Cooking for beginners
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Introduction
When you first enter the lands of Wurm you can obtain nutritious food from a Bartender in any starter town for 24 playing hours. After that you're on your own. Players usually Forage to survive after that. Foraging is an important skill to develop and the better you are at it the better the items you forage will be. So, if I get really good at foraging, why would I ever need to cook?
Why Cook?
1. Good Nutrition - Cooked food is always more nutritious than raw food. Good nutrition has many advantages such as having to eat less often and faster stamina regeneration. A healthy character is a more capable character!
2. Temporary Affinities - Prepared foods can give a temporary boost to certain characteristics or skills. You will learn more about Affinities later.
But cooking is hard and it takes a long time!
Actually, its not and it doesn't have to! Cooking can be as simple and quick as you want it to be. And you want to start out simple anyway because that's how you get better faster, by cooking very simple easy things.
What will I need?
To start cooking all you will need is a Pottery bowl, something to put in it and a campfire. That's it. You received a pottery bowl in your inventory when you first started but if you're like me you may have misplaced it by now. Not to worry as they are very easy to make! Dig some clay, (usually found by water) and mold it into a clay bowl using the Hand icon in your character window. Drop the clay bowl into a fire and wait until the description changes from Clay bow to Pottery bowl.
Using Lore
So you've got your bowl and something to put in it, lets say you foraged a vegetable or had good luck hunting and butchered an animal. Put something in the Pottery bowl, (one thing is enough) then right click the bowl and select 'Lore'. This useful function will tell you ahead of time what will happen if you cook it. You can receive a variety of messages from the Lore function but the one were interested in now is: "The ingredients in the pottery bowl would make a <item name> when cooked in a cooker." If you see a message like that drop the bowl in a campfire and before you know it you'll have some cooked food to eat. If you don't see a message like that try something else in the bowl until you do.
Recipes
When you cook something you may see a message saying that a new recipe has been added to your cookbook. This happens when you cook something unique that you have never cooked before. Your cookbook can be accessed from a button on your Quickbar (see image at right). The bowl over the campfire button will open your cookbook. The cookbook comes loaded with many recipes already which are show in green, the ones you create yourself are white.
Affinities
When you eat prepared food you may see a message like "You suddenly realize you have more of an insight about <something>. Affinities are a complex subject beyond the scope of this guide but for now just know that they are called Temporary Affinities and cooking the same thing in the same way will always give you the same affinity. At first they will not last very long but as your cooking skill improves the affinities your food will give you will last longer.
Getting fancy
Once you have the simple basics of feeding yourself under your belt (and it really is as simple as just described) you may want to begin experimenting. While a single ingredient in a bowl will work, you certainly are not limited to that. Try combining multiple ingredients of different types to see what you get. Try different containers like maybe make yourself a frying pan and see what happens when you put something in that. Don't forget about the Lore function. Adding ingredients found through Botanizing will add to the variety of your food. You can get as creative as you like.
Branching out
Cooking goes way beyond heating food in a container. (But it certainly doesn't have to!)
There are several other skills, tools and materials that all are part of the cooking experience.
While you are enjoying your first cooked food, have a look at some of the following cooking related articles.
Bon Appétit
