Assassin's Creed: Valhalla - health system: How to upgrade rations, get food and health regen explained
How healing works in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla.
Health in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla works a little differently to previous games in the series, with a new health system built around food, as opposed to built-in health regen.
If you're a little puzzled - it's not immediately clear how it works at first - then worry not. Here on this page we explain how to heal and how to get rations in order to do so, plus anything else you might need to know.
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If you're looking for more things to do or collect, then see our lists of Treasure Hoard maps and Book of Knowledge and ability locations.
Assassin's Creed: Valhalla health system explained - how to heal and is there health regen?
As we mentioned above, Valhalla's health system is slightly different to previous Assassin's Creed games.
For one, there's no automatic health regeneration - you need to actively do something if you want to recover health, as it won't go back up over time.
How to heal in Assassin's Creed Valhalla
There are three ways you can heal in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla:
- Consume a ration - you start off being able to store one ration at a time, but can increase your rations capacity as you progress. Press right on the D-pad or H on the keyboard to consume one.
- Consume food - such as berries from bushes, wild mushrooms, or interactable pots, baskets or plates of food found around the world.
- Sleep in your bed - you unlock this once you unlock your Settlement in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. Sleep in your bed in the longhouse to fully heal.
Most of the time then, you'll be healing by eating either rations or food, with the sleep-in-your-bed option a bit impractical for adventurers wandering around the whole of Anglo-Saxon England.
Food is usually found in the form of berry bushes in the world, be that the countryside or dotted around the outside of buildings and towns. In those towns, including your own settlement, you'll find more 'standard' food, usually in the form of a steaming pot of stew over a fire, or on tables in dining halls and houses.
Rations, meanwhile, are closely related to food but work slightly differently. The heal by more than food and can be carried with you to use as-required, so these should be your priority for healing while hunting for food is more of a backup. You'll want to strategise your ration usage, then, so for more on those read on below.
The new DLC is here - and we explain how to start The Siege of Paris, as well as new romance options and Treasure Hoard locations. If you're after end game activities in the full game, we can explain how to get Nodens' Arc, Excalibur, Thor gear and other Valhalla armour sets, Power Level and how to get XP fast, Order of the Ancients locations and all Assassin's Creed Valhalla story choices. If you're looking for things to collect and upgrade, we have lists on best skills and Book of Knowledge locations.
How to get rations in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla
Rations make up the core of the health system in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, and they'll be the main thing you want to focus on when thinking about managing your health in and out of battle.
How rations work and how to get them
When you collect food from the evironment - berries, and so on - and you don't have full health, they'll heal you. But if you do already have full health, they'll instead count towards rations. It takes several bushes of berries - or less of other 'proper' food like that you can get from a pot or dinner table - to make up a single ration.
So, to get rations, you need to collect food in any of its various forms. You can see your progress towards obtaining a ration in the bottom-left of the screen: there's a little circle around a number, and once the bar in that circle fills up, you'll get another ration.
How to increase ration storage in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla
At the start of the game, you'll only be able to carry one ration with you at all times. If you try to collect more food while at full health and full ration capacity, you simply won't be allowed to collect it.
Obviously, just the one measly ration isn't great, because you're likely to take damage quite regularly and it'd help to be able to heal more than just the once during combat without having to run off in search of berries to snaffle.
How to increase ration storage
To increase ration storage then, you need to go to the Inventory section of the menu, and on the left of it you'll see the rations icon. Hover the cursor over it and press the button prompted to upgrade it. You'll need resources - specifically Leather and Iron Ore - to do so, with the amount required starting quite low, and increasing with each upgrade. For reference, the first upgrade costs 100 Iron and 50 Leather, and the next costs 300 Iron and 140 Leather.
Simply gather more Leather (from chests or hunting animals) and Iron Ore (from chests or smashing those little stacks of glowing rocks), and head to the menu to upgrade your storage whenever you feel like your current ration capacity isn't quite enough.