Like many of the games that inspired it, Petit Planet challenges you to keep on top of a number of tasks – including farming, foraging, crafting, and exploring – with a character who can only retain a limited amount of energy at any given time. In Petit Planet, this mechanic is known as Strength, and it’s simultaneously easier and harder to manage than the equivalent feature in a lot of similar games.
Running out of Strength can delay your progression, which is frustrating even when there’s no other negative consequence (and, this being a gentle cozy game, there isn’t, don’t worry). Read on for an explainer on how to recover Strength in Petit Planet.
How to recover Strength in Petit Planet
Petit Planet does tutorialise its Strength mechanic, but not until well after the point when you’re likely to have already found yourself in need of more information about it. You’ll probably become aware of your character’s Strength when the game teaches you about chopping trees and mining – after a few rounds of hitting things with your mattock, you’ll likely notice a little bar in the right-hand side of the screen is slowly but surely going down.
When that metre turns from white to red and starts flashing, that’s your indication that your character is about to run out of Strength. The good news is even if this happens, they won’t pass out or do anything more inconvenient than refuse to carry on doing physically strenuous tasks until they recover.
As you’ve probably figured out already, the key to recovering Strength is to eat something. Given that Petit Planet is both a life sim and a HoYoverse game, a fascination with cooking and eating is almost a given – there are plenty of elaborate recipes on offer, but you can snack on raw fruit and veggies if you don’t have anything more filling to hand.
The easiest way to replenish your Strength on the go is to eat what’s in your Quick Bite Pouch – do this by tapping the icon next to the Strength bar, or by pressing and holding “Z” on keyboard. You can assign up to three foods by opening your Quick Bite Pouch and selecting which Consumables you want on hand. Then, whenever you go for a quick bite, your character will automatically consume whatever’s in the lefthand-most occupied slot.
You can also eat food the slow way by going into the Consumables tab of your backpack, selecting a food item and choosing “Consume” from the list of options.
For more on Petit Planet’s latest beta, see our guide to collecting and using Archiboos in Petit Planet, and our page on how to check your Petit Planet Home Rating.