Best advice for new players is that the cooking system is kinda broken since complex recipes don't give you more than 1 item per craft.
This means that it's ALWAYS better both in terms of stamina per pot & items crafted per pot to just cook raw fish and meat and ignore everything else. Unless you want to make food specifically to feed the farmers, who are kinda... completely unnecessary to engage with at all, I've found, but if you have fun with more mobile game like timers / babysitting you might have fun with them! Of course, if you find crafting complex recipes to be fun, don't let efficiency stop you! I just like to warn new players because it's an easy trap to fall into that can greatly hinder your stamina management.
The nut feast comes so close to being worth it pot/stamina wise, but it just falls short because you can only ever make 4 at once, which will still get you less stamina than just filling a full 24 slot pot with fish.
Farming is mainly good for nuts and carrots, which don't unlock until deep into leveling... and it's better to feed them to wolves raw rather than cook anything with them.
Keeping the bear npc at fishing going fishing for you serves about all the food needs you could want unless you are specifically farming the campaign searching for wild wolves. It will take a little bit, days to weeks depending on how you spend your time, for your food stores to get high enough that you're comfortable with that. I looked for ways to avoid using stamina at all costs when I first started. No point rushing campaign, we have no ETA for chapter 2 (or communication from the devs about anything besides the automated weekly/quarterly posts), and chapter 1 is not going anywhere.
There is a mining pick apparel item that will allow you to mine without using the stamina of the wolf that's wearing it, I do suggest either aiming for buying it or gathering the mining tickets when that weekly event rolls around so you can eventually buy the recipes needed and craft it. If the latter, it will take a while, as it uses gold, requires an Ashes of Loria crafting item that costs 150k pebbles from the mole market, and requires a crafting level of 20. :/
For making money early on, here is a tip; level 10 wolves (the current level cap) can be released for 10k pebbles, which is paltry-- but they also drop a knucklebone token, which can be used in batches of 50 to generate a wild wolf hunt that will auto-give you a wild wolf so long as you have the den space to accommodate it. People will pay some moonstones for these, which is the ~premium~ currency (that I don't advise anyone to buy atm due to the state of the site, but you do you, it's your wallet).
The way to farm these tokens to make money is that there is a frog companion called a basidio that will award XP every hour (or every 2 hours for the green rarity version). Set aside some small area of your den, and for every dog you want to level via basidio, attach 2 other one-hour companions that give pebbles. This way, when the companions are all level 10, they will give you enough pebbles that you can use the play with Nana function in your den and not lose money. You won't be making a ton of money, but the goal is not to make money that way, just not lose it while farming tokens. At the very start, while you don't have a lot of space, you may want to forego playing with Nana and just manually open tabs and play with the companions.
Then when the wolves are level 10, release those bad boys and sell the knucklebone tokens they give you on the flea market after checking to see what their price looks like. This time of year, it's also a very easy way to get extra tickets for the quarterly events that happen, as you'll get 1 ticket for every wolf released (2 if it's your pack's holiday). This one only has a few days left on it, but you can at least get a taste for what is coming up next in January. The events are all the same, just reskinned for each pack, but we have thus far gotten new apparel sets and familiars with each one. They are just far enough apart to remain at least fairly engaging despite being the same, and are the main thing to look forward to on the site at the moment. :P
Final tip, the companions that come from these quarterly events also tend to give an outsized pebble reward for their rarity tier, making them uniquely valuable to you as a source of self-generated pebbles. So if you get nothing else from this year, try to get a couple of the chesire-raccoons before it ends. A lot of people will sell tickets the next couple days, and some might be willing to just help out a newbie. The community is pretty nice to newbies, as we would like more of them to stick around longer!
Final final tip: this is also very much a game where you have to find your own fun, cuz not a lot is happening otherwise. If you can get into complex breeding projects, all the better, 'cuz there are still a ton of unexplored and hard to find ranges for dogs here. Some may already exist, but without a dog search function we'll never know. :P Most of the activity here is user-run events, which are nice. They tend to be pretty enthusiastic about those that like to engage in that kinda thing, and seem mostly nicely thought out.
spoot
