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For those that are reading for the first time, this paper addresses the needs of YOU, the consumer. In particular, I am currently doing a series exploring the best and most cost-effective quality of goods to buy. In my last article I explained how to determine which quality of gifts you should buy, and in this one I am going to talk about food.

When I first started in Erep, one of the first questions I had was, why buy higher quality food? Does one taste better to my citizen—five-star cuisine vs. Tao Bell? In actually, eating increases your wellness, and the better quality food you eat, the more it increases. However, it is not always necessary or cost effective to buy high quality food.

Before you can determine what quality of food you need to eat, you need to figure out how much wellness your citizen loses on a daily basis (if you already understand this, skip to “Automatic Wellness Gain”).

Daily Wellness Loss

Job Quality
In real life, working a high-paying job at a fortune-500 company is going to be more stressful than working at a burger joint. Similarly, working at a company that produces higher quality product in Erep decreases your wellness more than a low-quality company. Look at your company page and see what quality product they offer, and that will tell you how much wellness you will lose every day that you work (i.e., working for a two-star company decreases your wellness by two each time you work).

Note: If you manage a company, you will just lose one wellness per day for every company you manage.

Training
If you are training daily as you should be, you will lose an additional wellness point each day for your workout.

So, if you work for a Q5 company and train everyday, you could lose up to 6 wellness per day. Work for a Q1 company and you only lose 2 per day. Remember: If you work for a higher quality company, make sure that you are being compensated for the additional expense it takes on your part to keep up your wellness.

For our purposes, lets assume you work for a Q1 company (which I recommend doing until you get your head around everything), so we are dealing with 2 wellness lost per day.

Automatic Wellness Gain

There are two ways to gain wellness automatically: Food and Housing. The actual amount that you gain varies according to the quality of the food or house as well as your current wellness. The higher your wellness, the less you gain from the food/house. I will only look at food in this article, but houses work the same way.

The actual formula (as published in the wiki) is as follows:
"Wellness increase = (1.5 - current wellness/100)* Food Quality." To simplify, if your wellness is 50, you boost wellness by one times the quality of food you eat. If your wellness is higher, you get less boost and if it is lower, you get more boost.

So now we just need to know our current wellness, and our target wellness. Obviously, the most cost-effective target would be 50, but your manager probably wont be very happy about that since it will decrease your productivity. Generally, you want to stay above 70 at a minimum (more if you are in the army, and even higher is you want high-paying jobs). For simplicity sake, we will say we are at 75 and we want to stay there. Once you understand it you can easily make the adjustment if you want to increase wellness.

If we are losing two per day, you might think that consuming Q2 food would compensate. However, because our wellness is 75, we would actually only gain 1.5 wellness, thus losing .5 per day.

So in this situation, you could do one of two things: you could consume Q2 food for a week, dropping your wellness to about 71, and then consume Q3 the next week, bringing it back up. Or you could continually consume Q3 food and get your wellness slightly higher each day, depending on your financial situation.

Time to really save money:

Let’s approximate and make this easy. To maintain or slightly increase your wellness:
Wellness of 0-60: Food Quality = Job Quality + 1
Wellness of 61-100: Food Quality = Job Quality + 2

Simple right? Not so fast. Remember, I am looking out for the consumer’s dollar—your dollar. Right now, Q1 food is $1.52, while Q3 is $8.96. If you have high wellness, then you are paying for at least Q3 food just to maintain your wellness. Remember that the food has less of a positive effect on you because you have high wellness already.

However, Q1 gifts are only $2.50, and they give a full point boost no matter what your wellness is. So, if you have 98 wellness and you want to maintain it, buy Q1 food and then buy a Q1 gift. Better yet, buy a Q2 gift every other day to save both time and money. I have found that if you have high wellness, it is almost always cheaper to buy Q1 food and make up the difference with gifts.

This will save $5 per day… $150/mo… $1800/yr. When you’re only making $10-15/day, that can make a huge difference.

Next time I will look at weapons and moving tickets. I will also be looking at the pros and cons of buying houses. Until then… Please spread the word, and don’t forget to vote and to subscribe for more tips on playing and consumer advice! I look forward to questions and suggestions in the comments.