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But cooking is a better option.
Say you have a steak and a cabbage. They give 20 and 10 hunger reduction on their own.
If you mix them together to make a stir-fry, they give 34 hunger reduction. If you spice them up some happiness as well.
So higher hunger reduction and mood boost are the pro.
Eating raw meat also is not really an option as you will get food poisoning, so improving your cooking also assists with that and unlocking recipes, that will use some of the food resources you cannot use otherwise. Like you can make bread with flour->and with bread you can make sandwiches.
Of course it is a valid strategy to live on canned food and junk food(chocolate, chips etc.), but eventually those will run out. Farming, fishing and trapping do not.
More than half of the skills in the game only come into play on the very long run, and Cooking is one of them. Wanting to sustain yourself strictly on cooked food is fine, but it's more of a personal choice (challenge) than something you'd have to do out of necessity or even efficiency. Even on the Apocalypse settings (which I'm always playing) non-perishable and canned foods can be reliably found if you know where to look and you can sustain yourself for years before having to resort to Farming, Foraging, Trapping, Fishing and Cooking.
Nah those are gimmicks. Fun to make them if you are running a Cook in multiplayer to have fun with your friends, but kinda pointless when you're running solo... unless you're all about them views on them tiktoks...
With adequate skill level, and well chosen recipes you can actually add about 1/6th as a bonus nutrition to your food. So allows you to make more of less:P
(also later on you can salvage rotten food to make edible food:P)
You don't have to. And sometimes I don't cook it. Its mostly roleplay for me when I cook or don't.
If you are chasing cooking xp as fast as you can, cook it every time. butcher every rotten mouse, slice every rotten bread. (don't eat it, silly. just chop it all up...for the XP, so cook rotten bacon and chop it up to bits, then toss it out or save it until you can cook with it safely.
I used to cook salads but after 300 hours in the game it feels like waste of time. I've never run out of perishable food, let alone food that doesn't expire.
Yeah, don't do boring stuff. That's bad for entertainment value. In your case, I suggest to not cook, which is super okay!
I enjoy cooking food and building campfires and what not, I mostly play the game in my head, so I have no problem setting up a camp, cooking a meal and sitting by that fire all night long.
I play for long term and the story unfolds in my mind. If the story dictates to me, canned food today, thats what I do.
I broke my leg last fall in louisville, so instead of hobbling back home, i spent the winter building a base there. Ended up staying there all winter. Met a player in the summer and we didn't poke each others eyes out, so we teamed up and went back to my old base to reclaim it from the zombie armies.
You can pickle vegetables and they will stay fresh for most of a year in game.
Most people will just use stew/soup to get high levels of food for little cost.
High level cooking lets you safely eat rotten food when used in recepies.
Making pizza and cakes is fun (if you have friends lol)
If you take nutritionist, a massive underrated trait btw, you can see the value of any food item. This lets you keep your character in the health weight range rather than simply eating lard whenever you become weak from a diet of chips+cabbage
Food Spoilage: Slow
Refrigerator Efficiency: Very High
Generator Fuel Consumption: 0.3
I gathered a lot of prepared food (burgers, burritos, fried chicken, pizza, pie, pancakes, etc) but I didn't get it all immediately. The last handful of burritos went stale, because I found them last. The rest of it was consumed before it went stale.
I am almost 4 months in and all of that food is gone. If you survive for longer than 3 months, you definitely should start cooking so you're not eating cold canned food. Also, consider just doing Very Slow spoilage and Very High refrigerator efficiency. While it's not realistic for food out in the open, and by extension, makes composting take longer, it IS more realistic when it comes to freezers, since food in freezers should never get rotten. Freezerburned could be interpreted as 'Stale' but food ROTTING in the freezer doesn't make sense.
I have some tips for this strategy (in no particular order) as it's one of my favorite things to do, however, I play with 3 hour days, slow shamblers, etc so some of this will be very difficult or next to impossible using 'Apocalypse' settings. (your mileage may vary)
On default spoilage/refrigeration settings, there is no point in gathering more than maybe 1 or 1.5 months worth of prepared food items; IT WILL GO STALE before you can eat it and unlike 'normal' perishables, can't be used in soup.
1. Skip the TV on Day 1. If you waste time trying to catch the Life & Living shows, you will blow precious time. Every day the perishables are sitting out in the open translates to weeks/months off of their frozen lifespan. Once you have secured the food, you can focus on collecting VHS tapes to compensate for the shows you missed.
2. Try to do some calculations based on your spoilage/refrigeration settings to figure out approximately how much to gather. It's better to run out of burgers and switch to cooking steaks, than to waste space on burgers that are going to go stale before you can eat them.
Find a good balance! Ultimately, produce lasts longer. Meat doesn't last as long as a burger, but meat can be used to make soup when it's stale. Also, meat, frozen vegetables, etc that is found already frozen at the start of the game will have lost a minimal amount of freshness compared to a burger found out in the open, at the end of Day 1. The already frozen stuff is what you want.
3. Figure out which spots you're going to hit before you even start the game. If you have 3 hour days, work fast and manage to find a vehicle, you can do Rosewood and Muldraugh on Day 1. On default settings, many perishable food items out in the open will not be worth freezing after Day 1.
4. At Spiffo's and to a lesser extent, Jay's, most of the items will be in paper bags, so you will have to hit each counter space, transfer the bags to the floor, then take the food items out of the bags. At Pizza Whirled, most of the pizza slices will be in the display case, but there will be some scattered around on tables, etc. Some might be unreachable because of their position on the tables.
5. This is probably the most important point; DO NOT try to transport all of this stuff back to your base at first. Instead, transfer everything in to the freezers in the building, so it can FREEZE on Day 1. This way, when you come back for them, even if you are taking them from Muldraugh to Rosewood, they will likely still be frozen by the time you get them in to your own freezers, which leads to the next point..
6. Don't bother getting more freezers to your base until AFTER you've secured the restaurant food in those freezers. Unless you get royally screwed on power shutoff, you will have plenty of time. You still need to find a generator and generator manual anyway.
7. Resist the urge to stockpile a lot of icecream. It is bugged and ironically doesn't last as long as anything else; melts while frozen. Unless you're blasting 2-3 icecreams per day, don't bother with more than 10-20 of them.
8. The grocery stores have baked goods. Don't miss those if you like em.
9. Pizza Whirled has a lot of dough (and cheese, etc) in the kitchen counters. Which can be used to make pizza or bread, which can make more burgers. (I somehow forgot to grab them on my current game) However, dough might be easy to make later, IF you can find any yeast. They will also sometimes have whole, uncooked pizzas that you can freeze, thaw, cook and cut in to slices later on and rarely, they will have an already cooked, whole pizza in an oven, which can be frozen. (so check the ovens while you're there)
10. For bakery raids, don't forget that cookies will not spoil, so don't waste precious freezer space on those.
11. The restaurants will have meats out in the open (in the kitchen counters) ..stuff like meat patties, pepperoni, chicken, etc.. if you can get this stuff in to the freezer on Day 1, that's fine, but know that it has already lost some freshness. There is so much meat already in freezers that it doesn't make a lot of sense to save a lot of stuff that's thawed. This is also why I skip the fish counter at the grocery store. You can catch and freeze fish later. So in most circumstances, don't waste too much freezer space on thawed meat. (maybe a few choice things like pepperoni, since it has a super long shelf life, can be used in stews, etc) One thing I did was tried to relegate all the 'older' meats in one freezer section, so I know to eat that stuff first.
12. The buffet places sometimes spawn more burgers than Spiffo's + other stuff. If you can only hit 1 spot, consider making it a buffet.
13. Gas stations and convenience stores might have burritos in their refrigerators, which means they've lost less freshness than a burrito sitting out in a buffet. So make sure to check those if you want them and pop them in a nearby freezer if it's far from home.
14. Once you have hit all the restaurants you want, turn your focus to produce. Tropical fruits aint coming back. If you want to have those for a while, now is the time to secure them. Grocery stores will have some out in the open, but people's houses will have them in the refrigerator (which means produce in a house is fresher than produce on an unrefrigerated store shelf) When you hit a house, do the same thing as before; transfer all perishables (except milk) from the fridge to the freezer, to be retrieved later. This doesn't work well outside of your home town, because it's easy to lose track of which household fridges/freezers you've hit. With this tactic, start with the houses close to your base and fan out. Alternatively, you can painstakingly mark locations on your map. But..!
15. There is a mountain of produce in the farm warehouses and in the grocery stores. Make sure you get what you want from those spots ASAP and probably prioritize things that can't be grown later.
16. You can't save everything and nothing (perishable) lasts forever. Figure out your priorities and estimate your fuel consumption versus desired number of freezers BEFORE you start. For many items, if you can't freeze them on Day 1, they might not be worth trying to save.
17. Don't forget that you can start with more freezers than you need in the long run and remove them as you empty them. This will change based on your game settings. On default settings, you probably don't want to bother with more than 1 fridge and 2 ice chests.
18. Factor distance and thawing time to your retrieval when loading your vehicle. Don't try to retrieve too much from too far away in a single trip! Let's say you're getting frozen food from Muldraugh to Rosewood. Start at the furthest location and work your way back. If you try to fill up a whole step van, half the stuff will be thawed by the time you get home, defeating the purpose. Depending on your vehicle and situation, it might be wise to do normal loot runs and then finish with 1 or 2 freezer extractions. The closer you get to home, the more thaw time you have.