Did i miss it or the only option is to eat food ?
I'm playing on 3rd difficulty level so meditation won't give me health .. woman at bar don't let me sleep either ! (she also says drinks on the house, well, they're not. what a monster!)

Yeah, what the hell? lol
I thought I was going to at least get some cheap food and drink, but no!

Your health very slowly regenerates naturally. I'm talking a full bar in about an hour of gameplay! Other than that, you need to eat food or take potions. I'm playing same difficulty as you, so meditation is out (seemed like a cheap way to regain health anyway).

I was kind of expecting being able to hire a room for the night and sleep to recover health. But the more I think about that, the more I think it's redundant when you could just buy and eat the food....

But ... im poor !
Now we feel the real pain of the witchers why they work for money huh

On higher difficulties the only way is to eat food or drink.

Play "easy"

Get the Sun and Stars passive ability. It'll let you regenerate at a somewhat quick rate during the daytime.

Curious.. do generic mobs respawn? Like wolves, wild dogs, etc? That's where I get a lot of the "raw meat" that I eat.. why can't we cook the meat to make it better? That would have been nice.. but instead, I am forced to eat raw meat, dog's livers and so on to get by..

Actually, I totally agree with this. I like that it's a big struggle to come up with the gold you need for everything. It'll be interesting to see if this is still true in the late game. If you kill wolves and other beasts you also get meat that you can eat, but it still forces you to make choices about whether to spend money on food.

THIS all the way. Almost lvl 4 and never had to use any food at ALL because i got the Sun and Stars passive ability first.

before tackling the big boss of the prologue i am going to get me that Temerian Set first ;)


all thanks to Sun and Stars passive.

If one "avoids" Sun and Stars, will one block the way for more interesting perks that requires it? I'm thinking of waiting of picking it because the whole point of Hard/"Dark" is that you need to eat or drink to replenish health, I want to go with that for a while.

I'm recalling from memory, but I think the only limitation to later tiers of skills is having enough points in the family of skills.

Even then, if you needed to get the skill, you don't have to enable it. It'll just be in your pool of available abilities to slot in.