Just a very basic suggestion.

Fact: Salt can be mined from the earth, or collected from seawater via evaporation.

Fact: Several of the new recipes require salt.

Fact: We currently have one extremely unreliable place to collect it: a small drop chance from a rare-ish encounter in a region that is difficult and annoying to farm in.

(Yes I consider the fact that the region still contains the first-level battle for a quest I completed a month ago to be Very Annoying. If the devs honestly expect us to farm there for materials/ingredients the absolute least they could do is remove completely superfluous encounters. I can't even sell the oats!)

Anyway. Salt. Pretty pretty please with sugar on top?

Additional fun fact: Roman soldiers being paid in salt is an [unsubstantiated myth]. The Latin sal meaning salt is apparently what salary derives from, but we're not sure why. This is news to me as well. The more you know!

Idm fishing, but I can't support mining. I already have to manually drop out 75% of mined stuff.

Also, while I find the soulbound oats pointless (can we at least cook them?), those mobs do drop dyes that I find nice.

i like these suggestions! they also make sense too as sources for salt, it shouldn't be so scarce.

I would love to have salt drop in the mines and in fishing. I think with those however, the salt block would be like the moonstones, so we're not needing to smelt down 5 of them for one salt item.

Sure, so long as it's not so plentiful as to become completely worthless overnight however, so maybe do just one of these and still make it relatively rare/restricted to one area?

Since currently no item in the game really has that much much value to other players with Very few exceptions, i still want the ability to specialize intact

since having One meta behavior in a Multiplayer Game isn't really a good thing to have, the more alternative specializations a player can have the better. So I won't be able to support this if it makes the cooking ingredients encounter completely obsolete.

No support for mining; I have enough issues getting enough stuff to smelt down, that would just make it worse. The moonstone shards are annoying enough tbh.

As long as they aren't super common in fishing, I can support that.

And yeah "does eat oats" needs to be removed. Dunno why it's still there (and so, so common, if it needs to be there, lower the rarity of it please).

support for fishing as a rare pull, no support for mining.. i can already find 8 things, i dont need a 9th to complicate my cart

Maybe salt can be an ‘extra’ drop that sometimes shows up in mining and appears in the smelted bar bucket, rather than an ore that needs to be smelted/dropped. I’d love that.

Or there could be a salt-specific area that is all salt and it doesn’t drop elsewhere, so players can choose ores.

I would like to throw in support for mining (as an extra drop during smelting, not as an ore) and/or fishing. Also, pleaseeee, the does eat oats encounter needs to be removed.

Huge support for Desnik's idea of a new mining area, dedicated to salt, making you choose to prioritise which is more important to you, salt or ore.

Salt is such a pain to get. (Even without Lotus' constant interruptions. lol) However, for me, it's not at all worth buying it from the FM (at the current prices), as I have enough food, that, while I would really like to be able to make more of the recipes requiring salt, I don't actually have a need to.