Cooking Mechanics

Overview

Cooking is where survival stops being desperate and starts becoming deliberate. At the fire, scattered ingredients become real meals that steady hunger, lift morale, and keep your run stable through storms, long travel chains, and recovery days. The deeper you go into stews, specialty dishes, and ration-style food, the more control you gain over daily risk.

Cooking Requirements

Basic Requirements

1. Work at Camp: Cooking is a camp action, so set up in your active local tile before you start meal prep
2. Stand on the Fire: Heat must be live and under your feet. If you are not on the fire spot, the meal does not happen
3. Bring the Exact Ingredients: Recipes consume their listed components, not just generic raw food. Plan your ingredient chain before lighting up
4. Use the Right Tools: Some dishes can be made directly over fire, while pot-based meals require a Cooking Pot
5. Respect Skill Limits: Advanced meals are locked behind Cooking progress; build fundamentals first, then move into higher-tier recipes
6. Budget Time and Energy: A standard cook cycle costs 1 hour and 0.25 fatigue. Complex dishes may take longer, so batch wisely

Cooking Benefits

Safety

• Raw foraged foods: Hunger can push you into risky choices. Many wild foods still carry a real poisoning chance (often around 20%), and spoiled portions are far more dangerous
• Cooked meals: A hot meal is your safest calorie line. Properly cooked food avoids the raw-food poisoning roll and gives you stable recovery value
• Boiled water: Better than drinking straight from the source, but not invincible. Bad source quality can still follow you, so treat water discipline as part of survival, not a one-time fix

Nutrition Enhancement

Cooking improves meal reliability and recovery output:

• Cooked meal portions: Each serving gives strong, dependable recovery (+18 hunger, +1 morale, +2.5 mental health)
• Canned food: Useful in emergencies and travel loops (+16 hunger, +2 thirst, +2.5 morale, +6 mental health), but it plays a different role than fresh cooking
• Nutrition restoration: Meals rebuild your deeper nutrition profile (protein, carbs, fats, vitamin C), which supports long-run stability
• Meal quality scaling: Better cooking skill and better condition produce better outcomes, so kitchen discipline compounds over time

Food Types

Raw Meats & Fish

• Raw Meat (0.3kg, trade value 8)
• Raw Fish (0.25kg, trade value 7)
• Not consumed directly through the standard Eat path; convert through cooking recipes first

Wild Edibles

Cultivated Produce

Cooking Actions

Every meal is a tactical decision: spend time now to reduce risk later. Use fire windows efficiently, cook in batches, and turn fragile ingredients into stable field rations before your next push.

Basic Cooking

• How you trigger it: cook (or direct recipe targeting in advanced usage)
• Time cost: 1 hour per cooking cycle
• Fatigue cost: 0.25 per cycle
• What must be true: You are in tile mode, standing on a live fire spot, and carrying ingredients for at least one valid recipe
• What you get: A real crafted meal/drink item with hunger-thirst values, quality roll, spoil timer, and recipe trace
• Why skill matters: Cooking skill and condition shape both success and quality; failed attempts can burn your ingredients

Boiling Water

• Command: boil [amount]
• Time cost: 1 hour per batch step
• Fatigue cost: 0.25 per batch step
• What must be true: You are in tile mode, on a fire spot, carrying a Pot, and holding unboiled water
• Conversion rate: Up to 5 units per in-game hour
• Result: Converts unboiledWater into water, while using Pot durability each boiling hour

Advanced Recipes

Advanced cooking is where campcraft becomes mastery:

• Recipe gates: Each recipe can enforce its own fire requirement, pot requirement, ingredient check, and minimum Cooking skill
• Optional ingredients: Extras can be invested to improve outcome profile
• Variable timing: Some recipes run longer than the baseline and use their own cook-time values
• Output layer: Produces distinct high-detail meal items and updates recipe discovery/journal progress

Nutrition System

Nutrient Types

1. Protein: Supports condition stability and physical resilience (meat, fish, eggs, beans, mushrooms)
2. Carbohydrates: Fast action fuel for movement and repeated activity (grains, tubers, produce, fruit)
3. Fats: Long-burn reserve and cold-weather support (nuts, eggs, richer meats, oils/fats)
4. Vitamin C: Recovery and deficiency protection layer (berries, tomatoes, peppers, herbs)

Balanced Diet

Nutrition is tracked continuously and drains every in-game hour:

• Protein: -0.15/hour
• Carbohydrates: -0.20/hour
• Fats: -0.12/hour
• Vitamin C: -0.18/hour

Deficiency thresholds and runtime penalties:

• Protein < 20: Condition loss, extra fatigue pressure, weakness warnings
• Vitamin C < 15: Ongoing damage pressure (scurvy effect) with warning events
• Carbohydrates < 15: Additional fatigue loss during normal activity loops
• Fats < 10: Increased warmth drain (harder thermal stability in cold conditions)

Cooking Skill

Experience Gain

Every meal teaches you something, if you survive the mistakes. Your Cooking skill grows through successful prep, and the game scales each gain by outcome quality and recipe context.

• Core cook XP: Successful dishes pull from a base 0.5 Cooking XP value, then scale by runtime multipliers
• Standard cook flow: XP follows 0.5 x (0.8-1.2 random) x optional-ingredient bonus
• Advanced cook flow: XP follows 0.5 x (0.9-1.2 random) x optional-ingredient bonus
• Boiling reality: Boiling is still essential survival work (time, fatigue, tool wear), but it is not a direct Cooking-skill XP engine in the active runtime loop

Skill Bonuses

Higher cooking skill means fewer wasted fires and more dependable food under pressure:

• Higher success chance: Your odds rise from a rough early baseline toward a strong late-game cap
• Higher meal quality: Better rolls produce stronger hunger/thirst recovery and better crafted-item value
• Stronger consistency: Skill smooths out bad outcomes, so your camp economy becomes more predictable
• Advanced access gates: Some recipes stay locked until you meet minimum Cooking requirements

Skill Levels

Cooking progression is a long arc, not a quick sprint:

• The skill runs on a continuous 0-100 scale.
• XP requirements rise as you climb, so each late-level gain has real weight
• Mastery systems and perk layers reward commitment, turning your kitchen from emergency survival into strategic advantage

Recipe Ingredients

Common cooking ingredient types:

Food Preparation Tips

1. Convert raw proteins early: Route rawMeat and rawFish into recipes fast to avoid spoilage pressure and stabilize meal quality
2. Treat raw forage as risk-managed: wildHoney is safe raw, but many foraged items (including pine nuts in current data) carry poison-risk rolls
3. Cook in fire windows: A lit fire is your production window, so batch multiple recipes before moving on
4. Use broth chains efficiently: Ingredients like bone, fat, herbs, and salt support high-value stew paths
5. Prioritize water discipline: Boil from unboiledWater into water in planned batches (up to 5 units per hour).
6. Protect your Pot durability: Boiling and pot-gated recipes consume tool durability; carry backup plans
7. Exploit optional ingredients: Optional adds increase output profile and improve return on time spent cooking
8. Maintain nutrient balance: Keep protein/carbs/fats/vitamin C above deficiency thresholds to avoid hidden survival penalties

Special Food Items

Prepared Food

• Weight: 0.2kg per portion
• Value: 8
• Effect: +18 hunger, +1 morale, +2.5 mental health, plus balanced nutrition restoration
• Source: Produced from cooking recipes (food resource path)

Boiled Water

• Weight: 0.2kg
• Value: 5
• Effect: +5 thirst per unit when consumed
• Source: Produced by boiling unboiledWater on a fire spot with a Pot

Canned Food

• Weight: 0.35kg
• Value: 10
• Effect: +16 hunger, +2 thirst, +2.5 morale, +6 mental health (with less-balanced nutrition profile)
• Source: Scavenged from ruins

Fire Management for Cooking

Fire Duration

• How a fire starts: Lighting a fire consumes 1 wood + 2 tinder and uses a craft-quality roll
• How long it lasts: A successful light adds roughly 6-13 hours (quality-scaled), and total fire time is capped at 18 hours on that tile
• How it decays: Active fire burns down by 1 hour per in-game hour while you operate on that world tile
• Failure cost: Failed ignition can still waste wood, so poor prep can burn resources without creating a cooking window

Multiple Actions

Treat one lit fire as a full production window. While standing on the fire spot, you can chain:

1. Cook meals (cook) with normal/advanced recipe checks
2. Boil water (boil [amount]) at up to 5 units per hour with a Pot
3. Run fire-gated crafting (medicine brews, tar processing, smelting, and other recipes that explicitly require Fire)
4. Recover thermal stability through direct fire warmth gain while you stay on the spot

Food Poisoning

Risk Factors

• Raw forage risk is item-based: Many wild-foraged foods use a base 20% poisoning roll, while several cultivated foods are marked safe (0% risk)
• Spoiled food is extremely dangerous: If you eat spoiled foraged food, poison chance is forced to at least 85% before modifiers
• Perk modifiers are multiplicative
• Iron Stomach: x0.25 poison chance (75% reduction)
• Sensitive Stomach: x4.0 poison chance (quadruple risk)
• Companion protection: An active companion with Iron Stomach sets food-poisoning risk to 0 for that check
• Skill mitigation: Foraging/survival skill reduces final poison chance (down to 50% of the post-modifier value at high skill)
• Important runtime note: Standard raw meat/fish are not eaten directly via the normal raw-forage path; poisoning rolls here apply to raw edible forage items

Prevention

• Cook risky forage into meals whenever possible; cooked food uses the safe meal path
• Avoid eating spoiled foraged stacks except in emergency survival situations
• Favor naturally safe raw foods and cultivated produce when fire access is limited
• Build foraging skill to lower poison checks over time
• If poisoned (stomachBug), prioritize rest/sleep recovery windows and hydration