D&D: Five Ways to Not Starve to Death in the Forest
Lost in the wilderness? Out of rations? Don’t let your D&D character get exhausted, we’re here to help you survive the wilderness.
Bilbo Baggins had it right. It’s a dangerous business going out your door.
And that’s true in whatever world you live in. But doubly so if you’re in D&D. You’re only ever a failed check or two from getting lost in the woods. Assuming your DM actually uses those rules. Storms, monsters, and more can veer you way off course. But what do you do when you’re lost and the rations are running low?
Stretch Those Rations Out
There are rules for making a day’s worth of rations last longer – you can eat a half day’s worth of food and in theory, this should stretch out your rations. But don’t bother. It’s actually worse to eat only a half day’s ration, you waste survival time. Instead what you have to realize is that starving in D&D is extremely gamified:
A character can go without food for a number of days equal to 3 + their Constitution modifier (minimum 1). At the end of each day beyond that limit, a character automatically suffers one level of exhaustion. A normal day of eating resets the count of days without food to zero.
So all you have to do is eat once every 4 (or more) days. Suddenly your 10 rations go from lasting a “tenday” to actually lasting like a month out in the wilds.
Be Friends With an Outlander
Of course, the real way to beat the survival/foraging rules in D&D is to bypass them entirely. And in 5th Edition that’s ridiculously easy to do. For starters, all you have to do is know/be an Outlander and the whole party will always survive unless you’re in an area where there is no water or game or berries or what have you to be found.
Goodberries
Can’t ignore the part of the rules that say you have to actually be able to find the food you want to eat? That’s fine. That’s what magic is for. Goodberry is a spell that every single first-level Druid has access to, as do higher-level rangers and the odd subclass or human who took magic initiate because they wanted to pick up Shillelagh and decided to go for Goodberry to make sure they have to interact with as few rules in the game as possible. One spell slot will feed 10 people for a day.
Create Food and Water
If your DM is a real nose to the grindstone, grit-in-the-rules kind of DM and has taken your material components/arcane focus away so you can’t cast spells with Material Components (or if they house rule the spell to require you to actually have berries, which defeats the whole purpose of the spell), then you need to be a little bit higher level. Once certain spellcasters hit 5th level, including Clerics, genie Warlocks, Artificers, and Druids, they get access to this spell which lets them magically create food and water for up to 15 people, no components required.
Greater Restoration
If your DM has done everything they can to hit you with levels of exhaustion, well there’s not much we can do. The only option left is Greater Restoration which is fairly high level, but it will remove a level of exhaustion, so even if you’re at the end of your ropes, you can still sustain yourself on magic enough that your DM will get bored of trying to kill you and get back to doing it the old fashioned way.
Happy adventuring!
