Baldur's Gate 3 Camp Supplies: What to Carry and Sell

A Grilled Steak weighs 3 kilograms and pays 8 Camp Supplies. A Poutine weighs 0.25 kilograms and pays 20. The tooltips will tell you both numbers. What neither tooltip does is divide one by the other, and that quotient is the number that decides whether the thing is worth the space it takes.

That ratio is the whole game with Camp Supplies. The headline rule is the easy part and it is already in our beginner guide: a Long Rest costs 40, rest more often than feels right, do not hoard food. This post is the layer under it — which food is actually worth picking up, what you should be buying instead, what to throw at a trader, and the camp-chest behaviour that makes most of the carrying argument disappear entirely.

All the item numbers below come from bg3.wiki's own item data. Where I have divided one number by another, I say so.

The 40 you owe every night

The cost scales with difficulty, and the partial-rest consolation prize is narrower than it sounds.

A full Long Rest restores all hit points, all spell slots, all resources, certain item actions, illithid power dialogue options, and both Short Rest slots.

A partial rest, which is what you get if you rest without the required supplies, restores hit points and resources up to half of maximum, rounded down — and it does not give back your Short Rest slots. That last clause is the one that bites. bg3.wiki notes a specific casualty of the rounding: Luck of the Far Realms runs on a hidden resource with a maximum of 1, so half of it rounds to zero and a partial rest never returns it.

So a partial rest is not "most of a rest." It is half a rest that also leaves your Short Rest slots exactly where they were — if you spent both getting to camp, you start the next day with none. Do not scrape by; either pay the full 40 or do not lie down.

Doing the division the game will not do

Your carrying capacity is (40 + 10 x Strength) kg. A 10-Strength character therefore carries 140 kg, becomes Encumbered above 80% of that, and Heavily Encumbered above 93.33%. Our status effects guide covers what Encumbered actually does to you; the point here is that the budget is finite and food competes with loot for it.

Each of those items carries a weight as well as a supply value, and the spread between them is enormous. Across the 181 distinct items listed on bg3.wiki's camp-supply cost-efficiency page, the supply-per-kilogram figure runs from a Walnut at 100 down to Okta's Alternative Meal at 1 — a hundredfold range inside a single item category.

Walnuts are a joke answer, though, because you would need twenty of them for one Balanced rest. Here is the useful cut: every item on that list worth 10 or more supplies apiece, ranked by supplies per kilogram, with the derived kilograms you would carry to fund one 40-supply rest entirely out of that item.

Read the last column as the actual decision. One night's sleep is half a kilogram of Poutine or twelve kilograms of Raw Steak. That is a 24x difference in inventory cost for the identical outcome, and nothing in the interface puts those two numbers side by side.

The Heavy Supply Pack is a bad backpack

The Heavy Supply Pack looks like the solution to the whole problem: 80 supplies in one slot, an entire Tactician rest, or two Balanced ones. It is a better variant of the ordinary Supply Pack, and bg3.wiki gives the range of item supply values as 1 to 80, so 80 is the top of it.

It also weighs 5 kg, which works out to 16 supplies per kilogram — worse than a Pizza, and one fifth of what a Poutine gives you. bg3.wiki lists a single location for it — a shelf in Danthelon's Dancing Axe — so this is less a stocking decision than a "what do I do with the one I found" decision. If you are carrying it on a character with slack capacity, keep it; it is convenient. If you are Encumbered, it is 5 kg you can replace with a kilogram of stew.

The ordinary Supply Pack at 40 supplies for 2 kg is the more common find and the better instinct: it is precisely one Balanced rest, in one slot, at 20 supplies per kilogram.

The roasted meats are the trap

The big slabs of cooked animal are weighted like big slabs of cooked animal and paid like snacks.

Four of the grilled meats are the identical trade: three kilograms, eight supplies. Funding one Balanced rest out of Grilled Pork Belly means carrying 15 kg of it. The same 40 supplies is two Poutines and half a kilo.

These are the things to leave on the table, or sell. A Grilled Steak is worth 8 gold in base value and costs you 3 kg of capacity; that is a bad trade against almost anything else you could be carrying out of a dungeon.

Note that Bex's Handmade Cookies are unusual in the other direction — 3 supplies, 2 kg, but a base value of 14 gold, which is nearly five times the gold-per-supply price of ordinary food. They are worth more to a trader than to your dinner.

Buying supplies: food costs a gold each, wine costs a sixth

Here is the cleanest pattern in the whole system, and it is hiding in plain sight on bg3.wiki's cost-efficiency list: 145 of the 181 distinct items on it have a base gold value exactly equal to their supply value. Pizza, 15 supplies, 15 gold. Haggis, 21 and 21. Roast Beef Joint, 20 and 20. Food is priced at one gold per supply, near-universally.

Then there are ten items that pay six supplies for a base value of one gold, and every one of them is alcohol.

Do the arithmetic on a Balanced rest. Forty supplies bought as food is 40 gold. Seven bottles of Arabellan Dry is 42 supplies for a base value of 7 gold, and weighs 1.4 kg. On Tactician or Honour, fourteen bottles cover the 80 and still come in under the price of two pizzas.

Two honest caveats. First, these are base item values — what a trader actually charges you is modified by their attitude and your Barter, so treat the ratio as the durable fact and the absolute gold as an estimate. Second, alcohol carries a condition at both ends. Drinking a bottle with a bonus action applies Alcohol, which is Disadvantage on Dexterity and Charisma Checks. And per bg3.wiki, long resting on only alcohol as camp supplies applies Hungover to the whole party for 10 turns — the same Disadvantage on Dexterity and Charisma Checks. Mix one piece of food into the rest and you avoid it.

Larian did leave a nod to all this in the achievement list: Bottoms Up is awarded for taking a Long Rest using only alcohol ("a time-honoured dwarven tradition", per the achievement text). At 6 supplies a bottle that is seven bottles on Balanced — and it is the same all-alcohol rest that hands the party Hungover, so plan to wake up with Disadvantage.

The practical version: when you are standing in front of a trader deciding what to buy with 200 gold, cheap wine is the most supply-dense purchase in that data by a wide margin, and food at 1 gold per supply is what you buy once the wine runs out.

The 750-gold dinner

The Owlbear Egg, taken from the nest behind the Owlbear in the Owlbear Nest, is 40 Camp Supplies in a 1 kg package — an excellent 40 supplies per kilogram. It is not in the table above because bg3.wiki's cost-efficiency list is capped at 200 rows sorted by supplies per gold, and the egg's price drops it off the bottom.

It also has a base value of 750 gold, which is roughly nineteen times what an equivalent stack of food is worth, and it counts as a camp supply — which bg3.wiki flags as a live hazard. Because the game treats the egg as food, it can be fed unintentionally to the Owlbear Cub when the cub first appears at camp, or picked automatically when you rest. That is an expensive dinner.

Send the egg to your camp chest or hand it in. The rest panel has an Auto Select button, and Auto Select does not know what the egg is worth.

You do not have to carry any of it

Everything above assumes you are carrying supplies around. You mostly should not be, and this is the single most useful thing in this post.

bg3.wiki's Traveller's Chest page states it directly: some items can be used from inside the chest, and doing this saves weight in your party members' inventories. Camp Supplies are on that short list — they can be used from the resting menu while sitting in the camp chest. Gold works the same way in the trading and bartering menu, with the caveat that the wiki records that particular behaviour as not functional on consoles as of Patch 7 / Hotfix 29.

So the routine is: right-click food, Send to Camp, keep walking. The chest is at the campsite, its contents persist across every camp in the game, and you can send things to it from anywhere. The weight leaves your party and the supplies still pay for your rest.

Two things to know about the chest. In multiplayer each player character gets their own uniquely coloured chest that the others cannot access. And if you own the Digital Deluxe Upgrade there is free food already sitting in yours, in the Bewildering Adventurer's Pack: a Haggis, a Poutine, a Stout Stew, Frites, a Sun-Dappled Paella and a Mixed Coffee, alongside several potions. That is, as it happens, a shopping list drawn from the good half of the weight table above.

The Camp Supply Sack is the other half of the tidiness solution. It is starting equipment for player characters, and companions carry one in their inventory when recruited. It automatically routes most camp supply items into itself rather than your main inventory, which keeps the clutter out of the way. It weighs 0.1 kg.

The rests that cost no supplies

There are a handful of ways to get long-rest recovery without spending the 40, and bg3.wiki lists them on the Resting page as features that function similarly to a rest.

• Restoration Pods, in four places: aboard the Nautiloid in the prologue, the Mind Flayer Colony in Act Two, and in Act Three both the boudoir in the House of Hope and High Hall. These restore the party as if it had taken a Long Rest, and critically they do so without ending effects like Goodberry or Elixirs — so your elixir loadout survives the reset, which an ordinary Long Rest does not allow.
• Potion of Angelic Slumber, a very rare potion drunk as a bonus action, which functions as a Long Rest if the character is left asleep and uninterrupted for 2 turns. It does not reset your Short Rest count, though it does restore a Bard's Song of Rest, which is itself a short rest. It weighs 0.1 kg and has a base value of 200 gold.
• Potion of Angelic Reprieve, the lesser version, which functions as a Short Rest under the same asleep-and-uninterrupted-for-2-turns condition, and additionally returns all spent level 1 and level 2 spell slots.
• Divine Intervention: Opulent Revival, which restores the party as though it had long rested, revives downed party members, and can be used in combat — but any Divine Intervention is once per character for the entire campaign, so this is an emergency button, not a routine.

Note the wording the wiki uses: these restore the party as if it had taken a Long Rest. An actual Long Rest also passes the night, which is what companion scenes and several quest triggers are hung off. Treat this list as free hit points and spell slots in the middle of a dungeon, not as a way to stop going back to camp.

The food that is also a healing potion

A few supply items have a second use, which changes what they are worth keeping. bg3.wiki lists these as consumables that can be used for healing instead:

Suspicious Meat at 4d4 is the notable one — that is a real heal on a 2 kg item that is otherwise near the bottom of the supply-per-kilogram table, and it reframes the thing as a cheap potion rather than bad food. The Red Apple entry carries a caveat worth respecting: only some Red Apples have the healing effect, and the wiki pins one specific example, on top of a wooden trunk near the gate in the Emerald Grove.

One more oddity: Salami is a weapon. It is a one-handed simple Club dealing 1d4 Bludgeoning, it is light, it is dippable, and it can also be eaten for 6 supplies. Dipping your lunch in fire before swinging it is legal, and our weapon actions guide covers what a Club can do with its once-per-short-rest action.

Quick reference

• Cost: 40 supplies on Explorer and Balanced, 80 on Tactician and Honour, up to 120 on Custom.
• Partial rest: half of maximum HP and resources, rounded down, and no Short Rest slots back. Avoid it.
• Carry: Poutine and Chelo Khoresh (80 supplies per kg), Salmon Pie, the three 15-supply seafood dishes, Haggis.
• Sell or leave: the 3 kg grilled meats at 2.67 supplies per kg, Pig's Head, and Bex's Handmade Cookies (worth 14 gold, worth 3 supplies).
• Buy: the ten 6-supply drinks at a base value of 1 gold each. Everything else is about 1 gold per supply. Resting on alcohol alone applies Hungover to the party for 10 turns, so put one food item in the rest.
• Do not eat: the Owlbear Egg. It is 40 supplies and 750 gold of base value, and the rest screen will spend it if you let it.
• Best habit: Send to Camp. Supplies are usable from the Traveller's Chest at the rest menu, so the weight never has to be on your party at all.

One note on currency, since this is a three-year-old game with a long tail of hotfixes: Patch 8 in April 2025 was billed by Larian as the final patch, and bg3.wiki's patch-notes table records the most recent build as 2026-08-03, with Hotfix #36 on 2026-03-26 before it. Every number above is read off the current item data rather than remembered from launch.