I think the cauldron is very good to have on hard, and mostly useless on hell. Most common use for the cauldron is turning raw food into cooked food, which will constantly disappear on hell difficulty so what's the point. And no I don't have the patience to precisely manage all the breadcrumbs inside my poorly sorted inventory twice a day, there are much faster ways of getting food/money.
To the east/northeast of pirate's bane, however, lies probably the easiest fishcave that can be cleared really really fast because it's a really small place. And inside you will find
-A random amount of almost entirely unguarded captive women
-A chest with 5-6 random items in it
-Three piles of fish + tons of fish in the water (and this is the part where the couldron will be useful even on hell)
There's only 1 guard and 1 area that needs to be cleared for the captive women to reach the exit, which is a very short and very spacious crawl compared to any other as far as I can remember. All enemies, except for 3 tadpoles, all start submerged which means they're unlikely to even notice you unless you... bump? into them. And if you aggro something it's generally not an issue because the alarm is rarely ever raised and if it is raised you still have plenty of time to do everything (or at least loot the chest and fish) until the guards come or whatever. So if anyone is looking for a good and reasonably fast way to increase morality I recommend giving this place a try.
Still even if it wasn't for this fishcave I wouldn't mind spending a single point on the cauldron like I wouldn't mind spending a single point on other special traits, but survival itself is a mostly useless stat if not entirely.
1) Food only spawns in the wilderness, but never spawns in locations where Lona actually has any business so survival doesn't contribute anything at all towards survival. You must still rely on food you take with you (or from your enemies), and I'd rather buy food than waste time grinding it in the woods. Timid personality and survival armor already grant sufficient survival for getting food in the wilderness in case of emergency or whatever.
2) Magic defense? What enemies besides the fortune teller, Elise, Megamin and Lona can inflict magical damage? And which of their attacks cannot be evaded simply by getting out of the way? If you wanna pick a fight with Cocona there are a million other things I'd suggest before allocating any points to survival.
3) Traps are garbage, period. You would need to make one out of a Full Metal Harness weighing 50 and then you'd still end up with something that deals only marginally greater damage than a direct hit from a frag mine. A full 99 survival can only increase the damage by 49.5 at most, which is only like 20% higher than the same trap set with 0 survival.
4) Despite my efforts I still don't know what environmental danger does, nobody answered so maybe nobody knows what it does. Does it even do anything? Survival is supposed to have some influence but if the difference is only detectable via a debugger then whatever it does it sucks.
