Cooking

Game actions drain your character's hunger bar over time. If emptied your character will starve, halting health regen and draining hit points to 25%. Healing items and abilities can be used but any health over 25% will continue to drain.

So you need to eat up! There are many different food items in the game which can be eaten raw or cooked on a fire (or even in a cooking pot which allows for more advanced meals--including honey or spices can even yield strong buffs).

Food items are perishable and will eventually expire (you can check the expiration counter with a scholar's lens). Old food can still be eaten, but won't be nearly as filling and will disappear after a time. Old ingredients can't be cooked.

To find out more continue reading!

## Simple Cooking

Food can be cooked on a simple fire (temporary) or a fire pit (permanent).

 Light by adding wood (each log burns for 30 seconds).

Cooking pots can be used on either fire source but the fire pit is more convenient.

When the food is done it will change in appearance, leaving it on the fire too long will cause it to burn up (onions and tomatoes don't look different cooked, making them trickier to not burn). You can cook any quantity at once, but doing so will yield less cooking experience than cooking individually. Cooking with a cooking pot will also yield more experience.

## Leveling Up and Experience

Cooking food on an open fire gives 44 base experience. Cooking multiple at once gives more xp than that, but significantly less in total than if you had cooked them one at a time. Cooking with a cooking pot seems to scale with the nutritional value of the ingredients, cooking level, and cooking time, and gives way more skill xp than an open fire.

It *appears* that:

* 1% nutritional value from ingredients equals 5xp but stops giving xp after 40%.

* Each log (30 seconds on the fire) adds 7.5xp.

* There is a 75xp fixed base xp bonus to using a cooking pot.

* There is a scaling bonus of 2.5xp per cooking level added on top of everything else.

**HOWEVER** this is tentative and might break apart on better testing across a wider range of cooking levels.

(This section also jumps the gun a little bit on nutritional value; see the Ingredients and Advanced Cooking for more info.)

## Ingredients

Combining stacks of the same ingredient will average their expiration timers. Cooking resets the timer.

(In addition to listed sources all items can be randomly found in chests in the Underworld and some other maps.)

## Advanced Cooking

Using a cooking pot allows you to combine ingredients, cook them longer, and add spices to your meals.

### Nutritional Value

The amount of hunger filled by food made in a cooking pot is straightforward:

* 0.5% is added per cooking level.
* 1.5% is added per log (each log fuels a fire pit 8% and burns for 30 seconds).
* The total "raw" percents from all added ingredients (so 6% per meat, 4% per fish, etc.).
	+ ***Each ingredient must be added one at a time to be fully effective!***
* Tea (boiled water) has no nutritional value at all unless milk, honey, or spices are added.

#### Combining Stacks

Meals stacked together are averaged. For example if you have a meat dish that would fill 100% of your hunger bar, and pick up a second meat dish that would fill 50%, you now have a stack of two meat dishes that each fill 75%. Meals of the same name will stack even if their original ingredients differed. Meals containing spices however will not stack at all.

### Expiration

Meals can stay fresh up to 31 days. The function depends on cooking time and your cooking level. The variable in hours is roughly 60% of your cooking level, with every other log being worth double: so if you have 30 cooking, your variable is 18 hours: the first log adds double (36 hours), the second 18 hours, the third is double (36 hours again), then 18, etc.

I don't know why it oscilates like that. But simply put, every two logs adds [3 × (60% of your cooking level)] hours. And since two logs equals one minute on the fire, we can roll with it (see the table below for benchmarks). **And finally:** if you cook a meal longer than 20 minutes it will be burnt, halving its expiration time and nutrition. So don't do that!

#### Combining Stacks

When combining meals expiration timers are supposed to average as well, but currently the timer is on the food you're originally holding overrides the timer on anything picked up that stacks with it. So you can renew the expiration timer on cooked foods by holding newer foods and picking up older ones. This could be patched out later though.

(This doesn't work for meals containing spices as they cannot stack.)

### Food Buffs

Honey and spices add bonuses to meals (they can also be eaten raw for a smaller bonus effect).

The ***strength*** of the buff depends on cooking level, cooking time, and ingredient diversity. The easiest way to get a full buff is to use several different types of ingredients (up to 7 or 8 at lower cooking levels). At 100 cooking you can just make slop (throw the honey or spices into a cooking pot with no other ingredients) and still get the full buff.

The ***duration*** of the buff depends on the quantity of honey or spices added. Each honey or spice is equal to one minute of buff time. The exception is caraway, which is a temporary movement speed bonus that drops by 10 each time you move, is gone very quickly, and ranges from 100 to 200 with additional caraway having no effect. If a sweet or spicy meal is old the buff is still just as good, the nutritional value just drops.

* **July 29, 2019 Patch:**
	+ Spices no longer need to be added one at a time.
	+ The maximum duration of a buff is also now capped at 3 hours (180 spices).

### Poisoned Food

Added July 29, 2019. From patch notes: "Poison Extract can be used as an ingredient while cooking (this can’t be detected prior to eating and can be fatal). Kills for food poisoning will be credited to the dish, so the killer will be unknown and gain no infamy (there are some protections for newbies though)." Link

### Types of Meals

You can determine what the meal will be called specifically based on its ingredients. This doesn't influence the nutritional value of the food or anything like that, but it can help to organize different kinds of meals (such as only making black pepper meals with meats, and coriander meals with vegetables, to tell them apart afterward). Or to just be festive.