Best Food and Potions in IdleMMO

IdleMMO keeps consumables simple, which is exactly why people misuse them. There is no "best food" in the abstract; there is the food that keeps your character alive for the length of your queue at the lowest cost. Potions have one rule that trips up nearly everyone once. This guide covers both, with the rules from the official wiki and the cooking ladder from our cached game data.

How food works in battle

You choose food before the battle starts. It adds to your effective health: the wiki's example is 100 HP plus 20 food items at 10 HP each, for 300 effective HP. The battle runs until you are out of effective health, you clear the enemy stack (up to 6 enemies per battle), or you hit your maximum idle time. If you end early, unused food goes back to your inventory. The game tries to eat the weakest food first, but the wiki notes that isn't guaranteed.

Three practical consequences:

• Overpacking is free. Unused food returns, so bringing too much costs you nothing but inventory space for the duration. Running out mid-queue costs you the rest of the session.
• Mixed stacks are fine. Since the weakest food is used first, you can bring a pile of cheap fish plus some better fish as a buffer.
• Protection and Agility save food. Less damage taken per hit means fewer meals per hour. A gear upgrade often pays for itself in food alone; see the gear progression guide.

Food also matters off the battlefield. Cooking makes meals for you and your pets, and every level of Slayer adds to your max HP (up to +100% at Slayer 100, per the Slayer guide), which stretches every piece of food further.

The cooked fish ladder

Every meal Cooking can make, from our cached Cooking data, with its level, Cooking XP, action time and the cached market price. Each meal uses one raw fish and one Coal Ore. Healing values aren't in our dataset, so check a meal's in-game tooltip for how much it heals; higher-level fish generally sell for more, which hints at their value.

The ladder runs from Cooked Cod at level 1 through Salmon, Tuna, Trout, Perch, Herring, Sardines, Lobster, Crab, Turtle and Stingray up to Lantern Fish and Great White Shark at the top. If you fish and cook yourself, the food costs you time rather than gold; the Cooking leveling guide and Fishing leveling guide plan both. If you buy, compare a few tiers on the market. Mid-tier fish that many players cook while levelling are often cheap for what they do.

The potion timing rule

This is the one to remember: rewards for an idle action are calculated when the action starts. An effect you gain halfway through does nothing for that action. The wiki's example is a +100% XP boost used during a 60-minute woodcutting task: it doesn't apply until you restart. So the order is always potion, then action. If you already started, it can be worth cancelling and restarting to pick up the boost, especially before a long queue.

Effects stack by adding. +80% and -20% gives +60%; +50% and -50% cancel. Each effect has its own row on your profile's Effects tab, and potions can be cancelled there if you need the slot (the remaining time is lost).

What Alchemy makes

Alchemy brews potions and essence crystals. Our cached recipe list includes the Battle Potion (Alchemy 1), skill crystals for gathering and processing (Lumberjack, Miners, Anglers, Smelting and Chefs Essence Crystals at levels 2-6, then Timberfall, Rocksplitter, Deepsea, Hammerfell and Flavorburst at 10-17), the Dungeon Potion (level 10) and Dungeon Master's Tonic (level 50). The wiki lists potions and essence crystals as sources of efficiency, which cuts action time: +100% efficiency halves it, +15% turns a 100-second action into about 87 seconds.

We don't have verified effect sizes for each potion in our dataset, so read the in-game tooltip before buying in bulk. What we can say from the rules: an efficiency crystal for the skill you are training is worth the most on long idle queues, because the time saved multiplies over every action in the queue, and a dungeon potion only makes sense if you drink it before starting a dungeon chain.

Where else to get them

• The market. Every potion and crystal trades between players. The Alchemy calculator compares brewing cost with market price.
• The Celestial Exchange. Sells potions, essence crystals and Dragon Soulstones for shards, which you earn from level 70+ dungeons. See the dungeon guide.
• Vials and crystals. General Goods sells empty vials and empty crystals, the base containers for brewing.

A simple consumables routine

1. Before a combat or dungeon session, check how long you will be away and pack food for that, plus a margin.
2. Use any potion or crystal before queuing. If you forgot, restart the action.
3. For gathering queues, use the efficiency crystal for that skill if the market price is below the value of the extra output.
4. Sell surplus meals instead of letting them pile up; Cooking output is one of the commodities the market flipping guide looks at.

Frequently asked questions