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

You get moral penalties like you would not believe.

Mycus fruits and multivitamins. I keep my Metabolic Interchange on constantly so as not to waste a bit of nutrition, since I can’t actually drink liquids. I need a vitamin every so often because the Mycus lies, mycus fruits do not contain quite everything a human needs to live.

Before that, though, it was steak and bone broth for every meal. I am a simple man with simple needs.

Haggis and granola, depending on if I’m near my minifridge or not. I have a working farm, producing enormous bounties of fresh food that immediately gets frozen in my ice lab base, and I never eat anything else because between the food reduction implants and reduced consumption, I have to punch wildlife in the face faster than I eat it and I feel really guilty if I kill a wolf and leave it to rot.

as much amoral aspic as i can manage to scavenge materials to craft, might not be healthy, but i don’t give a shit… and probably won’t live long enough for it to matter anyway.

i think my record is around 80 days actually, so i’ve yet to survive a single real length season.

[quote=“TooDAMNMuch, post:24, topic:14156”]as much amoral aspic as i can manage to scavenge materials to craft, might not be healthy, but i don’t give a shit… and probably won’t live long enough for it to matter anyway.

i think my record is around 80 days actually, so I’ve yet to survive a single real length season.[/quote]

Spend your first 80 days not fighting, just leveling crafting skills and foraging, like me. Obviously you might have to fight some, especially at the start to get away, if you don’t start out in the wilderness already. Then you’ll survive a longer time, only problem is I do that and then go and find trouble and lose a char that had 10 in a lot of skills, just not fighting centered ones lol.

As for the main subject, I usually try to dehydrate/preserve whatever I can and make non perishable foods that are actually not too bad for you, like granola/pemmican/aspic/fruit leather. I love me some dandelion greens, cooked or fried, and once you find a swamp with a few cat tails, you’ve got and endless supply of salt and almost flour. When your out foraging, make sure to grab the dandelions and dahlia roots, the latter needing a shovel to pick the plants that give you dahlia… which you can then craft flour out of or just bake.

This run I have made quite a bit of woods soup to go with my pine needle tea, since you can craft it out of pine needle tea and I’ve just been making max batches of it anyway for thirst.

I also took the high metabolism trait, but not sure how much faster you actually gain stamina with it vs without, and whether it’s really worth it… but no complaints from me so far… once you get semi-established food isn’t too hard to come by.

i give myself a ludicrous amount of points so it’s actually less the fighting and more just being worn down over time, honestly.

i really do need to start leaving a spare 60L tank for salt water and nothing else around where ever i’m hanging out as a base, even if only to cut down on waste of leather/hides.

[quote=“TooDAMNMuch, post:26, topic:14156”]i give myself a ludicrous amount of points so it’s actually less the fighting and more just being worn down over time, honestly.

i really do need to start leaving a spare 60L tank for salt water and nothing else around where ever i’m hanging out as a base, even if only to cut down on waste of leather/hides.[/quote]

Or drop a 60L tank by a salt pond, then find a way to cook it into salt. Much more transportable if you’re a nomad.

oddly enough, that actually may be the case, as much as it goes against my usual play style, the mutant preset definitely is giving me more of a challenge to establish a home base location.

i was a bit annoyed by myself though, honestly, i should have put two and two together and realized i could have a free infinite source of salt (and salt water) from swamps a long time ago instead of going out of my way to avoid them.

When I can, I prefer to feed my survivors a healthy meal of meat or woods stew, with fruit juice or boiled rainwater. I don’t tell them the meat is from that poor doggo they killed until they kill a kid zed.

oddly enough, that actually may be the case, as much as it goes against my usual play style, the mutant preset definitely is giving me more of a challenge to establish a home base location.

i was a bit annoyed by myself though, honestly, i should have put two and two together and realized i could have a free infinite source of salt (and salt water) from swamps a long time ago instead of going out of my way to avoid them.[/quote]

Yeah. Swamps used to be hellish - constant, high-rate spawning of aggressive insects…! It took me ages to realise they were now some of the most useful map tiles for a survivalist.

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]

Most of the human flesh I got were from nameless human corpses; non-NPCs whose corpses spawn in hospitals, mines, and labs. Early game they show up in the areas where stuff like mi-gos spawn, like the places that have drugs littered around, though once time passes they rot and then disappear completely leaving only their items.

On places like labs/mines/hospitals, the corpses only spawn when the reality bubble around the survivor has reached the location, so usually I explore those types of locations during winter, so those corpses won’t rot so quickly giving me more than enough time to deposit them in my ice lab base. Alternatively I bring two NPCs, and the appropriate tools and supplies to help preserve the meat. In the case of the corpses spawned in ice labs, I can take my time since the area is cold enough to stop them from rotting.

And yeah, one reason why I like doing cannibal survivors is the names of the dishes made from human meat is rather amusing.

Hardest to make is cheater chili dogs, mostly because it requires uncooked hot dogs, which can’t be crafted and is perishable to boot - so once you hit late game you can only find them as very rarely a random drop from a zombie (I think) or in one of the ice lab’s rooms.