Cooking

**Cooking** is a system of combining foods in a cooking station to make meals. These meals can be eaten to restore energy, and if cooked with spices, provide buffs. Each recipe must be discovered through a system of experimentation before it can be cooked.

## Discovering recipes

In the cooking station, question marks represent recipes that have not yet been discovered, but that the player currently has the ingredients for. Clicking on one of these recipes will bring up an empty cooking pot with 2-4 slots. Fill each of these slots with ingredients and click the "discover" button to check it, which will either unlock the recipe or display a mix of symbols.

* A green checkmark means that one of the ingredients was correct and in the right position.
* A yellow circle arrow means that one of the ingredients was correct but in the wrong position.
* A red X means one of the ingredients is not part of the recipe.

Note that the symbols are always displayed in this order and from left to right; they do not convey any information about which slot they are referring to. If an ingredient is correct, the leftmost symbol will be a green checkmark, but it could be referring to any of the four ingredients.

Some rules:

* You only see undiscovered recipes for which you have the ingredients. If you discover all recipes whenever you find a new ingredient, you can be sure that all undiscovered recipes require the last ingredient you found.
* An ingredient can only be used once per recipe. The game will not allow the same ingredient to be added a second time to the pot.
* Spices are only used in 4-ingredient recipes (and vice-versa).
* If a spice is used, it will always be bottom ingredient. In the rare case of a second spice being used, it will be the right one. You can tell if a spice is used by the small icon next to the blue bar.
* Level 1 to 3 recipes are always vegan. Starting with level 4, recipes will require at least one ingredient acquired by fishing.
* More recent versions of the game will show you that ingredients start being used at the following levels:
	1. Cob of Corn
	2. Potato, Tomato, Onion
	3. Carrot, Rice, Eggplant, Pumpkin
	4. Tier 1 fish
	5. None
	6. Tier 2 fish
	7. Tier 3 fish

Ingredients will never be consumed through discovery. When a recipe is discovered, it will pop up on the screen with information about it but it will not actually have been cooked yet.

## Ingredients

Crop ingredients
* Carrot
* Cob of Corn
* Eggplant
* Onion
* Potato
* Pumpkin
* Rice
* Tomato

Fish ingredients
* Bluefish
* Clam
* Crab
* Flounder
* Lobster
* Mackerel
* Red Snapper
* Seabass
* White Marlin

### Spices

Spices are rare ingredients that can be added to some recipes to add temporary buffs when eating them. These recipes will be the same as their base form, but the bottom slot will be the spice and have an adjective prepended to their name. The duration of the buff depends on the level of the meal.

  Ginger Root | Aromatic | Walking costs less energy.

## Stew

The stew pot can have ingredients added to it without any recipe. The crew will eat from the stew over time, until the pot is empty. The player can also eat from the pot, restoring half of the energy and gaining a buff that reduces the cost of all actions for 6 hours. Starting the Foundation Update (1.3), the buff requires Fiona’s level 1 bonus. A new stew can only be cooked if the pot is empty, which is after 12 hours (e.g. if the stew is cooked at sunrise, it will be gone after sunset).

For information on how the stew relates to happiness and favored ingredients, see Crew. Happiness unlocks tool upgrades (first levels) and later camp upgrades (see article).