Welp... you can survive without smoked meat... but... ammm? I mean you still can make good, meat, vegetable soups or eating some other... am... bad things like human/goblin/abomination meat or even dirt... mhm... you can survive without 10 SURV stat just making other things or buying soups at the tavern guy or buying some bread/smoked meat/sausages/cheese into travel shop and do pretty much the same thing just spend more time doing it without SURV stat... amm... and the only place what i hate without 10 SURV stat is Abomination Land because without smoked meat it's very easy to get poisoned as well as losing all your MOOD stat... and if you try to cure yourself very often that could turn you into an medicinal herb addict which will only make things worse because there are no medicinal herbs in this place so you'll have to eat mutant mushrooms and parasite plants... and eating mutant mushrooms is problematic because you'll constantly make milk which will waste your stamina + stun in battles sometimes... soooo...
In short - Abomination Land is pain in the ass without 10 SURV stat sometimes...
About Woodson Family house -> If you don't kill them you can eat there for free all the time = 100% free good food (Don't answer the second dialog and just walk away).
- - - - And about the food search in general i realized some good things - - - -
1) Tropical Forest and Mountains is the best things for food + herbs (Boars are more common in mountains and tropical forests + Banana Trees and Apple Trees).
2) Swamps and Wild Forests are more often not so good because they are wasting your food and time especially if you don't have SURV stat at all (Wolves almost never drop much meat or they're not there at all... Still laughing when one wolf drops 1 meat but you tried to kill this wolf for 15-20 seconds and because of which you essentially lost more stamina than you gained by good soup. Thank you LonaRPG random).
3) Field, Beach and Swamp Forest are only very useful or if you have some vegetables or 10 SURV stat... (Because it's pretty easy to make smoked meat there... BUT don't forget there are no trees in the field so you should always go there with 2 pieces of wood or you won't be able to cook any).
4) There's also places like the Goblin Tower or the Deepones's Lairs where food often appears or even 100% without any SURV stat like dead animal corpses or pile of fish that you can pick up off the ground and get 5 meat just like in the Noer Arena (If there's a refugee camp nearby you can buy vegetables and make lots of good soup even without SURV stat... buuuuut... it's random thing... welp... yea... good luck).
5) Abomination Land actually like upgraded fields where a lot of food if you've got a bag full of medicinal herbs because all monsters are food and herbs save you from all negative effects (In general it is better at first eat a lot of food to 100% and then just drink a blue potion that will cure all diseases).
6) Some people don't know but practically some wood weapons can be used to smoke meat or dry food (Spear/Pitchfork/Sickle and even Bow and some others).
7) And in some places you can kill people with impunity and food drop out of them too (For example - Miners in a crystal mine).
8) You can also provoke 2-3-4 people to fight to the death just for food (Same way like - throw a rock at the second person behind the bar [You]---[№1]--->[№2 Your target] at Big Mom tavern).
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There are plenty of ways but the important thing is to moderate because two or three mistakes could go wrong and you will die~