Best Food for SAN and Hunger: Top Meals and Hot Springs

A base full of miserable Pals grinds to a halt, and the levers you control are what they eat, where they soak, and how fast the meter falls in the first place. Every number below is the food's real restore value — SAN on one side, hunger on the other — so you can stop guessing which meals actually keep the workforce happy.

The Best SAN Food in the Game

Cakes own the entire top of the sanity chart — even plain Cake restores 82 SAN, and Special Cake peaks at 92 — but there's a catch covered below. The best non-cake meal is Mammorest Curry at 52 SAN and a monster 418 hunger fill, and since its meat comes from a level 38 alpha you can farm on repeat, it's the practical endgame staple:

Meal	SAN	Hunger
Special Cake	92	738
Extravagant Vegetable Cake	90	717
Vegetable Cake	87	696
Mushroom Cake	84	676
Cake	82	656
Mammorest Curry	52	418
Broncherry Fried Noodles	40	321
Mozzarina Cheeseburger	36	288

The cake catch: every cake you feed a hungry Pal is a cake that isn't in the breeding chest, and cakes are the only food breeding accepts. Most bases are better off eating Mammorest Curry and banking the cakes — bake for the farm, cook for the crew.

Everyday Meals That Keep a Base Sane

You don't need curry-tier cooking for daily upkeep — you need cheap meals with better-than-berry sanity. The pattern in the numbers: anything cooked beats raw ingredients (Baked Berries restore just 1 SAN), and two-ingredient dishes are the sweet spot:

Meal	SAN	Hunger	Made From
Herb Roasted Lamball	12	94	Lamball Mutton + 2 Red Berries
Salad	11	84	2 Lettuce + 2 Tomato
Omelet	7	67	1 Tomato + 2 Eggs
Marinated Mushrooms	7	60	1 Mushroom + 2 Red Berries
Bread	4	27	1 Flour
Baked Berries	1	21	1 Red Berries

Salad is the classic feeder-box pick for good reason: both ingredients grow on a plantation with zero hunting, so a couple of planted rows keep the trough full of 11-SAN meals forever. Herb Roasted Lamball edges it slightly if your ranch keeps mutton flowing.

The Hot Spring Ladder

Food restores SAN when Pals eat; hot springs restore it whenever they soak, which makes them the passive half of base morale. There are four tiers, and the official line on the top one says it all — the Ancient Hot Spring offers the highest SAN recovery of all and restores Health on top:

Build the first one the moment you hit Tech 9 — it's the single cheapest fix for early-game mood spirals — and upgrade whenever the materials stop hurting. The Monitoring Stand line attacks the same problem from the other side by cutting how fast SAN drains in the first place.

The Generator That Slows the Drain

Meals and springs put SAN back; the Alpha Wave Generator makes less of it leave. It unlocks at Tech 41 for 3 points and bills 40 Refined Ingot, 20 Circuit Board, 10 Corrosive Solvent and 20 Paldium Fragment — one payment, then every Pal at that base loses sanity more slowly for good. Build exactly one: it covers the camp it stands in, and a second unit does nothing at all, so the only decision worth making is which camp gets it. Give it to the base running ore, coal and the assembly lines, where shifts are longest and mood slides fastest, and let the quieter breeding or farm camp lean on food and a spring instead.

Its sibling five levels later follows the same rule. The Beta Wave Generator arrives at Tech 46 for 40 Pal Metal Ingot, 30 Circuit Board and 5 Bio Battery and raises base work speed rather than protecting sanity — also one per base, also no benefit from a second. Between the two, 50 Circuit Board is the real gate — that is 100 Pure Quartz and 50 Polymer through a Production Assembly Line — so start banking quartz a few levels before the tech points land.

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