cook my own food or ration?

[Serpent]

i just start playing yesterday and constantly using ration as food source but after a while i notice that raw material for food is really cheap.
especially in food focus settlement. plus it have stress bonus.

should i just make my own food and only use ration as trade item?

[Oragepoilu]

Cooked food is a very good way to relieve stress, so yes.

If you intend to only cook for you, I'd say just buy stuff at the lowest price when you need that will be enough, especially if you pick the correct ingredient.
If you have the groumand trait, it's even more powerful (+50% stress relief from food).

However, if you make a good cook you can craft better quality food that sell a high price (set up stall in town, left side of your screen).
Basic cooked item is like 250-500, advanced is like 500-800 and legendary is like 900-1600. Something like that. At the cost of a few click, 10 scrap and 45min (btw, you don't get tired doing this) you can quickly get a lot of money. and since you can easily sell food this way, that's also a good way to carry "money" - carry good food instead of scrap.

[Steelfleece]

Cooked food is superior and it isn't like it goes bad or anything. Sell off the rations when it's profitable and just keep a handful for emergencies in case you're in the middle of nowhere and run out of legendary hot dogs.

[Serpent]

Originally posted by Oragepoilu:

Cooked food is a very good way to relieve stress, so yes.

If you intend to only cook for you, I'd say just buy stuff at the lowest price when you need that will be enough, especially if you pick the correct ingredient.
If you have the groumand trait, it's even more powerful (+50% stress relief from food).

However, if you make a good cook you can craft better quality food that sell a high price (set up stall in town, left side of your screen).
Basic cooked item is like 250-500, advanced is like 500-800 and legendary is like 900-1600. Something like that. At the cost of a few click, 10 scrap and 45min (btw, you don't get tired doing this) you can quickly get a lot of money. and since you can easily sell food this way, that's also a good way to carry "money" - carry good food instead of scrap.

should i upgrade my cooking or just hired someone with high cooking skill?
i read in newbie guide that cooking skill only count the most skill person in the team not a total sum of the whole team cooking skill

[Oragepoilu]

Yeah, only the best skill count.

IMO, I haven't finish the game or anything but,

I can't find any good cook, or even decent cook.

Looking at the file I can find a few at 20+ but damn they must be quite rare and/or they have trait that are annoying.

And I want a cook early on for the money.

So I made a guy with cooking and spend all my point into it. But that's just me.

You don't need int (it's useless beside for the extra xp, and the extra xp doesn't make up the amount of wasted point unless you intend to play for 50h- as for recipes you can either brute force with money or just grab a 40+ int to do it before ditching him);
You can grind focus by being hurt and fleeing;
You can grind bartering by trading;
You can grind crafting by failing recipe;
You can grind fishing;
Attack isn't super useful early IMO since you can start with a good gun, and if you need more attack there is already a large bonus from the car, and double gun fire with the car upgrade already do a lot of damage before they are in melee, and at during char gen it decrease the amount of food you receive when eating;
Hunting is IMO useless or negligible;
Armor could be useful, but that make focus grind harder (I GUESS I AM NOT SURE since I didn't get hurt often after equipping +10 armor against small group of +-20) and isn't much compared to what you can get without it so I don't think it's that good;
farming is good only for your NPC;
charm is negligible, it help for a few thing but nothing that is really useful.

[Serpent]

Originally posted by Oragepoilu:

Yeah, only the best skill count.

IMO, I haven't finish the game or anything but,

I can't find any good cook, or even decent cook.

Looking at the file I can find a few at 20+ but damn they must be quite rare and/or they have trait that are annoying.

And I want a cook early on for the money.

So I made a guy with cooking and spend all my point into it. But that's just me.

You don't need int (it's useless beside for the extra xp, and the extra xp doesn't make up the amount of wasted point unless you intend to play for 50h- as for recipes you can either brute force with money or just grab a 40+ int to do it before ditching him);
You can grind focus by being hurt and fleeing;
You can grind bartering by trading;
You can grind crafting by failing recipe;
You can grind fishing;
Attack isn't super useful early IMO since you can start with a good gun, and if you need more attack there is already a large bonus from the car, and double gun fire with the car upgrade already do a lot of damage before they are in melee, and at during char gen it decrease the amount of food you receive when eating;
Hunting is IMO useless or negligible;
Armor could be useful, but that make focus grind harder (I GUESS I AM NOT SURE since I didn't get hurt often after equipping +10 armor against small group of +-20) and isn't much compared to what you can get without it so I don't think it's that good;
farming is good only for your NPC;
charm is negligible, it help for a few thing but nothing that is really useful.

thanks a lot about all these advice and which stat can be grind. i think ill upgrade my cooking skill too.

[Tahnval]

As a minor thing - you can cook rations. Cooked rations are slightly better than uncooked rations.

But overall, proper cooked food is vastly better. If you have a good cook and avoid sexual jealousy between your crew members (most easily done by having all crew members be heterosexual people of the same sex, since all player characters in the game are insanely jealous prima donna drama queens for some reason and the only way to be sure of keeping the peace is to make sure none of them can be sexually attracted to any of the others in the crew), then simple cooked food can completely solve the stress problem and keep all your crew happy all the time except after a run of several fights (and they'll return to happiness after a bit of time without any fights).

If you install an exquisite dining table in your truck, food will also completely solve the fatigue problem. You can go 24/7, never sleeping, never resting, never tired, never stressed. Maybe swapping drivers occasionally. It's not as silly as it sounds - your truck has crew quarters, so the crew could take turns driving and sleeping in the crew quarters, so it's "realistic" to be driving 24/7.

Having a dedicated cook is good (only 1 - all cooking is done by the crew member with the highest cooking skill) but you don't need to pump it very high. ~20 is enough to accomplish the above. Maybe less. My cook has a cooking skill in the high 20s and that's more than enough. Their meals are about a third normal quality, a third advanced quality and a third legendary quality, something like that.

Cooking is also currently a wildly unbalanced way to make money. By opening a stall in a settlement and selling food, it's possible to make >2000 scrap per three clicks and the only practical limit is your own patience with doing it. Drive around to buy ingredients. Meat, seafood, bread, vegetables, mushrooms (all types - they're all edible), whatever. Get more ingredients from your settlements if you have them and they are producing spare food ingredients. Spices and seasoning are particularly good from settlements for this purpose. When you have a load of ingredients, cook many meals. Easy options are hotdogs (bread + chicken or pork), game with mushrooms or veg, seafood with mushrooms or veg. You can add spices or seasoning to any of those meals while cooking them if you have those spare. Doing so adds quite a lot to the selling price. Then just open a stall, sell food, repeat until you've sold your spare (i.e. not needed for you crew) food or you're bored with it. Make 20K, 50K, 100K, whatever you want really. It makes money rather pointless. I think I put ~450K in the bank before I stopped playing after having been everywhere and killed all the alphas. I might go back just to make a million. I had ~150K before I started selling food, and that was from being a profitable courier business and having two fully developed profitable settlements with multiple trade contracts, so I made ~300K from selling food. And that was with a conversion loss of ~10%, converting from scrap to creds in the bar and from creds to scrap at the bank. You can sell resources and equipment, but don't do that. You can't choose which you sell (so you can end up selling things you wanted to keep) and you get almost nothing for them anyway. Food only.

Int is also used for some stat checks in some locations, so it isn't completely useless. But you only need 1 crew member with high int to meet those stat checks.

I think that +stat clothing is more useful than armour per se. All my crew wear +fitness clothing and headwear (except for the crafter while crafting, when I switch them to +crafting kit). It helps with both fatigue and infection resistance, which I think is more useful than armour. I went with "the best defence is offence". The faster you can kill the attackers, the less damage they do to you and the less use you have for armour. My settlement defenders have good armour, though. Different situation for them.

There's a limit to how far you can raise skills/stats in the ways mentioned (for the few you can raise that way), so even for those stats/skills there's scope for improvement in other ways.

Pets can make a very big difference. All my crew have falcons as pets because falcons give +focus. I want all the attackers shot before they get anywhere near my truck, so focus is the key stat for combat. The amount of bonus a pet gives depends on the character's husbandry skill, so I increase that too. A single level point adds more to a skill currently at a lower level, so it's relatively easy to increase skills to mid-high teens.

I keep rations mainly to feed to random stray dogs I happen to encounter, just because.

Some skills are highest crew member only, some are crew average, some are crew total. You can find out which is which from the "Crew" button on the game screen, by selecting the ? next to a skill. Cooking is highest only.

[Oragepoilu]

Btw, when you craft some armor /clothes you can roll better quality for them like food and get extra stats from said gear.

[HeOfManyGames]

Originally posted by Tahnval:

As a minor thing - you can cook rations. Cooked rations are slightly better than uncooked rations.

48 hours into the game and I still didnt know this. Thanks!

[Tahnval]

Originally posted by HeOfManyGames:

Originally posted by Tahnval:

As a minor thing - you can cook rations. Cooked rations are slightly better than uncooked rations.

48 hours into the game and I still didnt know this. Thanks!

I was in much the same position as you. I'm not sure how many hours I'd played before I saw cooking rations mentioned in this forum a few weeks ago, but it was more than a few.

I guess the devs thought it was obvious. Which it sort of maybe should be. "rations" brings military field food packs to my mind, the stuff that has a shelf life of years and which soldiers eat when there isn't the logistics for a base with a kitchen and stores of ingredients. Those are usually cooked, or at least part of them is. Cold slop is bad for morale.

Although sometimes they're still bad for morale even when they are cooked...

https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/05/vomelet-bad-mre-omelet-military.html