First of all, I would like to point out that the current food system in the game does not bother me and I do not want the game to being more like Souls or another game. I am just trying to find a simple way to make both sides of the “food” conflict relatively happy.
The Idea is:
Food still works as it has been but is mainly used to gain additional buffs before a fight and as an additional option for restoring health.
Additionally, the player initially has 5 healing flasks (they can increase their number to 10 and can increase the value of the restored health over time). The method of obtaining an additional flask could be connected to some event, a fight with a mini-boss or exchange for Ichor.
The flasks do not fill automatically during a visit in Wishpers, but they can be filled with the “blood energy” that we would receive for killing enemies, which means that we would constantly accumulate this energy during the game and in theory after some time we would always have a supply so that in the event of a boss fight, we could fill the flasks before the next fight without having to farm resources to create meals. The flasks would also fill up after sleeping in a bed.
For example, we gain 1 energy for killing an opponent, 2-3 for a more dangerous one, 50-100 for a boss / and filling one flask costs 10 energy / then after some time we can easily gather a large supply of energy just by playing the game (at the initial stage it would be harder to gather a lot of energy, then we would rely more on food)
Additionally, you can upgrade the flasks to give additional buffs, but then the cost of filling them would be higher.