| Material required? | Cooking set |
| 80/100 giving extra checks? | Yes |
| Obtainable in game? | No |
| Wishable | Yes |
This skill allows the PC to cook food susceptible to rotting, increasing its nutrition value and making it easier to preserve.
Manual info[]
Cooked food is more nutritious and less prone to rot away. Very effective if used on corpses. You need a cooking set to use this skill.
Basics[]
As the manual says, the skill can be used only if the PC has a cooking set. It is possible to cook all corpses, raw meat, and fish meat. Pieces of raw meat will be transformed into pieces of fresh meat, which do not rot.
Cooking a single food item will take exactly 20/35/50 turns based on the B/U/C status of the cooking set. There is a significant chance to ruin the food which is reduced at higher skill levels. Cooking set B/U/C status also influences this chance (blessed giving the best chance, cursed giving the worst).
Cooked corpses
Cooking corpses will reduce their weight by 5% and make them last longer (cooked corpses rot about 4 times slower than uncooked ones for a PC without the Food preservation skill).
Nutrition value for the majority of edible corpses is doubled when they are cooked, while inedible corpses are typically not improved.
It is not recommended to use Necromancy on cooked corpses, as slaves created this way will start out heavily damaged.
Advanced uses[]
Cooking also usually turns cursed corpses into uncursed ones (or rotten corpses into slightly rotten corpses). Thus the Cooking skill might be used as an emergency measure to save valuable corpses (such as corpses of orb guardians). Moreover, certain corpses have beneficial properties that may only appear when uncursed or blessed, and cooking provides a method to remove cursing without using a scroll of uncursing or holy water.
Note that it is possible to cook corpses and meat using fire-based spells (Fire Bolt, Fireball, Improved Fireball) and wands (wand of fire, wand of fireballs). This method is typically much faster and reliable, as it cannot ruin the corpse or meat. Cooking in this manner does not remove cursed (or rotten) status.
Obtaining[]
The following Races start with Cooking: Hurthling.
The following Classes start with Cooking: Healer, Farmer.
Training[]
Successfully cooking corpses and meat. The skill cannot be increased on level-up unless the PC has a cooking set in their inventory.