Windrose is a pirate survival game with Souls-like combat, which means you will take damage constantly — from charging boars, undead pirates, and even the seemingly harmless Coastal Dodo if you're not careful. Healing is not straightforward, and the game doesn't do a great job explaining every option. Here's a full breakdown of every method you can use to recover health.
Quick answer: Craft Bandages at a Workbench using 1 Coarse Fiber for early healing, build a Bonfire anywhere for passive regeneration (even mid-combat), and eat two different foods before fights to maximize your HP pool.
Bandages — Your First Healing Consumable
Bandages are the earliest and most accessible healing item in Windrose. You can find them scattered around the starting island or craft them at a Workbench. The recipe requires just 1 Coarse Fiber, which itself is crafted at the Workbench from 1 Plant Fiber. You get Plant Fiber by slashing bushes, shrubs, and other vegetation — something you'll be doing constantly anyway.
A single Bandage restores 900 Health over 30 seconds. That sounds generous, but there's a critical catch: taking any damage while the heal-over-time effect is active will cancel it entirely. In a game where enemies are aggressive and fights involve multiple opponents, finding a safe window to use a Bandage can be difficult. They work best after a fight ends or when you've created enough distance to avoid getting hit for half a minute.
Bonfires — Passive Healing Anywhere
If you run out of Bandages or potions, the Bonfire is your safety net. You can build one almost anywhere on any island, and standing near it will slowly restore your health. Unlike Bandages, the Bonfire's healing effect is not interrupted by taking damage, which makes it useful even during combat if you position yourself carefully.
There doesn't appear to be a limit on how many Bonfires and Tents you can place per island. A strong tactic is to build a Bonfire right outside a tough encounter area — a pirate camp or a ruin full of enemies — so you have a reliable heal point to fall back to. Pair it with a Tent set as your respawn point, and you've created a forward checkpoint that saves enormous amounts of time if things go wrong.
Health Potions — Crafted at the Alchemy Table
Health potions are more powerful than Bandages but require more effort to obtain. Crafting them involves the Alchemy Table, a crafting station you'll unlock as you progress. The ingredients are Clay, glowing blue plants, and red healing plants found on other islands. This means you won't have access to potion crafting right away — you'll need to sail to at least one additional island to gather the necessary flora.
In the meantime, you can pick up a free basic healing potion each day by talking to the Doctor at your base camp. It's a small but consistent supply that helps bridge the gap before you can craft your own. Healing potions can also be looted from chests found in ruins and enemy camps scattered across the world, so exploring dangerous areas has a direct payoff for your healing stockpile.
Food Buffs — Increase Your Max HP Before Every Fight
Eating food in Windrose doesn't just satisfy hunger — it temporarily increases your maximum health and grants various stat buffs. You can have two different food effects active at the same time, which stacks their HP bonuses. This is available from the very start and costs almost nothing to maintain.
The easiest early combo is Coconuts (found on the ground near beaches) and Dodo Broth (cooked from Coastal Dodo meat). To cook, craft a Cooking Fire, which you can place anywhere — no need to return to your base. If you don't see the recipe, press ESC and check the Discoveries tab on the right side above the settings menu.
Without food buffs active, your HP bar is noticeably smaller. Even a minor enemy can one-shot you if you haven't eaten, and recovering your dropped loot from a pack of hostile creatures becomes far more punishing. Keep a chest near your bed stocked with spare food so you never leave base without buffs.
The Rally Mechanic — Heal by Dealing Damage
Windrose has a hidden recovery system that the game barely explains. After you take damage in a fight, dealing damage back quickly will recover a portion of your lost health. The faster you counterattack, the more health you regain. This mechanic also works with bleed stacks applied by certain weapons like rapiers, making bleed-focused builds surprisingly effective at sustaining through longer encounters.
Rally doesn't replace dedicated healing items, but it gives aggressive players a meaningful way to claw back health during combat without disengaging. The key is to strike back immediately after getting hit rather than retreating to use a Bandage. Combined with proper stamina management — never letting your stamina bar drop into the red zone, where recovery speed tanks — rally turns tight fights into survivable ones.
Stamina and the Well-Rested Buff
While not direct healing, stamina management is deeply tied to your ability to survive and recover. Windrose features a Well-Rested buff tied to your base's comfort level, similar to Valheim. Building interior furniture and decorations raises your comfort rating, which directly improves passive stamina recovery speed. Without it, stamina recovery feels sluggish in a way that makes dodging, blocking, and disengaging to heal far harder than it needs to be.
The buff activates almost instantly when you visit your main base. Pop back, grab it, and head out. It's a small habit that makes every other healing method more effective because you'll have the stamina to actually create safe windows for recovery.
Surviving in Windrose comes down to layering these systems together. Eat two foods before leaving base, carry Bandages for out-of-combat recovery, place Bonfires near dangerous areas, collect your daily potion from the Doctor, and learn to rally-heal during fights. None of these methods alone will keep you alive against the game's tougher enemies, but used together, they form a reliable safety net that makes even the roughest encounters manageable.