Putting the "mmmmm" in "Cataclysm" - What do you cook in the apocalypse?

Game Talk The Bunker
1

A place to share your favourite yummy treats to sustain your haggard, hollow-eyed avatar through the endless struggle against death.

My personal favourite, at the moment: Spider Soup!

Once you can safely clear a whole basement of spiders without fear of damage, your food supply is sorted for months. Not only is it fun to endure the psychological torment of a twitching, shrieking blackness, writhing with eyes and legs, but you can then enjoy plunging your hands into some corpulent sacs of oozing insectoid excrescence to find… spider eggs!

Now these aren’t for eating raw, that would be weird! No, first you must dehydrate them into powdered eggs. This, in turn, can be turned into broth. Then, using the meat of the chittering hordes you just dismembered (you can dehydrate this too) you can craft four portions of meat soup.

That’s right: 10 powdered eggs (2/5ths of a spider egg) nets you four portions of meat soup, worth 160 nutrition. Almost an entire day’s worth of food! In theory, a haul of 20 eggs should supply you with meat soup for about 50 days. That’s almost a year, in Cataclysm.

The only ingredient that isn’t available from the basement itself is salt-water, easily purloined from your local bog - a trip to the fetid marshes is nothing compared to the memory of bloodied mandibles champing in vain against your back as you sever yet another leg from a newborn spiderling!

The Recipe:

Step 1: Spider basement = spider eggs (20-30) + meat chunks (50-80)

Step 2: Dehydration = powdered egg (500-700) + dehydrated meat (50-80)

Step 3: One portion of broth = 1 water + 5 powdered egg + 2 salt water

Step 4: Four portions of meat soup = 1 broth + 5 powdered egg + 2 dehydrated meat

Result: With minimal resources and only slight psychological scarring, you can turn each basement (20-30 eggs) into enough food for 50-75 days!

Take comfort, as you drink your dehydrated foes, in the knowledge that you killed all the spiders. That crawling inside your mind is only the memories trying to burrow out. Only the memories…

2

Salvaged meat pie.
Exactly as it sounds salvage anything edible from rotting meat by dehydrating it get some buckwheat flour and toilet water and you have yourself a perfectly edible meat pie.

Personally I think giant spiders should be eggsterminated.

3

Human cuisine. Any idiot NPC wielding a chunk of steel threatening my survivor with the Saiga 12, any fresh corpse that can be found. Anything goes. Turning them into soup is nice, especially when canned since you can bring a fair amount when exploring. Of course, soylent green shake also makes a nice drink since it has a fruity flavor to go along with the protein slurry, and it won’t rot. While making the means non-perishable is nice, cooking some perishable stuff is nice for variety, especially when it’s winter and there’s less problem about food going bad.

Of course, non-human food isn’t out of the question. My survivor needs some variety in her diet, and it would be boring to eat the same thing over and over again. At so late in the game, my survivor can afford the luxury of drinking anything good that’s just not plain clean water.

4

I’m afraid only the most grizzly and heavily mutated can enjoy what my character eats - TAINTED FLESH

With his hardened taste buds and iron stomach, he is able to efficiently slaughter any zombie infested area and feast on the remains when he gets hungry. Best thing about it is that it’s fresh and basically unlimited.

A great advantage about this is that my chimera survivor can heal any damage sustained just by eating in excess, easily converting excess food into health, making him a killing machine!

Hey, when you’re covered in gore, beaten, hacked, launched, peppered with bullets with your pain higher than the stars with your condition teetering on death, why not just snack on your hard earned work? Kills two (or three) birds with one stone. You heal and take care of hunger (not to mention take care of the zombie remains, eat it and it stays dead!)

Efficient for a survivor who consumes food like gasoline soaked tinder!

5

All-time favorite: deluxe ant scrambled eggs.

The first and hardest/easiest/most luck-dependent step is finding an anthill. Any survivor with a decent vehicle should come across one eventually. They’re liable to spawn just about anywhere on the surface.

Once you’ve found a hill, harvest as much raw meat as you can carry from worker and soldier ants, inside and outside the hill. Genocide and economical long-term storage is the name of the game.

Next, find the queen’s room. She’ll start laying eggs when you come near. Just follow her around the room and pick them up before they hatch. Culling the (very) young is technically hunting.

Back to the surface you go with your prize. Dehydrate the eggs and meat, then make your deluxe scrambled eggs with the singular level 1 cooking recipe. Length of time you can subsist on a haul depends on the survivor’s bloodlust and available storage space.

Nutritious, delicious, a hint of genocide…deluxe ant scrambled eggs: the superior option for the superior predator.

6

I’m a simple man. I usually end up eating a lot of wild vegetable pies with cattail crust, wild vegetable pizza with cattail crust and wild herb dressing, and deluxe scrambled bird/lizard eggs. This is while accumulating an ever-increasing hoard of non-perishable foods “for emergencies” such as sausages and meat jerky, that I never seem to actually get around to eating.

I have, in the past, used Atomic Coffee as my only form of liquid sustenance. This turns me into an unstoppable genius superbeing with zero downsides as long as I keep drinking atomic coffee, and never stop. Never. Stop.

Ever.

7

At first, my survivor had to break his back scavenging bushes for wild vegetables, wild herbs, and eggs. He hunted the occasional forest animal too, but mostly for sinew. Later on, he started to visit neighboring farms to steal their crops and seeds to plant his own food. He ended up eating tons of bread for most days but now he’s starting to switch to biscuits (no yeast required!) and fruits in the forest because it’s summer. He occasionally drinks tea, and has a ludicrous supply of garlic (253 cloves, 227 bulbs).

[quote=“Solusphere, post:6, topic:14156”]I have, in the past, used Atomic Coffee as my only form of liquid sustenance. This turns me into an unstoppable genius superbeing with zero downsides as long as I keep drinking atomic coffee, and never stop. Never. Stop.

Ever.[/quote]
How do you get that much coffee? I only ever drink coffee from MREs, but you never stop? Do you raid coffee stores every day?

8

I think you can grow coffee beans. Also that is the reason why I never plan on doing atomic coffee anymore Literally had a guy who if he ran out would literally die of dehydration from how long they sleep.

9

It’s probably not as easy in recent versions, in which loot has become a lot scarcer across the board, but you used to be able to sometimes get upwards of 80 coffee powder, or syrup, from a single coffee shop. It’s also pretty common loot in all kinds of places, so I never found maintaining a supply all that difficult.

I don’t actually recommend the atomic-coffee-only thing these days by the way. Atomic Coffee now reduces your health by 5 per dose, which will tank it very quickly, not to mention the downside DeWolf mentioned. Fantastic for emergencies and/or surgery though.

10

Glazed Giant (Frog, Shelled (Ant, Fly, Mosquito, Bee, Wasp, Dragonfly))Legs.
Exactly as is sounds

11

[quote=“harison86, post:5, topic:14156”]All-time favorite: deluxe ant scrambled eggs.

The first and hardest/easiest/most luck-dependent step is finding an anthill. Any survivor with a decent vehicle should come across one eventually. They’re liable to spawn just about anywhere on the surface.

Once you’ve found a hill, harvest as much raw meat as you can carry from worker and soldier ants, inside and outside the hill. Genocide and economical long-term storage is the name of the game.

Next, find the queen’s room. She’ll start laying eggs when you come near. Just follow her around the room and pick them up before they hatch. Culling the (very) young is technically hunting.

Back to the surface you go with your prize. Dehydrate the eggs and meat, then make your deluxe scrambled eggs with the singular level 1 cooking recipe. Length of time you can subsist on a haul depends on the survivor’s bloodlust and available storage space.

Nutritious, delicious, a hint of genocide…deluxe ant scrambled eggs: the superior option for the superior predator.[/quote]

Nice. Why not get a snack as you systematically exterminate the unborn infants of a post-apocalyptic hivemind society?

12

I often fancy a bit of Dog Haggis and Glazed Dog Tenderloins. Though with all the sugar houses around I have a never ending supply of pancakes.

13

My character really enjoys glazed tenderloins made out of Bee. It goes very well together and even better, you just have to find a beehive to get most of the necessary ingredients.
Although I have to ask where exactly the tenderloin is on a Bee.

He also enjoys sushi (preferably sashimi), and sometimes he makes some Deluxe beans and rice with basically any meat he finds.

Currently, he is kinda on a woods soup & canned meat diet though. Thanks to a dairy farm he had a metric ton of cowmeat, half of it he dehydrated, the other half he put into jars.

14

Winter exploring is finished. Survivor has gathered a ton of human meat. 3,066, more or less, and of course it’s gonna be used one way or another on the current year.

15

The names of the prepared human dishes alone are tempting me to make my next character a cannibal. I don’t think I’ve ever met enough NPCs to do it on the same level as you though. Do you play with a higher spawn rate for NPCs? Or do NPCs have more meat than I realize, and I’ve been missing out on a nutrition gold mine?

16

The names of the prepared human dishes alone are tempting me to make my next character a cannibal. I don’t think I’ve ever met enough NPCs to do it on the same level as you though. Do you play with a higher spawn rate for NPCs? Or do NPCs have more meat than I realize, and I’ve been missing out on a nutrition gold mine?[/quote]
You’d be surprised how many places have corpses.

17

I eat mycus and mycus accessories. And nothing else.

Seriously though, the mushroom people are an excellent source of both food and water. Just gotta cook all the parasites out…

18
19

Wonder what would happen if you dehydrated the marloss berries and mycus fruit?

20

Wait, what happens if a non cannibal character eats human meat/bones?