Cooking & nutrition

Most real meals are evolved recipes: start with a base, then add ingredients one at a time. Each new ingredient makes the dish more filling and cuts boredom and unhappiness; repeating the same ingredient a third time cancels the bonus and a fourth makes it worse. Spices help more than anything.

Hunger, calories and spoil times for 92 foods: food list.

Pies, cakes, pizza and muffins also exist. Bread dough, baguettes, cake batter and pie dough are learned at Cooking 7, or from the cooking magazines on skills.

Build 42 canning: a jar and lid (both used up), a knife, the vegetables, 2 vinegar, 1 salt and half a unit of water. Cook the jar for about 60 minutes; it burns at around 120. Learned at Cooking 8 or from American Homesteading.

No meat or fruit. Jars are reusable once emptied, lids are not; find a stock of lids before autumn.

Your weight drifts with what you eat and how hard you work. The bands (from older game data; Build 42 may have shifted them slightly):

Any weight state other than normal caps Fitness XP at level 6. Eat fat and calories in winter; cut back in summer. Fast and Slow Metabolism traits push you one way from the start. Nutritionist shows the numbers on every food.

Every heat source cooks the same recipes, but they differ in what powers them, how safely they fail and how easily they burn your dinner. The electric ones warn you with a bell before food burns; the fuel-burning ones do not, so set a timer in your head.

Cooking times are short and burn windows are long: a sandwich takes about 5 minutes to cook and about 20 to burn, a bowl of oatmeal about 5 and 30. Burnt food is refused as an ingredient at any Cooking level, so pull the pot as soon as the label says cooked.

Our pick: a charcoal BBQ dragged into the base is the best early heat source. It runs on foraged twigs and junk mail, needs no power, and unlike a campfire it will not take the house with it.

Water taken from rivers, lakes and rain collectors is tainted and carries a chance of sickness every time you drink it or cook with it. The container shows a skull icon while it is unsafe. Heat it on any working heat source until the icon disappears, and remember that one unit of water takes about 10 points off thirst.

Which containers can be boiled

• Metal cookware for an oven, stove, campfire or BBQ: cooking pot (about 1.5 L), saucepan, kettle, roasting pan and a plain bowl.
• Microwave only: water bottles, pop bottles, plastic cups, microwave-marked mugs and teacups, empty jars and watering cans. The tooltip says contents can only be purified in a microwave. Never put metal in there.
• Not boilable at all: a bucket or a full gardening spray can. Decant into a pot first.

Water purification tablets purify a container without heat through the Purify Water craft. They are scarce outdoor-shop loot, so save them for travel. Later patch notes also added many more fluid containers that can be purified in the right oven, so if a container refuses in your build, check the branch you are on.

If you do drink bad water, lemongrass from foraging treats the sickness, and the health page covers the moodles. Cold or flu symptoms a day after a river drink are the usual sign.

Our view: keep one cooking pot permanently on the stove as a water station. Fill it from the rain barrel, boil, pour into bottles, repeat. Purified water does not re-taint in storage.

Cooking XP comes from three actions: adding an ingredient to an evolved recipe, finishing a cookable item on a heat source, and crafting a cooking recipe such as dough or a jar. A bowl of oatmeal or cereal gives about 3 XP, so a stack of oats and a water source is a quiet early grind. Soups and stews with six ingredients pay out more per pot because every ingredient added counts.

What the levels change

• The share of each ingredient used falls from 100% at level 0 to 70% at level 10, so the same larder feeds more meals.
• Nutrition per ingredient rises with level, up to about 117% at 10.
• Each level trims the time to add an ingredient.
• Level 7 unlocks dough, batter and rotten-ingredient use; level 8 unlocks canning (see above).

Boosts

Chef starts at Cooking 3, Burger Flipper at 2, and the Keen Cook trait adds levels and recipe knowledge. The five Cooking skill books multiply XP by 3, 5, 8, 12 and 16 for levels 1 to 2, 3 to 4, 5 to 6, 7 to 8 and 9 to 10. On default sandbox settings the cooking TV shows stop helping at around level 3.

Our loop for the first fortnight: read the book for your current bracket, cook every raw item in the fridge before it turns, then run a pot of soup on the stove with whatever vegetables are closest to rotting. Burnt pots are the only real cost, so stay within earshot of the bell.