Has anyone found any useful effects? I know that sun-dried bananas give temporary psychometry; so bullet-based-builds are no longer stuck behind a luck-wall.
There's a lot on
the wiki (see
here for detailed effects.) Several things of note:
Banana chips can be used to get Psychometry, which lets you learn tinker recipes permanently.
If you want to play a cooking-focused character, Spinnerets is extremely useful, since it lets you get unlimited Phase Silk. There's two ways to take advantage of it:
1. Don't take Phasing. Instead, use a Shade Oil Injector or something similar to phase for the first time and produce some phase silk. Then, use Carbide Chef to turn this into a recipe that reliably grants you the phasing mutation, which you can now get for free via cooking - just use it and harvest the phase webs you produce for more phase silk, so you have an unlimited supply.
2. Do take phasing. Produce phase silk and use it to produce cooking effects that trigger when you phase, or which make your phasing last longer, or which phase you automatically. In this case, max out your Willpower - you can stay phased permanently, or can trigger free effects very frequently, eg. rapid healing when combined with Starapple Preserves.
Always carry a lot of:
Jerky, for HP-based effects. The 30%-40% HP increase in particular is valuable with anything that can trigger it, as is the one that triggers when you drop below 20% HP and the trigger-on-damage effect.
Starapple Preserves are good for the healing effect (eg. with the phasing trick above, you can heal 15-20 HP every time you phase.)
Salt is easy to get and is good to add when you want to get a solo effect from the other ingredient, as is Cider.
If you have a way to carry it, Lava can be used to get fire-related effects (eg. flaming hands.)
Convalessence can be used for cold-based effects and can be gathered in huge amounts at Bethesda Susa.
Slime Glands can be gotten basically for free by cooking slime (naturally, using it produces more slime, so you can get it again whenever you want.)