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

The best food in Palworld ranked by real SAN and hunger values — why cakes top both charts, the everyday meals that keep a base sane, and the full hot spring ladder from Tech 9 to the Ancient Hot Spring.

Source: https://palworld-db.com/guides/best-food-for-san
Updated: 2026-07-23

A base full of miserable Pals grinds to a halt, and the two levers you control are what they eat and where they soak. 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](https://palworld-db.com/guides/alpha-hunting-by-level), it's the practical endgame staple:

| Meal | SAN | Hunger |
| --- | --- | --- |
| [Special Cake](https://palworld-db.com/item/Cake05) | 92 | 738 |
| [Extravagant Vegetable Cake](https://palworld-db.com/item/Cake04) | 90 | 717 |
| [Vegetable Cake](https://palworld-db.com/item/Cake03) | 87 | 696 |
| [Mushroom Cake](https://palworld-db.com/item/Cake02) | 84 | 676 |
| [Cake](https://palworld-db.com/item/Cake) | 82 | 656 |
| [Mammorest Curry](https://palworld-db.com/item/Curry) | 52 | 418 |
| [Broncherry Fried Noodles](https://palworld-db.com/item/Yakisoba) | 40 | 321 |
| [Mozzarina Cheeseburger](https://palworld-db.com/item/Cheeseburger_2) | 36 | 288 |

The cake catch: every cake you feed a hungry Pal is a cake that isn't in the [breeding chest](https://palworld-db.com/guides/how-breeding-works), 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](https://palworld-db.com/item/GrilledSheepHerbs) | 12 | 94 | Lamball Mutton + 2 Red Berries |
| [Salad](https://palworld-db.com/item/Salad) | 11 | 84 | 2 Lettuce + 2 Tomato |
| [Omelet](https://palworld-db.com/item/Omelet) | 7 | 67 | 1 Tomato + 2 Eggs |
| [Marinated Mushrooms](https://palworld-db.com/item/MarinatedMushrooms) | 7 | 60 | 1 Mushroom + 2 Red Berries |
| [Bread](https://palworld-db.com/item/Pan) | 4 | 27 | 1 Flour |
| [Baked Berries](https://palworld-db.com/item/Baked_Berries) | 1 | 21 | 1 Red Berries |

Salad is the classic feeder-box pick for good reason: both ingredients grow on a [plantation](https://palworld-db.com/farm) 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:

| Hot Spring | Tech Lv | Key Materials |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Hot Spring | 9 | 20 Wood, 15 Stone, 3 Aquatic Pal Fluids |
| High Quality Hot Spring | 31 | 3 Cryogenic Coolant, 10 Cement |
| Japanese-Style Hot Spring | 64 | 30 Coralum Ingot, 10 Thermal Core |
| Ancient Hot Spring | 76 | 100 Paloxite Ingot, 10 World Tree Holy Water |

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](https://palworld-db.com/guides/monitoring-stand) attacks the same problem from the other side by cutting how fast SAN drains in the first place.

> **Tip.** The SAN death spiral usually starts with an empty feed box, not a missing hot spring: no food means hunger, hunger means misery, misery means work stops. A plantation growing Lettuce and Tomato plus one cook on shift ends the problem permanently — the [early-game crew guide](https://palworld-db.com/guides/best-early-game-pals) covers who to hire.

## Related Guides

More base quality-of-life:
- [How to Use the Monitoring Stand and All Upgrades](https://palworld-db.com/guides/monitoring-stand)
- [All Cakes and Their Breeding Effects](https://palworld-db.com/guides/all-cakes-in-palworld)
- [How Breeding Works: Combi Ranks and Inheritance](https://palworld-db.com/guides/how-breeding-works)
- [Plantation crops: growth times and yields](https://palworld-db.com/farm)
- [Best Early Game Pals: First Catches for Every Job](https://palworld-db.com/guides/best-early-game-pals)
- [Full structures database](https://palworld-db.com/structures)


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Palworld Database — every number on this page comes from the game's own data files.