Salad
Food · FoodDishVegetable0★Lettuce tossed with Tomato; grants a small temporary lift to work speed.
Salad is 10th of 20 cooked dishes by hunger restored, at 84 against the 738 of Special Cake.
It feeds no other recipe, which makes it a terminal item: craft what you will actually carry and stop there.
Details
It weighs almost nothing and stacks to 9,999, so there is no reason not to carry a full stack.
Lettuce
TomatoWhere to Find Salad
Salad is not something you find lying around — you craft it, and the recipe is below.
Using Salad Well
"Slightly" undersells it. The buff is +30% work speed for a flat 10 minutes, with nothing else attached — no hunger-drain cut, no defence line, no experience bonus. That is the same speed figure a Pizza gives, off two farmed vegetables instead of flour, milk and berries.
It is a Cooking Pot dish, so a Campfire will not take it — the pot unlocks at technology level 17 for 2 points and needs no electricity. The later kitchens cook it too: Electric Kitchen (level 41), Large-Scale Stone Oven (level 49) and Ancient Kitchen (level 70). There is no separate recipe unlock to buy; building the station is the whole gate.
One of the wandering food-request NPCs asks for a single Salad and pays out High Grade Medical Supplies for it. That reward is worth 3,120 gold against the 320 gold of vegetables in the plate, and it is the tier of medicine that clears the nastier status ailments — worth keeping a couple of Salads in the bag whenever you pass a settlement.
Cooking one costs 4,000 work — an eighth of what a Pizza takes and the cheapest route to a work-speed buff in the game. Both ingredients grow on a plantation, so a base with Lettuce and Tomato beds running turns out buffs indefinitely with nobody leaving to hunt. If you want more than +30%, every stronger option (Minestrone at +40%, Dumud Chowder and Mozzarina Hamburger at +50%) starts costing meat.
Trading Salad with NPCs
An NPC will take Salad as a hand-in and pay 1 High Grade Medical Supplies — worth knowing before you sell a stack to a merchant for gold.
Alternatives and Upgrades
Step up from here and you get Stew at 100 hunger restored; step down and it is Marinated Mushrooms at 60. The size of that step is what decides whether the crafting bill is justified yet.
Other cooked dishs at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:
