Pokemon Scarlet And Violet

Eating food in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet can provide special buffs to help you on your Pokemon journey.

By James Carr on November 21, 2022 at 11:58AM PST

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet has players adventure through the vast region of Paldea, where you may occasionally want to stop and have a bite to eat. Eating food can provide some buffs to your gameplay, although the actual effects aren't immediately clear within the game. Here's everything you need to know about food buffs and picnics in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.

There are a large number of buffs available to get from eating food. These buffs seem to last almost indefinitely, not going away until the next time you eat food.

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The full list of buffs is:

With the exception of the Egg Power buff, all of these buffs will also come with a listed Pokemon type, so each buff itself only affects that specific type. If you are looking to have better chances of encountering a Charcadet for example, you would want the Encounter Power buff, specially marked for Fire-type Pokemon. Each buff has a level indicator as well, telling you how much of a boost you will get.

In each town and city found throughout Paldea, you can find restaurants and food cart vendors selling a variety of food for you to consume. All of these dishes come with three buffs and the combinations can be pretty interesting. While you can mark down where you found certain food dishes with certain buffs, the best method for consistent buffs is the picnic feature, where you can make your own sandwiches.

You can set up a picnic pretty much anywhere in the open world, as long as you are outside of a town. During a picnic you can play with your Pokemon in your current party or rest, but the big benefit here is the opportunity to sit down and make a sandwich. Of course, before you can really take advantage of this system, you need two other things; sandwich recipes and ingredients.

Both of these can be obtained in the many different towns and cities you can find in the Paldea region, as long as you know which two buildings to look for. The first one is the red sandwich shop, which has a massive sandwich logo on the building. Inside you can buy sandwiches to eat like other food vendors, but there is also a man standing next to the counter who will teach you sandwich recipes. He appears to learn new recipes after each gym badge obtained.

The second building is the blue-green sandwich ingredient shop that can also be found in most cities. It has the appearance of a deli counter and doesn't have an interior. There you can buy the necessary ingredients to make sandwiches. Each sandwich requires condiments, toppings, and a pick to hold the entire thing together.

Once you have the necessary ingredients, head out and set up a picnic. Once you pick your recipe, you will be faced with a sandwich construction mini-game where you need to construct the sandwich. This minigame appears to have zero effect on the quality of the sandwich, as even a custom-made monstrosity where the top bread didn't even stay on top of the sandwich still netted me three stars.

As for making custom sandwiches, you can build a sandwich with whatever ingredients you want, with no real limit on the toppings. This doesn't really seem beneficial however, since each sandwich can only provide three buffs and you won't know what you are getting with the custom sandwich until after consuming it.

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