Rordon Gamesy's Kitchen Hell - Cooking In Kingdom Death (Patreon)

Cooking was one of the innovations that was tuned and buffed in 1.5 by quite a lot.  In 1.31 Cooking was an unclear mess that caused a lot of rules questions and was not that popular.  However, for those of us who were looking to take advantage of every single thing we could squeeze from the various parts of the game it was something that was used quite often.

It's got better in 1.5.

First of all, the innovation, as you can see above provides 2 passive benefits, allows you to ignore starvation (which matters against certain monsters like the Antelope and Phoenix) for an endeavor.  And it also allows you to cook with 100% success. 

Here are the recipes:

Now, I must say that I find the selection available right now to be very lacklustre.  We have one recipie that is easier to make than the others and is also far more powerful.  That is the Oso Buco, or to call it by it's real name; the Ossobuco.

The Ossobuco is a real life Milanese dish and I think the entire cooking element was added in because of Anna Poots' love of cooking. This is why the flavor of these recipes is so well done and you can taste the seasoning.  

But the power level of these is all over the place.  The single best recipe requires nothing but Vermin and mostly useless Antelope resources, while the others require hard to get resources that are of high value (Bladder, Eye of Cat, Pustules, Phoenix Eye). 

What this means is that right now Cooking is pretty much the +1 Evasion innovation.  You're looking to make Venison Oso Buco to order for your Tanks and Bruisers and only rarely consider making the other recipes.  (For example Stuffed Cockroach is pretty good in an Accept Darkness society, or to help bring back a survivor with Fear of the Dark).

The main tools to help you do this are as follows:

1. Screaming Antelope

The antelope is so closely tied to cooking that it's pretty much the beginning and end of it.  Without the Antelope in the game you can forget about cooking anything at all apart from the 3 Eyed Stew.

2. Bug Patch

Vermin are the other part of the process and outside of hunting the Dung Beetle Knight the only way to get them turning up is to use the following item.

It's not ideal, but it will help over time.  Unsurprisingly, you cannot craft the Bug Patch without the Barber Surgeon, and you can't make that without hunting the Antelope.

3. Salt

This Strange Resource comes with the Sunstalker and requires either the Sunstalker or a Sunspot Lantern to gather.  +1 Strength isn't that valuable, but it's a nice thing to do with spare Salt you might have left over after crafting all the Sunstalker Gear you want.

Expanding Cooking?

Sadly there is very little in any of the expansions to support Cooking, and it looks like we are waiting for the Gambler's Chest before we get on to having anything more to do with food.  I'm looking forward to that and I do hope that we get a more robust system that doesn't just devolve into +1 Evasion and occasionally +strength or +accuracy and rare disorder cures. 

I hoped that the Sunstalker's 3 fish would have their own recipes and that Spidicules would have it's own cooking aspects to make up for replacing the Antelope. But neither expansion delivers on those fronts.

However, this leaves this part of the game wide open for variant cooking homebrew and eventually, I'll get on that!  Until then, never forget that Cooking = +1 Evasion in exchange for some resources.