Cooking

Cooking requires a minimum Crude tools to perform. Grilling, baking, frying, butchering, preserving, brewing, wine making, cider & mead making. This skill covers just about anything food related. If this game had a sanity meter, this skill would recharge sanity for your character. Especially after they’ve been on the trail for 3 months eating half burned fish & fists full of clover.

The main mechanics of the skill are preservation of food. Although creating high level dishes & drinks would be a big flex on the other characters around you, & would definitely get you that job as head chef in the local diner. You may even fetch a fair bit of extra coin for the rarity of such a quality beer you made in a barrel while on the trail… if your GM approves it.

Food & drinks go bad. Without applying the Cooking skill, your apple juice, fresh squirrel, & cabbage will go bad in about a week. 1 week is not a lot of time when you have to stockpile for the winter, or travel across the open ocean.

A character must conclude the preservation of food & drink before they spoil at the end of the 7th day from their harvest.

Each time Cooking is assigned as 1 daily task; the player gets 1 point added to their Cooking Point Pool for each level they have in the skill (ex: a level 5 cook gains 5 Cooking Points. A level 10 cook gains 10 Cooking Points in their pool). They may distribute them however the player sees fit:

  • Chore Delegation (1 Point): By freeing time for others, a cook may grant 1 non-cooking ally an extra Daily Task for that day. Allowing the ally to perform a 3rd Daily Task. The ally must provide themselves with 5 hours of light to use the 3rd task slot. This buff may not be applied to any character more than once each day, & requires the Cook to feed that character a full day worth of meals to apply.
  • Permanent Food Preservation (1 Point): Preserve 1 unit of food permanently. Crude Toolkit x1, Basic Toolkit x2, Workshop x4, & creature size modifiers apply to this sub-task.
  • Tallow Candle Crafting (1 Point): The Cook may process 1-hour Candles x5 (XS size) from 1 unit of “Animal Fat” with a Crude Toolkit. The Cook may process 1-hour Candles x10 from 2 units of “Animal Fat” with a Basic Toolkit. The Cook may process 1-hour candles x20 from 4 units of “Animal Fat” with a Workshop. (this sub-task does not gain any bonuses for creature size.)

The Cooking Skill Preservation outputs are also tied to a creatures size category as:

  • Small races will half-production (0.5x).
  • Medium is normal (1x).
  • Large produces four times (4x).
  • Extra-large races can cook & preserve nine times (9x).

“Preservation Tier” value is not reflective of the “Taste Tier” value of food. Taste Tier of meals requires assignment of a daily task, & provides meals equal to the tool bonuses for that daily task (Crude Toolkit = up to 25 meals, Basic Toolkit= up to 50 meals, Kitchen = up to 100 meals). This does not have to be all at once. If your party of 5 was to eat 3 meals a day. The Cook can make all 15 of those meals as their “Daily Task” performed throughout the day. If it is not declared as a task for the day, then the Taste Tier of each meal is half of the characters Cooking skill level.