Originally posted by Dimyell:

Just curious, what does the rested bufff do? Increase HP regen? Because from what i've seen the bonus HP from food can be insane.

Rested: +50% health regen, +100% stamina regen, +100% Eitr regen (you'll discover this much later)

You can see the effects of any buffs/debuffs on you by opening your inventory and clicking the raven icon near the top-right window.

Food as HP is a unique mechanic but you can adjust to it. The rested buff is actually more important. You can get away with lower quality foods as long as you are rested. You should also have a portal or 2 at your main base with a unique name so that you can carry the materials you need to build the other end of the portal where you are going to be exploring. That way if something unfortunate happens you don't have far to travel to recover your gear.

You can recover your gear after death with console commands. If you use the fly command you can get up out of the trees and you won't aggro anything (you'll still need frost resistance meads in the mountains). Fly with sprint is also insanely high speed travel.

Originally posted by Dimyell:

My only two gripes with this game are dropping everything on death and how reliant on food we are. For food i wish it was just like most survival games where you need to eat to stay alive and for buffs, not for 90 percent of my hp. This, as far as ii know, isn't something i can change, however surely there's a way to turn off loot drops? Dying in the cold mountains or miles into a dangerous biome is the most stressful thing to ever happen to me in a game. This game is too grindy to have such a slate wipe in place for my liking.

Death is indeed very punishing, but is it really?

First you're supposed to use portals to make traveling easier/faster so hopefully when you die you're only a portal hop and a short stroll away from your body.

Second it so happens that maxed out gear from biome N is roughly equivalent to starting gear of biome N+1. If you die with your current top gear you should still have a very decent spare at home that you can use to retrieve your stuff.

Yes the game requires quite some grind to craft stuff, don't just throw it out once you move to the next level.

As for your real question: mod or devcommands are the current option. Soon maybe difficulty settings.

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Food as HP is a unique mechanic but you can adjust to it. The rested buff is actually more important. You can get away with lower quality foods as long as you are rested. You should also have a portal or 2 at your main base with a unique name so that you can carry the materials you need to build the other end of the portal where you are going to be exploring. That way if something unfortunate happens you don't have far to travel to recover your gear.

You can recover your gear after death with console commands. If you use the fly command you can get up out of the trees and you won't aggro anything (you'll still need frost resistance meads in the mountains). Fly with sprint is also insanely high speed travel.

Just curious, what does the rested bufff do? Increase HP regen? Because from what i've seen the bonus HP from food can be insane.

No way to make those changes without using mods.