Historical:Guide To Cooking

Main Page :: Useful links for beginners :: Cooking Guide

Introduction

As a newbie, you will get free food for the first 24 hours of playtime (if you play 3 hours every real life day, you will have access to free food for 8 real life days), at the bistro of the starting villages. During this time you should learn how to cook.

Foraging and botanizing

In order to make stews, casseroles, and other meals, you will likely need to forage and botanize some ingredients. To do this, right-click a grass tile, and select Nature > Forage or Botanize.

NOTE: A player can do both forage and botanize, once on the same tile, every 24 hours. Any attempts beyond this on a single tile then will find nothing. Because of this, it's often a good idea to find a less populated area to forage in.

Pottery bowl

To make your pottery bowl for cooking, you will need to first find clay. When you find a deposit, double-click (activate) your shovel, right-click the clay tile, and select "Dig". You will get clay. Now, double-click your left or right hand, then right-click and select "Create > Containers > Clay bowl". You will now either fail, get an unfinished clay bowl, or get a (finished) clay bowl. If the bowl is unfinished, you will need to perform actions on it to finish it.

Put the unfinished clay bowl in the campfire (or another fire container) to finish it. It should change color and be called pottery bowl once it has heated up and cured.

Combining ingredients to cook

After finding ingredients and making a pottery bowl, before you heat up the clay bowl, put the foraged and botanized items in the bowl and put it in a campfire (please note that the food will only cook in a pottery bowl, so you may have to wait for a clay bowl to turn into a pottery bowl). If you already have a finished pottery bowl, just put your food in the bowl and put it in the campfire. Note that you can add more than just one foraged or botanized item in a bowl for a larger prepared food dish. We'll cover the recipe for meals on this page as they are currently the most useful recipe.

Campfire

To create a campfire, first, find a tree, double-click your hatchet, right-click the tree, then select "cut down". Keep chopping down the same tree until the tree vanishes. Now, there should be a log or a felled tree. For the felled tree, right-click and select "chop up" to create logs. Now, double-click either your hatchet or carving knife, right-click the log, and select "Create > Miscellaneous > Kindling". Now that you have kindling, double-click your steel and flint, right-click the kindling, and select "Create > Campfire".

Meal

To create a meal, you will need a vegetable and a piece of meat or fish. Heat them up to searing hot and put them in a frying pan, and you will have a meal. Various low-nutrition foods like bread, berries, or cheese can be added to the frying pan to make your meal larger. Meal quality will, in most cases, equal your hot food cooking (HFC skill), unless you try to cook a meal with too high difficulty.

Why Won't My Hot Food Cooking (HFC) Skill Go Up?

You are probably cooking too high or low difficulty food. At HFC 1, cook a couple of 3-5 difficulty foods (like stews). Keep the difficulty up to 10 more than your current HFC. To check the difficulty, right-click the container the food is in, and select "Examine" (which will also tell you what food the current ingredients will combine to make as well as the container's temperature). Try cooking lots of stews at once to gain cooking skill faster.

Gaining cooking skill is a mystery, although Rolf has posted on the forums the way it should work. What works for one player doesn't always work for another, however. Use trial-and-error to find what works best for you.

Using 1 cooked meat and 1 veggie works well until about HFC 30. Once you get to 30, skill gain seems to slow down and you will probably only get skill for every 5-10 meals. You can also use corn as a component, which is especially nice since you can grow your own and will not have to go out to search for ingredients.

Note: To cook faster, place meat and veggies in a fire (not in the pan), wait for them all to become at least searing hot, and then place the 1 cooked meat and 1 veggie in the Frying Pan. It will become an instant Meal and will heat faster than in the Frying Pan alone.