Historical:Meal

Main / Skills / Cooking / Hot food cooking / Meal

Meal

Creation
Put ingredients in a frying pan. Cook in a fire.
Result
1 Meal
Skill and improvement
Uses hot food cooking Cannot be improved

The most nutritious type of food. When eaten hot it gives more nutrition.

Method

A basic meal consists of meat / fish and potato / corn / onion / pumpkin (commonly referred to as vegetables) or rice that you heat up in a frying pan. Do not use fish and meat at the same time as that will only make a stew.

If there are no vegetables available, they can be substituted by bread. Adding salt halves the meal's decay rate.

Examine the frying pan before cooking to determine the difficulty and whether or not it will become a meal. Herbs, cheese, and some other foraged and harvested items can be added for additional difficulty. Typically the more ingredients a meal has the more difficult it will be to cook. Berries added to the frypan will produce stew instead of a meal.

Meals have higher base difficulty than other dishes, so at low HFC skill it is recommended to use stone ovens when cooking them. If difficulty isn't an issue, any fire source can be used. Experienced cooks will sometimes use campfires or stone forges to intentionally increase the difficulty and therefore their skill gain. Added difficulty:

• Oven 0
• Campfire 5
• Forge 10

The base QL of a meal is your hot food cooking skill, and at lower skill it will match this most of the time. As hot food cooking becomes higher, it also becomes harder and harder to maintain maximum quality. When it exceeds 70, the meal QL will drop and become more dependent on the ql of the items and the difficulty of making it (the easier the meal, the higher QL meal made).

Requirements

Fire source

Campfire, Stone forge, Stone oven

Cooking implement

Frying pan

Meaty part

Either meat or fish (regular or fillet)

Vegetable part

Potato, corn, onion, rice or pumpkin.

Alternatively: bread or grain.

Resulting Product

• 1x meal

Skills used

• Hot food cooking

Some Recipes and Difficulty (2011 Feb 19)

• Meat + Onion = 22 difficulty
• Meat + Onion + Corn = 25 difficulty
• Meat + Onion + Potato = 25 difficulty
• Meat + Corn = 27 difficulty
• Meat + Rice = 27 difficulty
• Meat + Potato = 27 difficulty
• Meat + Onion + Pumpkin = 28 difficulty
• Meat + Pumpkin = 30 difficulty
• Meat + Bread = 30 difficulty
• Meat + Corn + Onion + Cheese = 32 difficulty
• Meat + Corn + Rice = 33 difficulty
• Meat + Potato + Rice = 33 difficulty
• Meat + Pumpkin + Potato = 33 difficulty
• Meat + Pumpkin + Corn = 33 difficulty
• Meat + Pumpkin + Grain = 33 difficulty
• Meat + Rice = 37 difficulty
• Meat + Pumpkin + Corn + Potato + Onion = 39 difficulty
• Meat + Corn + Onion + Cheese + Grain = 39 difficulty
• Meat + Pumpkin + Corn + Potato = 40 difficulty
• Meat + Pumpkin + Corn + Rice = 40 difficulty

Additional notes

• Meals decay very fast in inventories. You're better off storing them in a barrel.
• They do take damage in your inventory even if you are logged off.
• A common myth is that water, salt, or water plus salt will decrease the decay rate of meals in a barrel, but this has been proven to be false.
• Salt cooked into meals halves the damage of a decay tick on the meal. Experimentation on identical meals (one with salt, one without) stored in a bucket inside a building (no water in the bucket) has resulted in the following results:

10.0 QL meal with salt Day 0 = 0.0 damage Day 1 = 0.0 damage Day 3 = 60.0 damage

10.0 QL meal without salt Day 0 = 0.0 damage Day 1 = 0.0 damage Day 3 = 0.0 damage