Quick question about the food system.

[erter]

I just bought Caves of Qud and I am working on getting familair with the basic mechanics. While I was looking at the food mechanics I saw that having actual ingredients to cook simple non-buffing meal wasn't neccesary. Because of this you only needed to carry around foodstuffs if you wanted to buff yourself. Is this still the case?

[Luke]

Yes, I think all characters still start with the "Make Camp" skill that allows you to create a campfire and whip up a meal with random found ingredients.

This has some risk though, which you are not warned about by the game. Any time you cook with random ingredients, there is a chance that it will use something from your inventory to cook with.

So it is typically fine for low levels, but you probably want to avoid it if you're carrying around something expensive and/or dangerous that you don't want to accidentally eat.

[erter]

Okay good to know. I also heard that preserved food weighs next to nothing so Ill just carry some basic ingredients around. Thanks for the response.

[Judas Iscariot]

Originally posted by 503 erter:

Okay good to know. I also heard that preserved food weighs next to nothing so Ill just carry some basic ingredients around. Thanks for the response.

That's correct. Preserved food weighs 0 so you can carry 1000s of beef jerkies or goat jerkies :)

[erter]

So another question related to the food system. Say I have some basic ingredients make camp and choose the whip up a meal option will the game then automatically use the ingredients instead of items? And how do you recognize if something is a ingredient or not? Do you simply have to deduct that from the description and look or is it specifically stated?

[Starscrape the generous]

Originally posted by 503 erter:

So another question related to the food system. Say I have some basic ingredients make camp and choose the whip up a meal option will the game then automatically use the ingredients instead of items? And how do you recognize if something is a ingredient or not? Do you simply have to deduct that from the description and look or is it specifically stated?

whip up meal can still use items, i used it once and it cooked up a ubernostrum injector

[Paperbell]

I think I remember ingredients taken from inventory will be colored. For example, beef jerky will be colored brown while the other ingredients will be colored gray. I feel like I read somewhere that after getting meal preparation, you don't use stuff in your inventory when cooking. Still, salt, boar jerky, and vinewafers are plentiful, so you won't lose much from selecting 1 or 2 of those every meal.

[erter]

Good to know. So it is probably a good idea to get the cooking skill for some basic buffs and to not have to rely on the whipping up a meal RNG.