Provisions: Food, Drink & Kampō
Updated 2026-07-19
Taro Bay runs on what you cook, brew and steep. A hot meal keeps your health up, a good drink steadies you, and the apothecary's bench turns wild herbs into remedies for the hunt. This page is the field guide to all of it — what each provision does, and which skill makes it.
Two slots you carry at once
You can keep two consumables active — one food and one drink — and they work side by side:
Eating or drinking a new item replaces whatever is in that slot, so a fresh dish overwrites the last one rather than adding a third stack. From your inventory you choose how many to consume in one go — several of the same item simply add up their durations, so a stack of five gives five times the length of one. Top up before a buff runs low, because starting a new batch gives up whatever time was left on the old one.
Food: the meal restores you, the ingredient flavours it
Cooking is modular. Every base recipe — Onigiri, Soup, Sashimi, Sushi, the Feast Tray — takes one fixed part (rice, sometimes seaweed) plus your choice of an edible ingredient, and the ingredient decides the dish's character:
- The recipe sets how much health the meal restores. Bigger, higher-level dishes heal more — an Onigiri is a snack, a Feast Tray is a banquet.
- The ingredient lends its own identity buff on top, and a higher-tier ingredient makes that buff a little stronger.
So a Crab Onigiri and a Fugu Onigiri are the same recipe with different souls: both restore the Onigiri's health, but the crab adds defence while the fugu adds vitality. Pick the recipe for the healing, pick the ingredient for the buff you want.
What each edible lends
Every edible ingredient carries one game-wide identity. Each identity appears twice — once low, once high — so you can chase the same buff as you level:
| Ingredient | Tier | Lends |
|---|---|---|
| Sardine | 1 | Agility |
| Clam | 1 | Spirit defence |
| Crab | 1 | Defence |
| Daikon | 1 | Vitality (max HP) |
| Mackerel | 1 | Speed |
| Sea Urchin | 2 | Attack |
| Carp | 2 | Parry |
| Abalone | 2 | Defence |
| Squid | 3 | Agility |
| Reef Fish | 3 | Speed |
| Oyster | 3 | Spirit defence |
| Tai | 3 | Parry |
| Tuna | 4 | Attack |
| Fugu | 5 | Vitality (max HP) |
Two of these — Mackerel and Reef Fish — carry the Speed identity, so a Mackerel or Reef Fish dish is the meal to cook when you want to gather and craft faster. The rest are combat identities (attack, defence, parry and the like); their bite arrives fully with a coming combat update, but the dishes exist now, restore health now, and trade now.
The plain Onigiri on the trader's shelf is the exception: it's a starter snack that restores a little health and lends no ingredient buff — handy on day one, outclassed by anything you cook yourself.
Drink: tea keeps you quick, sake steadies your spirit
Brewing runs two drink lines:
- Tea is the tempo drink. A cup of Green Tea gives a flat speed bonus — the reliable idle-worker's cup, brewed cheap and early. It stacks with a speed food and with speed on your gear.
- Sake steadies your spirit. The sake ladder climbs from Amazake and Doburoku through Junmai and Ginjō up to Daiginjō and aged Koshu — each rung restoring more spirit, the reserve your combat techniques spend. Its full effect lands with the combat update; the brew, and the Kōji starter it's built on, are here today.
Because speed lives on the tea (and on speed foods), and sake is about spirit, an idle gatherer's pairing is a speed dish plus a cup of green tea; a hunter's pairing is a restoring dish plus a sake.
Kampō: herbs for the hunt
The apothecary's bench — also Brewing — turns the Kampō herbs you cut while Woodcutting into remedies. Like cooking, it's modular: a base preparation plus your choice of herb, and each herb lends its own word:
| Herb | Lends |
|---|---|
| Yomogi | Mending |
| Dokudami | Purifying |
| Sanshō | Keening |
| Kuzu Root | Warding |
| Mannentake | Stillness |
There are four preparations, climbing in level:
- Decoction — a steeped brew, the entry rung.
- Salve — an ointment rubbed on to shake off a wound. This one works today: any salve clears a hunt's recovery or injury on the spot (see Combat), and you can mix one from Brewing level 25.
- Blade Oil — an edge treatment for your weapon.
- Incense — a rolled stick lit before the hunt.
These are not food or drink — they don't sit in your two buff slots; they're combat provisions. The salves already heal; the decoctions, blade oils and incense exist and stock today, but their effects arrive with a coming combat update. Either way a herbalist can build the whole supply chain ahead of the fight.
The speed formula
Speed bonuses — from a speed food, from tea, and from equipment — are percentages that all add together:
speed multiplier = 1 + (sum of all speed % ) / 100
Your action time is your base time divided by that multiplier. A base
10-second action with +6% from a Mackerel dish, +3% from green tea and +6% from a
suit runs at 1 + (6 + 3 + 6)/100 = 1.15× — so about 10 s ÷ 1.15 ≈ 8.7 s.
Faster actions mean more repetitions, more items and more XP per hour. A bonus
that names all speeds up every skill; one that names a single skill helps only
that one.
What happens when a buff runs out mid-session
The length of each repetition is locked the moment that repetition begins. So if a buff expires part-way through a batch, the repetition already underway keeps its faster time, and only the repetitions that start after it ends run slower. A buff you ate before logging off is honoured for its full duration even while you're away — no repetition is ever cut short or retroactively slowed. See Action Queue & Offline Progress.