Cooking is the cornerstone of any adventuring party's repertoire, as being able to sustain oneself while enduring a long expedition is crucial to survival.

As long as players are in a space free from any active threats, they can cook, as long as they have their Cooking Kit in their Communal Inventory. The kit is essentially a massive wok and a portable fire-starting kit, so cooking is possible virtually anywhere.

Gathering Ingredients

Depending on where you are, players can choose to forage signified by rolling for Perception. The results of the individual dice determine the amount of ingredients that'll be found. For example, in a dense forest full of fruits, a 3d6 Perception roll (2, 1, 5) will yield 2 Apples, 1 Melon, and 5 Bananas. As a rule of thumb, you can either pick 3 random ingredients, or give players better food/additional different ingredients if their roll passes a certain threshold. Every Perception roll will yield something.

How to Cook (!)

Meals can have anywhere from 1 to 5 different ingredients in it at a time, and 1 of any ingredient is considered a regular portion for whatever meal is being cooked, so there's no need to worry about cups of flour or tablespoons of sugar.

When cooking, it's a roll of the Cooking Skill with a DC equal to 5 + The number of ingredients inside the meal. You can also cook with more than one of the same ingredient, but this will also affect the DC. On a success, the meal is sufficiently cooked, retaining all of the potential bonuses of the ingredients used. On a failure, the meal has no benefits to being eaten, and players who do eat it have to make a Constitution save equal to the DC of the meal, where a failure will result in a loss of 1 Wellness.

Healthiness & Heartiness

Every ingredient has two stats attached to it: Healthiness and Heartiness. When cooking a meal, the Healthiness and Heartiness of the result is a total of the ingredients used to make it. For instance, if cooking with a Potato and Butter, the Healthiness and Heartiness of the Potato (-1,1) and the Butter (-2,2) are added up to make the total stats of the Baked Potato (-3, 3).

The Healthiness of a meal determines what kind of status you receive. If you eat 3 consecutive meals of a positive total Healthiness, you get the Healthy Status for as long as the Heartiness of the Meal. Eat 3 Consecutive Meals of a negative total Healthiness, and you get the Unhealthy Status, with a duration as long as the Heartiness of the meal.

Heartiness is how filling the meal is, and how long any effects you take on from eating the meal last. This is how you affect your Size, by eating foods with a Heartiness that makes your current Fullness exceed your Max. Fullness.

Food Groups (!)

There are 5 Categories of food: Carbs, Vitamins, Proteins, Fats, and Condiments. Each Food Group grants a specific kind of bonus when eaten. For ingredients that increase a stat by a fixed amount, if there are enough ingredients in the meal that it would apply a +3 bonus to a stat, the bonus becomes an Advantage for every +3.

There is also a Special Category of food, which is food derived from unconventional places. This includes special minerals, rare spices, and monster parts. Effects from these vary wildly from one ingredient to another, with some having the same benefits as the other Food groups, while some may only have negative effects, and others may even grant special status conditions.