There are several types of food your character can eat in Valheim to boost their health and stamina. Your character can eat up to three different foods. Your stomach will be full after that, and you’ll have to wait for one of those meals to wear off before you can eat another. It’s important to consider what foods you eat because each one offers a unique health and stamina boost. Are you fighting a boss? You probably need more health to survive their attacks. Are you visiting an area where you’ll be running and jumping a lot? You should probably stack up your stamina to prepare for that. We’ve broken down the best combinations for you to try in Valheim.

Blueberries, mushrooms, and raspberries

When you first begin your journey in Valheim, cooking food is a bit of a chore. You need to use the resources you can find around you in a moment’s notice to use whatever energy you can to beat the earlier enemies wandering the Meadows and the Black Forest to build a home. The quickest resources available to all players are Raspberries, Blueberries, and Mushrooms. These are things you can find in the Meadows and the Black Forest, and quickly scarf down for a small boost in health and stamina. These are far from the best, but they’re good in a pinch.

  • Blueberries: 15 health, 20 stamina for 600 secondsMushrooms: 15 health, 20 stamina for 600 secondsRaspberries: 10 health, 20 stamina for 600 seconds

Blueberries, cooked meat, grilled neck

For the mighty hunters who prefer meat in their stomachs, you can always go after the local wildlife. Just don’t be surprised when they bite back. There are plenty of creatures to hunt in the Meadows when you’re first starting out. The biggest prey you can go after are the deer, but we highly recommend you have a flint spear or a bow to use against them. Otherwise, you’ll find that running up to them with a club is only going to scare them and drain your stamina. You also want to go after the lizard creatures wandering around in the waters, and the boars running around. The boar and the deer have the same type of meat when cooked, so combine the cooked meat, with a cooked neck tail, and the blueberries, and you’re good to go.

  • Blueberries: 15 health, 20 stamina for 600 secondsCooked meat: 45 health, 30 stamina for 1,200 secondsGrilled neck tail: 35 health, 20 stamina for 1,000 seconds

Honey, carrots, and yellow mushrooms

When you’ve become a bit more experienced in the Black Forest, you’ve probably adventured into a few burial chambers and walked out with the yellow mushrooms. These are slightly better than the regular red ones you’ve been grabbing. You can combine these with honey, another resource you can find inside beehives. If you’ve captured a queen bee from these beehives, you can use them to create a personal beehive that you keep inside your base. These regularly produce honey you can eat or use to create mead. Another resource you’ll find in the Black Forest is carrot seeds. You can plant those at your base and harvest the carrots, which you can eat raw.

  • Carrots: 15 health, 15 stamina for 600 secondsHoney: 20 health, 20 stamina for 300 secondsYellow mushrooms: 20 health, 20 stamina for 600 seconds

Queens Jam, carrot soup, turnip stew

When you’re trying to force your way through the Swamp biome, you’re going to face plenty of obstacles, and there’s a lot of creatures here who can harm you with poison damage. You want to obtain as much health and stamina as possible to survive these fearsome attacks. For those looking for a good boost of health, there are plenty of resources you can gather together from the Black Forest. You can bring them all together to create the Queen’s jam. This requires raspberries, blueberries, and honey. It’s a worthwhile investment for the amount of health and stamina you receive. You can use this alongside the carrot soup and turnip stew. The soups are far better than the raw food, so we highly recommend creating these using the cauldron.

  • Carrot soup: 20 health, 60 stamina for 1,500 secondsQueen’s jam: 30 health, 40 stamina for 1,200 secondsTurnip stew: 50 health, 50 stamina for 1,600 seconds

Cooked fish, cooked serpent, and sausages

After you’ve adventured around your starting location enough, you’ve probably located the trader, Haldor. They have a wide variety of items to sell to you, and an important one is the fishing rod. You can use this to catch fish and add it to your regular resource of cooked meat. Cooking fish does yield a few more benefits, though, and it’s slightly easier to find. We recommend you use that, plus some cooked serpent meat. The cooked serpent meat is pretty difficult to find unless you use a harpoon on a sea serpent and keep it pinned down. We also recommend you create sausages, which you can do if you’ve spent enough time wandering around the swamps.

  • Cooked fish: 45 health, 25 stamina for 1,200 secondsCooked serpent: 70 health, 40 stamina for 2,000 secondsSausages: 60 health, 40 stamina for 1,600 seconds

Blood pudding, lox meat pie, and serpent stew

For those who want to gather up the biggest health meter you can manage in Valheim, this is the combination you need to use. Blood pudding is an item you can make once you acquire barley flour. You can make it once you’ve acquired a windmill and you’ve stolen plenty of barley from the fuling villages. Lox meat pie is another food you’ll need plenty of barley flour to create, so you want to make sure you have a lot of it on hand. Serpent stew is the only meal on this list that doesn’t require any ingredients from the Plains, so you should be able to make this much earlier, probably when you’re still stomping around the Swamps biome.

  • Blood pudding: 90 health, 50 stamina for 2,400 secondsLox meat pie: 80 health, 80 stamina for 2,400 secondsSerpent stew: 80 health, 80 stamina for 2,400 seconds

Fish wraps, lox meat pie, and serpent stew

If you want food that gives you a big boost of stamina, you want to go with fish wraps, lox meat pie, and serpent stew. The big difference from this list is the fish wraps, which you can acquire by gathering cooked fish, and barley flour. You can stock up on the cooked fish pretty early in Valheim, but the barley flour will be one of the final ingredients you can make.

  • Fish wraps: 60 health, 90 stamina for 2,400 secondsLox meat pie: 80 health, 80 stamina for 2,400 secondsSerpent stew: 80 health, 80 stamina for 2,400 seconds