Cooking
This article is about the Cooking 
Decreases ingredient consumption by evolved recipes
Poison detection
Cooking is a crafting skill.
Overview
Cooking allows your character to make the most out of food items when used as ingredients.
Character Creation
Boosts to cooking skill from character creation can grant a significant boost to skill gain.
Occupations
| Name | Starting points | Major skills | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
 Chef
|
-4 | +3 Cooking +1 Maintenance +1 Short Blade |
N/A |
 Burger Flipper
|
2 | +2 Cooking +1 Maintenance +1 Short Blade |
N/A |
Traits
| Name | Cost | Description | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
 Cook
|
-6 | Knows cooking recipes.[1] | +2 Cooking |
Cooking
Cooking can be initiated from the context menu for a cooking vessel or base ingredient. If the player has at least one ingredient valid for that recipe, they will be able to add it to start cooking. Further ingredients can be added from the same menu, to a limit defined per-recipe. Food cooked this way benefits from an unhappiness reduction, increased nutrition and reduced overall food usage. Spices can be added for a boredom reduction and a stronger unhappiness reduction.
Evolved recipes crafted from a base ingredient (such as the Bread in a Sandwich) will inherit the age of the base ingredient. This means that base ingredients that have gone stale will result in a stale food item. However, the age of any other ingredients does not have any affect on the final food (so long as they have not gone rotten), so it can be very efficient to prioritise use of stale food in recipes before they rot.
- Adding 3 of the same ingredient will remove the unhappiness reduction, and further additions of the same ingredient will add an unhappiness increase.
Cooking level
Cooking XP is easy to gain, but you should still maximize it by reading Skill Books.
Cooking Vol. 1 (Levels 1-2)- Cooking Vol. 2 (Levels 3-4)
- Cooking Vol. 3 (Levels 5-6)
- Cooking Vol. 4 (Levels 7-8)
- Cooking Vol. 5 (Levels 9-10)
Cooking experience is gained when cooking food in a heat source, when crafting cooking recipes and when adding ingredients to evolved recipes.
Benefits
Each level of cooking skill increases the amount of nutrition each ingredient provides and reduces the amount of ingredient that is used. At level 7 the player is able to safely use small amounts of rotten food in their recipes.
| Cooking level | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amount of ingredient used[2] | 100% | 97% | 94% | 91% | 88% | 85% | 82% | 79% | 76% | 73% | 70% |
| Nutrition added per ingredient[3] | 100% | 103% | 107% | 109% | 111% | 113% | 115% | 116% | 117% | 117% | 117%[4] |
| Amount of rotten ingredient used | Cannot use rotten food | 5% | 10% | ||||||||
Each level of cooking skill also reduces the time it takes to add ingredients by a miniscule 0.05 seconds.
Poisoning
Evolved recipes with three or more ingredients can be poisoned with Bleach. A higher cooking level makes it easier for the player to detect poisons, and harder for the player's poisons to be detected. Food that has been detected as poisonous is marked with an icon 
.
| Poisoner's cooking level | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Level required to detect poison | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | |||
Recipes
- Main article: Cooking (crafting)
See also
- ↑ Ingame description. Does not actually give any recipes.
- ↑ The base amount of an ingredient used is set per-recipe. This is a modifier to that per-recipe value.
- ↑ Each level increases nutrition added by 6.66%, but this is applied after the amount of the ingredient used is reduced, so the final value (displayed in the table) is much lower, and has greatly diminishing returns.
- ↑ The diminishing returns are so extreme that this is actually slightly lower than level 9.