This is a basic guide to get you started in cooking. The fun of cooking is trying different things to discover recipes.

Early on your nutrition will suffer for lack of skill to make quality nutritious meals. As long as you have food and water you should be fine with low nutrition.

Speaking of water, you can drink any water for hydration, even salty water.

Salt

• Do not confuse salt with source salt. Source salt is completely different.
• Salt can be mined from rock salt veins. Rock salt can be converted to salt with a grindstone
• Salt can be made by boiling water with any amount of salt in it.
  • If you boil salt water to make salt, make sure you're not storing the salt water in a secondary container and drawing from it as this greatly reduces the resulting quality of the salt.
  • The best salt quality is achieved by taking your cooking container directly to the salt water source and filling it, then boiling it to make salt.

Hot food cooking simply means food that is combined and prepared to make a recipe. In other words, not raw ingredients, but cooked ingredients.

The items you'll need.

• Furnace (oven, forge or campfire)
• Cooking container (pottery bowl, frying pan, roasting pan, etc.)
• Ingredients
• Kindling to start the furnace and fuel for the furnace
• Utensils for preparing food (knife, spoon, etc.)

NOTE: You cannot use your carving knife to cut up food ingredients. You need to make a “knife”.

Add ingredients to a cooking container inside a furnace. Right click on your cooking container to see if the ingredients inside make a recipe.

Wurm Unlimited has an extensive list of recipes. Also see the Hot Food Cooking icon on the quickbar (the same button bar that has climb on it) for a list of recipes.

Meal

• Furnace (oven, forge or campfire)
  • Cooking Container
    • 1 vegetable item
    • 1 meat item

Adding ingredients makes larger meals. Preparation of ingredients in a recipe (chopping, roasting, etc.; also adding salt) increases the duration of a meal's affinity timer. QL (quality level) is determined by your skill as well as the QL of the ingredients used.

One of the best survival foods is kielbasa. It lasts a long time, gives decent nutrition, and the ingredients are easy to come by. You don't have to know the recipe, just make one and you'll learn the recipe.

Kielbasa

• Furnace (oven, forge, campfire)
  • No cooking container, put kielbasa directly in furnace
    • Bladder and knife to make a sausage skin, put the below ingredients inside
      • 1 meat chopped twice with knife to make minced meat
      • 1 garlic chopped once with knife
      • 1 fat

You can forage for garlic and plant it to start accumulating garlic. You can also find garlic growing at abandoned settlements around the map. Kill creatures to acquire meat. Only certain creatures drop fat and bladders.

Once you've made some sausage skins with your bladders you'll have some smaller bladder pieces left over. Do not throw these away. You can put the bladder pieces in a container to recombine them.