Hello spellcasters of all shapes and sizes! Welcome to my spellbook and thank you so much for checking out the 13th episode of our 3rd level spell series. Today we have a very underestimated spell in store for us. We’re gonna be taking a look at create food and water dnd 5e spells and to be honest i think this is gonna be my new favorite spell to give problematic NPCs, there’s just a lot of upside to it and i’ll explain why that is in a little bit.
Create food and water 5e is usable by the cleric, paladin and the artificer and this found in the good old players handbook (229 page). Now it’s pretty easy to figure out what this spell does just by reading it but let’s check out its mechanics so you can figure out the exact details.
Table of Contents
Mechanics
- Level: 3rd
- Casting Time: 1 Action
- Range/Area: 30 ft
- Components: V, S
- Duration: Instantaneous
- School: Conjuration
- Attack/Save: None
- Damage/Effect: Creation
The effect at a glance is as followed: Create 45 pounds of food and 30 gallons of water, enough to sustain up to fifteen humanoids or 5 steeds for 24 hours: the food spoils if uneaten after 24 hours, and the water does not go bad.
The cast time is one action, the range is 30 feet, the duration is instantaneous, the components are verbal and somatic and the school is conjuration which isn’t too surprising. Now looking at this, it doesn’t seem like a huge deal. Now there’s a little bit of discrepancy when it comes to the amount of food and how long you can sustain you but we’ll talk about that in a little bit here. That being said, before we do it let’s take a look at its full description.
Description
You create 45 pounds of food and 30 gallons of water on the ground or in containers within range, enough to sustain up to fifteen humanoids or five steeds for 24 hours. The food is bland but nourishing, and spoils if uneaten after 24 hours. The water is clean and doesn’t go bad.
Which makes sense, before i do a deep dive though let me explain the discrepancy….so it maintains that it’s enough for 15 humanoids for 24 hours, however the food component alone is technically enough to satiate 45 humans. Basically how it works and honestly this is worth an article all to itself is you need one pound of food per day and one gallon of water per day.
Unless it’s hot in which case you need double that so bear that in mind and the consequences of course exhaustion. So the discrepancy comes from the spell itself so 30 gallons of water should technically be enough for 30 people but i don’t know it’s kind of one of those rules as written versus rules as intended arguments and i’ll leave it up to your dm to decide.
Food
A character needs one pound of food per day and can make food last longer by subsisting on half rations. Eating half a pound of food in a day counts as half a day without food. A character can go without food for a number of days equal to 3 + his or her Constitution modifier (minimum 1). At the end of each day beyond that limit, a character automatically suffers one level of exhaustion. A normal day of eating resets the count of days without food to zero.
Water
A character needs one gallon of water per day, or two gallons per day if the weather is hot. A character who drinks only half that much water must succeed on a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or suffer one level of exhaustion at the end of the day. A character with access to even less water automatically suffers one level of exhaustion at the end of the day. If the character already has one or more levels of exhaustion, the character takes two levels in either case.
That being said, let’s take a look at its alternative uses really quick and i’ll get into why this spell is so great.
Alternative Uses
So the coolest thing about this spell is it doesn’t specify what kinds of food it creates which is super interesting. So i mean the intended way to use this to use it to gain essentially favor or restore vitality to you and a group of people. However you could really easily use it as planning for example let’s say you need to make it into a city relatively unnoticed but they’re screening everyone at the border.
You could very easily kind of hijack a caravan and load it up with food that’s about to spoil through its vegetables things of that nature and then you could roll into town and try to be a merchant i think that’d be a very very cool stuff. It’s very useful when there’s a little food or water available around you so i highly recommend taking the spell if you’re in a desert.
Alternatively you could kind of weigh out how much certain food items are, for example items like donuts occupied quite a bit of space it’s actually quite light and because the spell doesn’t give a space requirement it only gives a size requirement, you can make 45 pounds of donuts which would occupy quite a space.
One would argue enough to block off a doorway or things of that nature, so it’s very cool stuff and along that lines you could use it to run away. For example let’s say you will create i don’t know like 45 pounds of spaghetti on the ground. I would consider that to be difficult terrain to be honest with you. So i don’t know there’s a lot of very interesting food combos i suppose you could use, the spell is left relatively ambiguous as to how it actually functions.
What i mean by that is although the range is 30 feet, it doesn’t give an area-of-effect so it’s kind of left your DMs discretion i suppose. I think this has a lot of cool upside to it and the fact of the food spoils after 24 hours means it exists in the real world.
A lot of the time the spell gets a lot of hate for not being as good as like goodberry but goodberry doesn’t actually cover your water needs which is gonna be worth noting and there’s a sage advice about that. But what makes this spell unique as this actually brings things from magical essence into physical objects in the real world and that makes it a lot of different from things like flame blade or shadow blade or all those other spells that disappear after your durations over this exists.
So what means is hypothetically you could create a ton of fruit and leave it to rotten and ultimately just take the seeds and use it as fertilizer and possibly even create a farm just on your own. Do you know how do you create water in d&d 5e?.
Conclusion
So it’s very easy for me to just sit here and rattle off hypotheticals but that being said, tell me how you would use this spell. Be sure to list any hypotheticals, any questions, comments or concerns down beneath in the comment section. That being said, i hope you all have a great day and as always happy casting everyone. can you make food with creation 5e?.