Despite the recent addition of a consume button, Starfield players argue eating food still feels completely “worthless” when trying to heal.
DLSS support wasn’t the only long-awaited addition that hit Starfield’s 1.8.86 update. The patch also introduced a “consume” button for food and drinks, which lets players eat consumable items as soon as they see them in the game world.
Previously, taking a snack break required users to add the item to their inventory, open the menu, and click on the consumable to eat it. Most viewed it as a few too many steps for something as simple as munching on a sandwich.
And to make matters worse, the process rarely felt rewarding since eating food did little to boost a character’s health. Has the all-new “consume” option changed things in this regard? Not according to the Starfield community.
Starfield fans think eating food is still useless despite new button
A Reddit user posted a video of their Starfield character well below half-health, but wading through a sea of floating packaged steaks. One would assume that eating a handful of hearty steaks would restore the character to full health – that wasn’t the case, however.
As the Redditor demonstrated in the three-plus-minute video, dozens upon dozens of steaks were needed to completely heal the protagonist.
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“The new update allows us to eat on the fly but I have to eat 100+ steaks to fully heal,” reads the text that accompanied the video.
A quick read through the comments shows other players believe update 1.8.86 did nothing to quell their food-related frustrations in Starfield. “An hour later you’ll be hungry again…” one person said in response to the above post.
Someone else echoed past sentiments from the community, saying Bethesda needs to buff the amount of healing that food items can restore. “They really need to buff some things like the amount of healing food/drink gives you (make it restore like 5% health over a few seconds or something)…”
Despite the recent addition of the eat button, Starfield developers have yet to detail how else this functionality may improve in the future. Players would do well to rely on standard healing items like Med Packs and Trauma packs for the time being.
