Cooking

Cooking turns a hunt, a catch or a harvest into meals that strengthen you, and into dishes a whole settlement can buy. Anyone can cook, and the cooking skill grows as you do it. Cook is the full command reference, and Cooking and village life tells the story with pictures.

Over a fire

cook by a fire cooks the raw meat and fish you carry. A campfire or a camp will do, as will the hearth of a food hall or an inn. Skinning an animal's corpse can also give raw meat, more often with the carving skill.

Recipe cards

A dish needs its recipe card.

• At a food hall, cook menu lists the cards your standing allows and buy recipe <name> buys one. Inns sell the drink cards.
• read <name> recipe shows the ingredients, where it can be cooked and what the dish does. cook recipes lists the cards you carry.
• A cookbook keeps your cards together. Every food hall sells a plain one, along with a cooking pot (buy pot, buy cookbook).

Where you can cook depends on the dish. Everyday dishes cook in a pot over any fire. Hearty, work, house and seasonal dishes need a food hall's hearth or an inn's kitchen fire. Party dishes need a food hall, master dishes a great food hall, and drinks an inn's kitchen fire.

Cooking a dish

cook recipe <name> cooks the dish on a card. Ingredients come from your pot first, then from your pack and the bags in it. They are used up only when the dish is done, so stopping early costs nothing, and nothing on your keep list is used.

The dish cooks in stages and needs watching. When the pot calls for your hand, answer with the exact words you are given, such as use stir the pot or use pull it off the heat, before the moment passes. A missed moment makes a poorer dish and may burn it. A dish beyond your skill may burn too, and then everything that went into it is lost.

Every dish you see through without a slip adds to your cooking mastery (show masteries). A practised cook has longer to answer, and now and then turns out a masterful dish that is better and keeps longer.

Eating

A dish gives a meal effect and a drink a drink effect. You can have one of each at a time, and a new meal replaces the last. effects shows what is active.

Ingredients

Hunting, fishing and foraging fill the pot: game, fish, berries and edible mushrooms. Grain, roots, milk, butter, cheese and smoked meat and fish come from the settlements; the butcher at a food hall's counter sells what the stores can spare (list). A turn of work on a farm or a pasture leaves you a share, and a larger home garden grows roots. Province food explains where a settlement's food comes from.

Cooking for a settlement

At a food hall hearth or an inn's kitchen fire, cook <name> with a card's exact name cooks a batch for the building's shelf. The settlement's stores supply what they keep, and you bring the rest, such as game meat. A better cook gets more servings from a batch. You need standing with the settlement and the skill for the dish, the shelf must have room, and each cook may do this once in half an hour. A food hall's shelf takes dishes and an inn's takes drinks. You earn experience and standing when you finish, and coin when a serving sells.

Once a season the council can call a feast at the food hall, and cooks bring dishes to the table.

The cooking skill

Affiliated stats: wisdom (primary), intelligence (secondary) and dexterity (tertiary).

Cooking grows as you cook, up to 100%. The cook at a food hall also gives lessons with train cooking from cook, for experience and coin that goes to the settlement's treasury. The plain work is taught to those the settlement knows, the finer craft only to those it trusts.

See also

• Cook, the command reference
• Province food
• Crafting, for the other crafts