The food ecosystem was first introduced on the 28th of June 2017 in this following Content Update. It features consumable fruits that give essence when eaten by animals, diversifying the ways of obtaining essence in the game.

This guide aims to clear up anything relating this food ecosystem! If you know anything about about food that is not present is this guide, please let me know so I can add it!

There are 2 main sources for food introduced in this update: fruit trees and berry bushes. We will be looking at how they diversify further, as well as how they look, both in normal view and scent mode.

There are 4 main types of fruit that are dropped by trees: red apples, yellow apples, pears and acorns. These fruits can only be found around their corresponding tree, which are visually different.

The tallest of the fruit trees, it's defined by constantly having red apples hanging from its upper branches. When viewed in scent mode, both its dropped fruits and hanging fruits have a strong dark red colour.

Defined by its bonsai-like appearance, this tree drops the yellow apples. Similar to the red apple tree, it constantly holds its yellow apples on its upper branches. When viewed in scent mode, the dropped fruits have a strong yellow colour, but strangely the fruits that are on the upper branches are not highlighted like the dropped fruit. This may not be intended by the developers.

Its appearance consists of its main tree trunk being cut, and having a thick branch growing out of the trunk base at an angle. Like the apple trees, it also has a few pears on its upper branches. In scent mode, the dropped fruits have a strong green colour, while the fruit on the upper branches have a muted, darker green colour.

Similar looking to the yellow apple tree. Its upper branches constantly hold acorns, and when highlighted in scent mode, the dropped acorns have a dark brown cap attached to a bright yellow nut, while the acorns on the upper branches have a slightly darker yellow colour.

There are 4 main types of fruits that are dropped by bushes: purple berries, blue berries, red berries and black berries. These fruits can only be found around their corresponding bush, which despite looking similar to each other (they’re all very short), are visually different in regards to what color of berries they hold.

In scent mode, the colour of the dropped berries is a strong purple, while the held berries have a very muted dark purple colour.

In scent mode, the colour of the dropped berries is a muted blue colour, while the held berries have a very muted dark green colour.

In scent mode, the colour of the dropped berries is a strong orange, while the held berries have a slightly darker orange colour.

In scent mode, the colour of the dropped berries is a muted grey colour, while the held berries have a very muted dark green colour.

This section features some the food sources as seen in other biomes.

The amount of essence each fruit type gives is the same. For each fruit eaten, you will receive 10 essence. When fruits drop from a food source, they're usually plentiful, so eating fruits is a very efficient way of gaining more essence!

When roaming around the meadow, you may find one of the food sources pictured above, and if you're lucky you may just find the dropped fruit! But sometimes you're not as lucky, and there's nothing there. If you were to wait for a tree to drop its fruit, how patient would you have to be?

Through experimentation, it's been observed that all food source sources have a high chance of spawning food roughly every 30 minutes. These 30 minutes do not start counting down when your animal joins the grove, however. They are grove dependent: If, by chance, you see fruit dropping near a food source right in front of your eyes, that's when the 30 minute timer begins.

Knowing this, one might think that, over time, the tree will always have food until someone else eats it. So, if some cunning fox were to wait next to the tree for, say, 4 hours, without having any other animal eat the fruit, that fox would strike essence gold! Well, it appears that this is not the case. If you see food dropping right in front of you, if you are patient enough not to eat it, or have any other animal not eat it, you will notice that roughly 28 minutes after the food has dropped, it all starts to disappear, like so:

This is most likely an intended measure implemented by the developers, since the cunning fox scenario described above would not be desired. The consequence of the food disappearing in 28 minutes is that, for 2 whole minutes, there will be no food present in the entire meadow!

So your animal was patient and waited for the fruit to drop from a tree. Your animal proceeds to eat the fruit and then waits for 30 minutes for the next batch to drop. But it doesn't happen. Why not? Well, it seems like food is not guaranteed every 30 minutes, but there is a high chance that it happens. So, in theory, an unlucky badger could wait hours before a specific tree drops its fruit. But that is very unlucky. Even so, if it were to happen, there's a high chance that food will have dropped at other food sources in the meadow after 30 minutes have elapsed! So be sure to check all of them! Your animal being near a food source does not affect the fruits being dropped. This means that even if you are in the deep south of the meadow, if a food source deep in the winter biome drops its fruit, it will be there, waiting 28 minutes for you to pick it up! Unless another animal beats you to it, that is.

If a fruit is eaten by an animal before you, the fruit does not disappear right away. That fruit will remain for roughly 45 seconds before it begins to glow. After it begins glowing, it will pulsate at an increasingly rapid pace for roughly 12 seconds, after which it disappears for every animal if not eaten within the entire period. What this effectively means is that once an animal first eats a fruit, you have around 1 minute to consume it before it goes away.

• Food sources have a high chance of dropping their fruit once every roughly 30 minutes.
  
• When an animal other than your own eats a piece of fruit, the piece of fruit will remain where it is for roughly 1 minute, after which it disappears.
  
• Once fruits have been dropped by a food source and no animals are eating them, they will remain where they are for roughly 28 minutes, after which they disappear. A consequence of this is that once fruit disappears in this way, there will be no food available in the entire meadow for 2 entire minutes, with a high chance of new food spawning after these 2 minutes pass.

Most food sources have been already mapped and can be found in Nemo's handy map!
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=802358207

• When travelling in a group, when you reach a food source, the best strategy is to go for the fruit that was most recently eaten by another animal, so that the chance of it disappearing is minimal. However, usually there is enough time to consume the entire field in one minute.
  
  
• Sometimes, fruits drop right into each other. This is apparent when you eat a fruit, but another fruit is already there in the same place you ate it from. This is not a bug, it just happens that there are multiple pieces of fruit in one spot. You may notice that after you've eaten a fruit from such a pile, your animal does not eat the next one. There are a few ways of making the animal eat the next piece of fruit:
  
  1. Move around the fruit, rotate, move backwards and then forwards near the fruit pile (slow)
  2. Simply jump in place (fast)
  3. Press escape (fastest)
  
  The reason why the third method is the fastest is that there is no other action involved like in the first two methods, so your animal will continuously eat.
  
  
• If you get to see the entire food source disappear all at once, you may get lucky and have new fruits drop in the upcoming 2 minutes, so be patient!
  

• All fruit disappeared even though nobody ate it before me!
  This is explained by the fact that food expires in 28 minutes, no matter where it is on the map.
  
  
• Eating the fruit gives no essence or partial essence! (they also don't count for the food achievement in this case)
  This is a common bug that’s been present for quite some time in the game, referenced as “ghost fruit”, namely, fruit that does not give any essence. I’ve recently made a post on why this happens in the “Support” section, and hopefully it will be fixed in the future. In order to avoid it, you would need to be connected to the server for more than 30 minutes, and it should never happen afterwards.
  
  
• The food didn't spawn for me!
  This issue is connected with the “ghost fruit” bug mentioned above. The fruit that other animals are eating is actually “ghost fruit”, which gives no essence. So rest assured that real fruit will always drop for every animal!
  
  
• A specific piece of fruit reappeared after I ate it!
  This happens when a player’s ping to the server is really high. There will be a bug report made about this in the “Support” section, but for now there is a workaround. Always eat the food piece that reappeared. It seems that the first food piece eaten does not actually give any essence, but the one that reappeared does.
  

Thank you for reading the guide! If you have any ideas on how to fix or improve the guide in any way, please let me know, I am always open to criticism!

Happy meadowing!

29th of June 2019 - v1.0

• Guide published!

30th of June 2019 - v1.01

• Added some information in the "The inner working of the food ecosystem" section and in its "Short summary" subsection about how the fact that food disappears in 28 minutes affects the entire available food in the meadow.
  
• Added a new tip in the "Tips and tricks" related to the added information above.