Cooking
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Cooking is the process of turning raw Food into cooked, or otherwise improved, food which, in general, adds a Health bonus and sometimes improves their Hunger or Sanity benefits as well. There are three types of cooking: Fire, Drying Rack, and Crock Pot.
Cooking food also reduces the spoilage of food. Fire and Crock Pot reduces spoilage by half (e.g. turning 20% fresh food back to 60% fresh), while Drying Rack completely renews spoilage.
On Fire
Cooking food on a Campfire, a Fire Pit or a Dwarf Star is the most basic cooking method. To cook food, simply click on it, bring it to a burning Campfire, Fire Pit, or Dwarf Star and click again when the prompt shows up. Once a food has been cooked, it will be replaced in the inventory with its cooked counterpart. For example, a Morsel becomes a Cooked Morsel, and a Carrot becomes a Roasted Carrot. Cooked Meats generally spoil slower, while cooked Fruits and Vegetables generally spoil faster. There is no difference between cooking on any of the fires.
In the Shipwrecked DLC, it is also possible to cook food on a Chiminea, a Buoyant Chiminea, an Obsidian Fire Pit, a Lava Pool or an erupting Krissure.
In the Hamlet DLC, it is also possible to cook food on Crumbling Brazier and Wall Brazier.
In Don't Starve Together, it's also possible to cook on the Scaled Furnace, Willow's Lighter, Willow's Fire Ball, Extra-Adorable Lavae, and Magma Pools. Willow, Warly and Walter only take half as long (0.5 seconds) as other Characters (1 second) to cook food.
Some Fruits and Vegetables are generally better consumed cooked than used as ingredients in Crock Pot. Notable examples:
Braised Eggplant [+20
+25
] – provides 17 more health and 3.125 more hunger
Sliced Pomegranate [+20
+12.5
] – provides 12 more health
Roasted Toma Root [+20
+12.5
] – provides 17 more health
On the other hand, some Vegetables are best consumed raw:
Corn [+3
+25
] becomes
Popcorn [+3
+12.5
] when cooked.
Drying Rack
Main article: Drying Rack
While not exactly cooking in the full sense of the word, using the Drying Rack to prepare Meats provides a longer-term food storage option to those without an Ice Box. When dried, Meats become Jerky and spoil at a much slower rate. Additionally, Jerky tends to give more of a Health and Sanity bonus than its raw or cooked counterparts.
In the Shipwrecked DLC, it is also possible to dry Seaweed, Jellyfish and Rainbow Jellyfish.
In the Hamlet DLC, it is also possible to dry Poison Dartfrog Legs and Flytrap Stalk.
The Foods which can be dried are listed below:
Meat | Dried | Time required |
---|---|---|
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2 days |
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1 day | |
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1 day |
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2 days |
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1 day | |
(![]() ![]() ![]() |
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1 day |
(![]() ![]() |
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0.25 days |
(![]() ![]() |
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1 day |
(![]() ![]() |
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0.25 days |
Crock Pot
Main article: Crock Pot
The Crock Pot requires 4 accepted (some foods such as Seeds cannot be added) items to produce a dish. Some recipes require or allow for non-foods to be added (most recipes accept twigs as filler). Recipes sometimes produce a dish with a greater Hunger/Health/Sanity bonus than all the ingredients combined. Keep in mind Crock Pots don't always improve the nutritional value of what's put into them, look at Wet Goop or the Powdercake as examples. Some recipes are designed to specifically provide a large Sanity or Health boost but do not fill as much Hunger, or have some other purpose.
The cooking times for Crock Pot recipes vary. A few foods like Waffles are cooked in as little as 10 seconds, while recipes like Mandrake Soup take a full minute. Most recipes require a certain amount of food (such as Meats or Vegetables) as opposed to specific food items. Warly brings an exclusive Portable Crock Pot, that can be used to cook four additional recipes.
Cooking basics
A cooking attempt's ingredients have to match a recipe. If an attempt fails to match any recipe at all, Wet Goop ends up as the product. When a recipe is attempted (i.e. the pot starts cooking), the Food Value the ingredients fit into are considered; almost all recipes require some amount of Food from certain Food Value, but there are many recipes with specific Food requirements (like Froggle Bunwich requires a Frog Leg). Each recipe has recipe priorities, so a result can be decided when a set of ingredients fits more than one valid recipe.
When spoiling ingredients are used, the completed dish's spoil percentage becomes half the average spoil percentage of the ingredients (e.g. if 1 monster meat and 3 berries, all 90% spoiled (10% fresh), are placed in the Crock Pot, the resulting meatball will be 45% spoiled (55% fresh)). Non-spoilable ingredients are ignored when calculating average spoil percentage.
Crock Pot dishes start to spoil (even quicker in rain) before being collected. Some existing recipes gain the ability to warm or cool the player and new recipes have been added which can lower or raise the player's temperature. The Crock Pot itself also generates heat when cooking, which may Overheat the player during Summer.
Recipes for the Crock Pot
- For complete list of Crock Pot recipes, see Dishes.
- For complete list of Portable Crock Pot recipes, see Portable Crock Pot.
Food values
- For complete list of Food Value, see Food Value.
Ingredients
Food groups
There are 9 recognised food groups when cooking with a Crock Pot:
Meats
Fishes
Eggs
Fruits
Vegetables
Sweeteners
Monster Foods
Dairy (
)
Bugs (
)
- Decoration (DST)
Some Foods do not fall into any of these groups (e.g. Butterfly Wings); some fall into multiple (e.g. Fish); some might count as a meat, fruit, or vegetable when fed to a Pig but not when used in a Crock Pot.
An 11th food group, Fat, has gone unimplemented.
Valid ingredients
The following items can be used in a Crock Pot:
Any Meat (raw or cooked)
Any Monster Food (raw or cooked)
Any Fish or Seafood
Any Egg (raw or cooked)
Any Fruit (raw or cooked)
Any Vegetable (raw or cooked)
Any Sweetener
Certain inedible items (See Inedible)
Butterfly Wings
Mandrake
Kelp Fronds (raw, cooked or dried)
Lesser Glow Berry
Moon Moth Wings
Invalid ingredients
Although edible, the following items cannot be used in any recipes:
Dark Petals
Deerclops Eyeball
Foliage (excluding
)
Garland
Glow Berry (excluding
)
Guardian's Horn
Hatching Tallbird Egg
Koalefant Trunk (excluding
)
Light Bulb
Mandrake (cooked – raw o.k.)
Petals
Rot
Rotten Egg
Seeds (raw or cooked)
Winter Koalefant Trunk (raw or cooked) (excluding
)
Birchnut (applies only to raw; roasted can be used in crock pot)
Coconut (whole – halved or roasted o.k.)
Dead Swordfish
Dead Wobster (raw or cooked - alive o.k.)
Dragoon Heart
Eye of the Tiger Shark
Blooming Tuber (raw or cooked)
Bramble Bulb
Clippings
Flytrap Stalk
Lotus Flower (raw or cooked)
Magic Water
Nectar
Poison Dartfrog Legs (raw or cooked)
Seed Pod (raw or cooked)
Tuber (raw or cooked)
The following recipes do not work with any cooked foods:
Melonsicle (
)
Banana Pop (
)
The following recipes do not work with specific cooked foods (i.e. Turkey Dinner requires raw Drumsticks but the other meat component can be cooked.):
Filler
An ingredient is "filler" if it can be added to a partially prepared recipe without changing the Crock Pot's output; most recipes call for less than four ingredients, so fillers are need to fill the pot.
When filler is called for, most valid ingredients (see above) will usually work; though some recipes explicitly prohibit a couple ingredients or food groups. For example: Dragonpie cannot have any Meat ingredients in it.
While a lot of recipes prohibit their use; one dish, Kabobs, actually requires Twigs. Using them when possible is efficient, as Twigs are usually easier to get than Food.
Monster Food
If two or more Monster Foods are used in the pot, the crock pot produces Monster Lasagna unless Twigs are added (which makes Wet Goop), or higher priority food is available; thus, only one Monster Food should be attempted as filler for a dish, except Surf 'n' Turf. Though it follows the twig rule, it's useful to note that Bacon and Eggs can be made with two Monster Meat, one tallbird egg, and one stick.
The following is Monster Food:
Monster Meat (Raw or Cooked)
Monster Jerky
Durian (Raw or Cooked)
Dead Jellyfish (Raw or Cooked) (
)
Dried Jellyfish (
)
Dead Rainbow Jellyfish (Raw or Cooked) (
)