Food and water are essential Stone Shard. You don't have too much of a chance to save in the game, and you need to manage your inventory space and heal your character. When your character is hungry, you need to make sure they are eating decent food. You can buy it from merchants, but if you kill animals on your travels, you have the option of cooking them while standing next to a campfire.
If you want to cook raw food, you must first take one of the wild animals you encounter, or find excavations in the barrels of a dungeon. When you search your inventory, you know you have raw foods that you can cook if you hover over them, and it shows negative effects for eating them, rather than positive ones.
After determining what foods you can cook, you need to find a campfire. You can usually find one in Osbrook inside the house to the left of the herbalist who sells medical supplies, located south of the small town. You can go inside the house, light a fire, and then freely cook your meals. When you are in the world you might need to find a campfire created by bandits. If you find one that doesn't have a flame, right click to start a fire. You don't need any supplies to do this. To cook, just right click on the campfire or oven and click on the cook icon. The item you can cook should now appear as cooked, and you can freely eat it to appease your character's hunger.
As of this writing, only deer and moose drop venison in the game. None of the other animals drop meat, so if you want to go hunting for food, you have to go after these animals. You can chase foxes and wolves, but they don't lose meat, but other types of meat will arrive in a future game update. Stone Shard is in Early Access.
