u/BlakeTheDrake

As a completionist, I of course had to get a complete collection of possible pets. And then, of course, I had to level them all to 20. In so doing, I've had the opportunity to learn a few things about doing so efficiently, which I will share here, in the hopes that it will benefit others. But first, let's just sum up three fundamental facts that inform my conclusions...

Firstly, you pet ONLY gains XP by being fed. Whether it's joining you in pulse-pounding combat, or spending the rest of its time snoring on a Pet Bed, is irrelevant - only mealtimes matter!

Secondly, while I could be wrong about this - I haven't tested it that extensively - it seems like the XP your pet gains from a meal is purely linked to that meal's Hunger Fill. Meaning, Thirst Fill is irrelevant, which also means that most soups, stews and so on make poor pet-food, since they tend to be balanced in that regard.

Third, your pet will get hungry every 8 in-game hours, regardless of how filling their last meal was.

So, from this, you can draw a simple conclusion - you need food with the highest possible Hunger Fill, if you want to level them quickly! Which leads us to an unfortunate detail about the Cooking-system. As you level up Cooking, you get a rather hefty bonus to Hunger and Thirst Fill for anything you fry or bake, but ONLY for that, and this benefit is COMPLETELY non-transferable. So, anything you prepare at the Chef's Counter isn't affected by your skill, even if it uses fried or baked foods as ingredients, as many such meals do. Now portionable food - cakes, pies, casseroles, etc. - DO allow this quality to transfer to the actual portions that you eat, but unfortunately, none of those portions have high enough Hunger Fill for this to really matter.

What this means is that a LOT of cooking-options just kind of plateau - they may be a decent fallback, or useful in particular situations, but they never get better. Cosmato Salad Wrap, for instance, often gets mentioned as an excellent source of food for you OR your pet, since all the ingredients can be farmed - but it has 51.7 Hunger Fill, and that is all it will ever have. Still, it can be a good fallback, since you'll never run out! By the same token, some of the more high-end portionable foods - Simple Pest Pie, Carrot Cake, Salted Honey Pie - will, at high Cooking-levels, reach a Hunger Fill rate of around 50, making them comparable while being highly resource-effective thanks to the Serving Seconds perk, and able to stack up to 6 instead of 4 as with most food-items. This may also make them useful if you're planning a long expedition and need to bring enough food for both yourself and a pet, while fitting it all in a single cooler-space!

However, the real take-away is that for optimum leveling, you need fried or baked foods with high Hunger Fill and no portioning. There are three stand-outs on that front - the shared 1st Place goes to the Fr-eyed Rice and the Egg & Peccary Tartine, with a close second being the Stuffed Roast Peccary. All three can easily clear 100 Hunger Fill at high Cooking-levels. Of course, none of those can be made with purely home-grown ingredients, but it isn't really far off! Rice, Egg, Tomato, Mushroom, Greyeb, plus Wheat and Milk for Bread, can all be grown at home - just make sure to tame a Peccary Sow for milking, and potentially a Mushroom Peccary for Mushrooms, allowing you to grow those even before you reach Canaan and get the ability to craft an actual Mushroom Farm.

What you'll be missing is Canned Peas, Salt, and Meat. Salt is easy enough to get, by several different routes, and if you care about cooking at all, you'll be grabbing it everywhere you go regardless. If you need a lot, though, Darkwater Fish make a good, renewable source! Canned Peas, meanwhile, is something you just need to make a habit of collecting any chance you get - there's a bunch in Flathill, right near the start, for easy collection after every reset, and a couple in the Witch's Hut in Canaan which you're likely to repeatedly visit for... other reasons, anyway, so why not grab those two while you're at it? You can also trade Root Beer for Canned Peas at the Security Station in the Office Lobby, so make a point of emptying every vending-machine you come across of Root Beer - and of course, you can also grab a can every time you take down a Security or Containment Bot! Considering all of that, you can easily get a huge stockpile.

So, all that remains is to just make sure to kill and butcher every Peccary you meet, for Drumsticks to stuff and Peccary Chops that you can grind into Sausage. Or, if you really want to optimize, just stick with the Fr-eyed Rice, which needs only home-grown veggies and Canned Peas, along with the Egg & Peccary Tartine, in order to avoid having two dishes compete for a limited supply of Peas - especially since the Stuffed Peccary is slightly inferior to the other two. Just means you can leave all those Drumsticks to rot, I suppose!

Honorable mention goes to the Silky Fish Florentine - the third-place finisher. It tops out at just shy of 90 Hunger Fill, which really isn't bad, though it also comes in quite late, since the Silken Betta is one of the last fish you're likely to catch. Still, you can make two Florentines per fish, and the rest of the ingredients are home-grown, so if you caught a bunch anyway - perhaps while trying for that elusive Gossamer Betta - you can do a lot worse than turning it all into a smorgasbord of Florentines. Just keep in mind that it'll be competing with the Egg & Peccary Tartine for Milk, and with the Stuffed Roast Peccary for Mushrooms...

I've been coming back to Canaan regularly to collect the Lodestone, pick corn and apples from the fields, pick up some silver at the marketplace, fish for eel from the pier, etc. But what bugs me is how ISOLATED the Swamp is! The rest of the area has plenty of shortcuts and stuff you can unlock, but the swamp is at the end of a stupidly long and winding route, and unless I've missed something, the closest thing to a shortcut it has is that one zipline across the broken bridge - which is one-way only, of course. I'm plotting out a future portal-network as I go, for when I'm able to craft Teleporter Pads, and it honestly seems like it I want convenient access to both the swamp and the rest of the area, I'd need TWO just for that one Portal World! Which seems a bit unreasonable...

My question, thus, is whether there's any way to make the Swamp area of Canaan easier to reach, short of Telepads and maybe the Jetpack? I recently unlocked the Longjump Pack, but it doesn't really seem like it can go up high enough to clear the broken bridge from the lower end. Maybe it's possible to 'rebuild' the bridge using ramps and bridges? I haven't really used those much, or AT ALL, so I'm unsure of their limitations. Or, have any other clever-clogs come up with a convenient way of reaching the swamp without a huge detour across a bridge, down a ladder, fighting through multiple unavoidable enemy encounters, through a cave, across the water, and up a bucketvator?

As my flair suggests, I'm playing as a Paratheoretical Physicist. Which means I get bonuses to thrown weapons! However, Throwing is by far my LOWEST skill at this point, because I just can't seem to find any practical throwing-weapons to use - not since Throwing Darts stopped being relevant - and I'm at the Hydroplant now! All the options currently on my table eat up resources that are way too much of a pain to farm, basically.

Thermite Molotovs? Eats through Anteverse Gel, meaning more time spent raiding the Fungal Zone, especially since it's needed for a BUNCH of other things too - including the Boiling Distillations, nowadays. Electron Grenades? Eats through Capacitors, which - while hardly rare - are bothersome to acquire in that sort of quantity, since the primary source for them is hunting Electro-Pests. Throwing Quills? Uses Magnetic Alloy for some unholy reason, HARD PASS! Grenades? Only obtained through drops, so way too rare for general use. Throwing Crystal? Easy to make, but too weak to be worth using even when they first became an option.

Honestly, it seems like Mugnades are still the most practical option, somehow, and those are a pain too since the only real way to get the requisite mugs is to just stand at a coffee-machine and feed a ton of ones to it. Would be nicer if you could pick up coffee-machines and move 'em to your base, but as it is, it's kind of a hassle! Meanwhile, the single most renewable throwable resources - Kerespheres - is COMPLETELY useless, if not actively an obstacle. =_=

Chemistry seems to offer a batch of new throwables, and I haven't experimented extensively with those yet, but none of them seem promising? I tried making some Concussive Flasks, but as it turns out, they do zero damage and basically just bounce enemies around a bit.

I finally got around to making a couple of Pest Wheels - mostly just 'cuz they seemed like a good place to stash some of my growing collection of bespoke Pests, granted. By the time I accessed the recipe, they already looked like an inferior solution compared to just... using batteries, y'know? But, at a glance, they seemed like they'd have some niche applications, maybe powering a base if you just NEEDED to put one somewhere that doesn't have an outlet nearby. But that was when I assumed that they generated energy continuously.

After making a couple, and hooking them up to some base defenses, I quickly realized that the little buggers will only spin the wheel for a few seconds, generating a brief burst of power, then revert to lazing off - and seemingly the only way to get them spinning again, is to take them out of there, then stuffing them back inside. Even charging up a Makeshift Battery like that is a huge hassle. Indeed, they seem so bafflingly useless, that I have to consider the possibility that I'm missing something obvious...

As the title says, I'm on the Security Sector. I've tangled with the Reaper several times - first with the XRay Lamp, then with the Energy Pistol once I'd made one. I reached the storage where there's a ton of crates, and got a bunch of Sensors out of them. So far so good! I found the journal, and the rift leading back to the Laboratories, and got the Canaan gate up and running again. Cleared that world, though it wasn't easy...

But now, I just... don't know what I'm supposed to do anymore. I guess I'm supposed to make the Keypad Hacker Tier 4? I found designs for it in an e-mail this time, though, where all the previous versions have come from an NPC telling me that I have to get through some tougher security and pointing me at some particular gate I need it for. And in this case, I have no idea where I'm supposed to USE it - I haven't noticed any Tier 4 keypads, at least not recently. More to the point, I need a bunch of Magnetic Alloy to make it, and I don't HAVE any - I only found a SINGLE piece, when I wound up in the Night Realm while raiding the Security Storage and stumbled on a long blue crate in one of the jail-cells. I suppose that'll respawn, but that takes several days, so that's hardly practical. Same can be said for trading Night Essence to the guard in the Office Lobby.

Basically, I get the feeling that I've missed some area of the Security Sector - which, presumably, is where you find Magnetic Alloy, and also the Tier 4 keypad I'm supposed to hack my way through. But I'll be damned if I can find it - though of course, searching for a missed door or passage isn't easy in a place that's permanently Stygian, and where any hunt is frequently interrupted by a visit from the Reaper...

EDIT: A'right, I think I'm back on track now! Thanks for all the guidance.

For a bit now, I've observed two separate pets - first a Tareccary then an Alpha Peccary - get stuck in a deathloop of sorts. They keel over, I revive them, and then their health immediately starts dropping faster than it regenerates, leading to them dying again some twenty or thirty seconds later. This can go on for five or six deaths, before it USUALLY clears up... anybody else noticed this, or have any idea why it's happening?

My first notion was some kind of DoT-debuff that lingers after death - bleeding, acid, that sort of thing. I'm currently exploring Canaan, so there's a bit of it flying around! But, while I'm seeing a vaguely acid-esque particle effect around the pet, the Acid Burn debuff shouldn't last more than a second and a half. To make things more complicated, the first time I noticed it happening was in the Security Sector, after fighting the Reaper... who, AFAIK, doesn't have any kind of DoT effects on hand.

Perhaps it's a bug? I've only seen it happen to Peccary-variants, and taming those is still a pretty fresh option.