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 Newtown.

Foraging And Botanizing

You will need to Forage and Botanize to make your Stew, Soup, or Casseroles. To do this right click a Grass Tile than select Nature > Forage or Botanize

NOTE: A player can do both forage and botanize once on the same tile every 24 hours. Any attempts past then will find nothing, so it's 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 your Shovel, than Right click the Clay Tile and Select Dig. You will get Clay, now Double click your left or right hand than right click and select Create > Containers > Clay Bowl. You will now either fail, get an Unfinished Clay Bowl or get a Clay Bowl. If the bowl is unfinished you will need to perform actions on it to finish it.

Put the (not unfinished) Clay Bowl in a Fire to finish the bowl, it should change colour and be called Pottery Bowl once it has heated up and cured.

Campfire

To create a campfire, first find a tree, double click your Small Axe and right click the tree than select Chop Down, keep selecting Chop Down to the same tree until the tree vanishes. Now there should be a log or a felled tree on the floor. For the felled tree right click than select Chop Down to create logs, Now double click either your Small Axe or Carving Knife than Right click the log and select Create > Miscellaneus > Kindling. Now that you have a Kindling Double click your Steel and Flint and right click the Kindling and Select: Create > Campfire

Combining all three things to cook

First off you should Forage and Botanize, now create your Clay Bowl and BEFORE you heat up the Clay Bowl put the Foraged and Botanized items in the Bowl then 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 Casserole. We'll cover the recipe for Meal on this page as it's currently the most useful recipe.

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. QL of the meal will in most cases equal your skill in hot food cooking, unless you try to cook a meal with too high difficulty.

My cooking will not go up, why?

You are probably cooking too high or low difficulty food, at Cooking Level 1 cook a couple of 3-5 Difficulty Foods, to check the difficulty Right Click then Examine the bowl it will also tell you what the food will turn out as. Try cooking lots of stews at once to gain cooking skill faster.

Gaining cook 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. Use trial and error to find what works best for you.

Using 1 cooked meat and 1 veggie works well until about skill 30. Once you get to 30, skill gain seems to slow down and you will prolly 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 search for ingredients.

Note: To cook faster, placing meat and veggies in a fire (not in the pan) wait for them all to become at least searing hot, and then place 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.