excellent beginner P foods) or the flowers and berries skill. The flowers and berries skill unlocks the wild salad recipe which is incredibly reliable for P gains. I would suggest aiming for rabbits if you have an option, mainly because grinding for flowers and berries at that stage in the game is fairly difficult compared to getting small game hunting and field dressing.

Now that we have nibbled some BB and P food, it’s time to raise our B and YB. As I said, blood should be an easy one. Berry-on-a-Straw are excellent for reliable blood gains and should be more than enough to level you to 10 points. Lavender Bluets also give blood quite often when eaten on their own, with a hint of yellow bile. But they have a much more important use for you in raising said yellow bile. The only good pure YB food early game is beaver steaks, and those are nearly impossible to acquire with the stats your character would have right now (15B 15YB is about where you might start hunting them solo). Your other option is Wortbaked Warbites, but those are a pain to make and serious overkill for a character with 5 YB. So we’re moving up the food chain and into what I call “Humour Diets”.

Since there’s no easy to make food that will give us YB, we’re just going to have to use two foods that give us YB. If Lavender Bluets are eaten alone, they will give you 80-90% blood and a little bit of YB. If Shrooms and a Stick are eaten alone, they will give you 50% YB, 50% BB. However, at purity 1.00, both give less than a full bar of stats to a character with a max humour value of 10. If you eat one Shroom on a Stick, and one or more bluets, you will gain 100% YB. The reason being the “side attributes” each food type gives. For the bluets, it gives more B than YB, but not by much. For the Shrooms on a Stick, it gives YB and BB in roughly equal amounts as an average. But when we put them together, you get 2 doses of YB, 1 dose of B, and 1 dose of BB. The net result is that neither the B nor the BB are able to fill their bars, but the YB can without any competition. And voila, we have perfect YB gains from two foods that would give YB on average 25% of the time if they were eaten one type at a time instead.

At this point, I think you have enough information to start looking at food combinations yourself. Remember to look for foods that give the same gluttony point type across all events, and preferably the higher the better of course. Unreliable foods can certainly be used, but you’d want to have a chest with the correct foods to raise whichever humour the unreliable food gave you points in. Food combinations get easier as you go up in points since you can spread out the other stat gains into multiple categories very easily. A Fish in the Reeds and Shrooms on a Stick are a bad YB combination for example since both give YB and BB. But if they are but 2 of 6 recipes you’re eating, likely that’s not a huge issue. Also remember that the higher your humours, the more recipes you *should* be using as the varience penalty will become a very big issue. Any recipes giving towards the humour you want and taking away the varience penalty are very useful to you.

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