How to recover your health

You’ll start off with a very miniscule amount of HP and enemies can rip through it easily. As such, healing is very essential. Resting in any Sculptor Idols will fully replenish your HP and restock your consumables (as long as you have reserves). However, resting will also respawn the standard enemies in the area.

You’ll start off with the Healing Gourd. This is the game’s Estus Flask counterpart. When used, this item recovers a significant amount of Vitality. You’ll start off with one charge but it can be upgraded later on to have more charges by giving Gourd Seeds to Emma, the doctor NPC in the Dilapidated Temple. You can restore all its healing charges by resting in any Sculptor’s Idol.

Pellets are single-use, consumables that can be found as normal loot in the world, dropped by enemies, or purchased from merchants. They restore a small amount of vitality over time so you may want to keep your distance from enemies while your HP is slowly recovering. You can only carry three pellets at a time, and they must be set in the quick access slot so you can use it in combat. Excess pellets are sent automatically to your storage. Whenever you rest, pellets in your storage will be “moved” to your current inventory.

The Divine Grass is a unique consumable, capable of fully replenishing your HP and recovering all status effects. It’s best to save this item in extremely difficult fights. You can purchase this from Pot Noble Harunaga, an otherworldly merchant found in an island near the waterfall in the starting area of Hirata Estate using Treasure Carp Scales, which are only acquired from giant carps in specific water areas.

Learn the Breath of Life: Light Latent skill as early as you can. This allows you to recover a bit of HP from any successful Deathblows. Try to get this skill as early as you can to conserve your Healing Gourd and Pellet use. The amount of HP you recover from deathblows is not affected by the other medicinal potency latent skills. You can further enhance the potency of healing items by learning Latent skills such as Emma’s Medicine: Potency and Emma’s Medicine Aroma in the Prosthetic Arts skill tree.

Another latent skill that increase healing item potency is called the Shinobi Medicine. This is learned automatically after dying enough times in boss fight and defeating the boss. The first rank can be acquired after defeating the Chained Ogre in Ashina Outskirts.