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Ummm...there's nothing official but I'm on your players side honestly.
Personally I hate survival stuff, it's just not fun for me. And if no one in your party built around it, it's challenging in an unfun way.
The kineticist can use this ability every round, not every 10 minutes. The part about feeling full I interpret as "the creature feels so full they can't eat for 10 minutes" not that its only nutritionally relevant for 10 minutes. And it's not "simply a berry". It's produce. It could be any kind of produce that's light bulk or less. Please recall that light bulk is not negligible bulk. Examples of light bulk are a dagger or scroll, while a piece of chalk is considered negligible bulk.
The fact that it provides healing, to me also is indicative that it's more rejuvenating that normal rations (which provide no healing).
Ultimately it's your call as a GM, but I'd make sure your transparent with your player about how you intend to run it. If the player knew survival was going to be important to the start of the AP and selected this ability with that in mind, you should give them the opportunity to change their decisions if you're not going to allow it to function at least equivalent to basic rations.
And you might need to establish some guidelines for how it functions. Since the produce withers the next round, and can only be consumed every 10 minutes it wouldn't be unreasonable to say that consuming a "full meal" takes multiple servings of the produce over an hour to be sated for one meal.
RAW this probably works fine. As mentioned, Kineticist has multiple ways to basically cheese this. And they're not the only ones: any non-Occult spellcaster by book 2 can cast Create Food, which easily covers a party for food. So if you've got a Cleric, the food part is completely trivialized.
Plus unless you say "the Subsist exploration activity isn't available", anyone with Survival and Forager literally can't fail to feed 5 people (because that's the minimum possible result). We abused the hell out of this in Kingmaker (it made food management not a thing).
PF2 fundamentally doesn't worry that much about things like food and water and the core rules give PCs multiple ways to simply handwave it away. If you want it to be an actual thing they need to do, you're going to need to house rule all of those things away or hope they have a party that can't do any of them.
And that's a thing you can do: house rules are allowed. Just remember that it is a house rule, and a player might be annoyed if they took an option specifically to deal with this and you go "nah you can't do that so you have to do this the hard way."
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From Rage of Elements, page 34:
You grow a nourishing nut, vegetable, seed, or fruit. Choose a creature in your kinetic aura. The produce grows in their open hand, or at their feet if they have no open hands. The produce has light Bulk. A creature can eat it with an Interact action to regain 1d4 + 1 HP; this is a healing vitality effect. The creature feels full for 10 minutes, during which it has resistance 2 to void damage and can't eat another piece of produce.
(I have bolded the relevant parts)
Vegetable & Fruit includes carrots, onions, radishes, rutabegas, cabbage, lettuce, apples, citrus fruits, bunches of grapes or berries, bananas, plantains, garlic bulbs, tomatoes and jalapenos. There is no reason you can't subsist on these items.
The part about feeling full and being unable to eat more for ten minutes is a limitation imposed due to the healing properties of the Fresh Produce, to keep it from becoming unlimited healing during combat.
Still, run it past your judge. If the Survival/feeding problem is a standard part of the adventure then maybe the foraging leads you to an interesting cave (or some such)?
Kineticists are pretty well designed to break survival scenarios in general. That's part of their fun, but it needs to be considered for any survival game. If you want hardcore mode, you'll need to nerf them or limit their build options (probably to air and fiee).
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So even if you allow Fresh Produce / Base Kinesis to make edible plant matter with nutritional value capable of sustaining the party, the players still have a finite amount of water.
I'd disagree as vegetables and fruit have high water content: cucumbers, for instance, are 96% water, strawberries have 92% and even at the low end, potatoes have 79% and bananas 74%. Even nuts can have 50% when harvested and even after that, nuts [and seeds] have 5-13%.
If they are eating enough fresh food to feed themselves, they should have no issue with water.
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The ability says it's nourishing, so it does nourish no matter its duration, as long as you eat it before it's gone. And for water, you could just squeeze juices into your mouth. That should qualify even if one has to dedicate a certain percent of the produce to the water stat rather than the food stat. Obstacle overcome (for better or worse narratively).
And as noted before, this is what the Kineticist does. At worst they might get fatigued from ceaseless effort, but if augmenting some of the other resource successes of the party this obstacle simply isn't one. (I've seen it happen with other scenarios when the party simply had emphasized that type of threat, but it does come at the cost of not addressing other obstacles as thoroughly.)
Arguably Kineticists should've been Uncommon given how they can break so many scenarios (except they were already established in PF1). Even post-Kineticist scenarios have a hard time accounting for their endless resources so a GM should be alert to this possibility at session zero. Heck, in the infrastructure thread Kineticists pose a major X factor as to what's possible, being more impactful than labor & spell slots at least per Kineticist, so infrastructure questions depend on how many there are as much as most factors.
Given your fixation on nutritional realism
On the contrary, I replied to YOUR nutritional realism that nutritional food wouldn't also provide water. Once you accept it giving you the food requirement, I can't see an argument that it wouldn't also the water requirement too.
The scenario itself identifies two pools of resources -- food and water -- and makes no attempt to differentiate between types of food, their relative nutritional value, or says that one can be interchanged for the other.
I don't think someone needs a degree in Nutrition Science to know fruits and vegetables have a lot of water in them and knowing that to come to the conclusion that eating such foods would slake one's thirst. My comment was on accepting it as food and not as water: it's pretty much a package deal with either it working as both or neither.
If you want resource consumption to matter, you could just work with the players to come up with a suitable explanation for why it doesn't work. Maybe the effort required to summon the elemental energy burns enough calories to make it a wash.
Yes, food is probably not "precious" (debatable for a starving person), but it's definitely valuable and its cost is not negligible.
If you look at it that way, then simple wood has value, even if it's as firewood or kindling.
Yeah, but we don't have firewood or kindling cost in rulebooks (thankfully) :) We do have rations' or meals' costs.
Without an actual description of what each contains, rations or meals having a cost are pretty meaningless. A cucumber isn't a meal or ration. For instance, a ration by definition is "a food allowance for one day". A singular use doesn't create that so it's not a ration by itself so it has no listed cost. Much the same as a meal unless you're trying to tell me a single cucumber counts as one of those meals. So, IMO, we're looking at the same thing as firewood with no listed cost for individual food items, just the aggregate of several pieces of food.
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Yeah, but we don't have firewood or kindling cost in rulebooks (thankfully) :)
The Kingmaker cooking rules expect PCs to make a non-magical fire in marshland. This implies that low-level adventurers without a Kineicist are expected to carry firewood. If a dagger is light bulk, then a log of firewood is at least light. It takes 4 to 12 logs to make a good campfire. So we have at least one extra bulk per three days PCs intend to spend in wilderness.
In my Home game, we spend much more time on talking to people or smacking monsters, but if you want to play Oregon Trail, watch out for dysentery.
And wood plane is for the overwhelmingly major part is about ... wood. Of different forms and types, animated or not, but mostly it's wood. And leaves. What it's not is a fruit or vegetable garden. So, take this piece of fine oak wood and use it normally :)
I'd also like to point out that there are trees like the crocodile-bark tree and the traveler's palm that release drinkable water when pierced, making even having a strict 'only wood' requirement would allow for water.
As far as food, the inner bark of certain trees, such as pine, birch, and willow, is edible and contains carbohydrates, fiber, vitamins (e.g., vitamin C), and minerals (e.g., potassium). At 500-600 calories a pound, you'd only have to make @5 pounds per person. So 2 uses of Base Kinesis covers 1 person.
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As far as food, the inner bark of certain trees, such as pine, birch, and willow, is edible and contains carbohydrates, fiber, vitamins (e.g., vitamin C), and minerals (e.g., potassium). At 500-600 calories a pound, you'd only have to make @5 pounds per person. So 2 uses of Base Kinesis covers 1 person.
LOL! Adventurers listening are absolutely sweating bullets right now.
"They're asking us to eat eat 5 pounds of tree bark now? I thought the jerky was bad enough"
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I meant that food definitely isn't free in the system, and firewood could be.
And I meant that you're talking about something that's LOWER than the smallest coin in the game. A poor meal is 1 cp so when you're talking about something that's just PART of that meal, it's a negligible price that is the equivalent of free for our discussion. It's like saying an earth kineticist couldn't make a piece of chalk because 10 pieces are a cp and that's a price. Are you really quibbling about fractions of a cp? The requirement is "Elements you create (using Base Kinesis to generate an element, for example) must typically be ordinary materials of negligible value" And I can't think of a better definition of that than LESS than a cp.
That again is only a matter of the general question: could they make exactly what they want and everything they want? If they can, they could as well make strawberries.
I can't see how they can't or else you'd be saying water kineticists wouldn't know if they are making fresh water or having a flame that can't burn normal items [cool flames can be as low as 212 F temp]. I've never seen kineticists have to create random items with the ability. But lets assume it's totally random [lets pull up that random chart]; it's a 2 action ability so even at 1% for what you want, you'll likely get it after 10 min.
As far as food, the inner bark of certain trees, such as pine, birch, and willow, is edible and contains carbohydrates, fiber, vitamins (e.g., vitamin C), and minerals (e.g., potassium). At 500-600 calories a pound, you'd only have to make @5 pounds per person. So 2 uses of Base Kinesis covers 1 person.LOL! Adventurers listening are absolutely sweating bullets right now.
"They're asking us to eat eat 5 pounds of tree bark now? I thought the jerky was bad enough"
You're in luck, you can make bark into something like jerky! I will admit, bark isn't the tastiest food but it's better than starving.
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The Kingmaker cooking rules expect PCs to make a non-magical fire in marshland. This implies that low-level adventurers without a Kineicist are expected to carry firewood. If a dagger is light bulk, then a log of firewood is at least light. It takes 4 to 12 logs to make a good campfire. So we have at least one extra bulk per three days PCs intend to spend in wilderness.Torches are light bulk and better for cooking than plain wood. So, at most 1 bulk per 3 days.
Citation for torches being good for cooking, please. A campfire is quite a bit larger than a torch.
Torches require a good amount of oxygen to burn properly and they give off quite a bit of noxious smoke.
Some people like the smoked flavor.