v0.31:Stonegears/Cooking

Cooking and changing labors

Go to the dining hall area (F2) and in the 3x3 nook south of the food storage area place a kitchen workshop‡ (b-w-z). If you unpause the game you'll note that none of your dwarves will come to build the kitchen. This is because none of your dwarves has the cooking Template:L enabled. Use the units screen‡ (u) and zoom in on _____. Use v-p-l to modify active labors‡, make sure the cursor is over _______, scroll down with + to an select Farming/Related, press Enter, scroll up with - to select Cooking, hit Enter again, then Esc twice to return to the main menu. ____ will now go build the kitchen.

Go back to the kitchen (F2) and interact with it (q). This will give you three different types of meal to prepare, and the currently unusable Render fat. "Easy meal" produces a meal with two ingredients, "fine meal" produces a meal with three ingredients, and "lavish meal" produces a meal with four ingredients. Note that the prepare meal commands have no means to control which ingredients are used. For that we have to exit from the kitchen and go to the kitchen sub-screen of the status screen‡ (z-→-Enter):

SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER

Ingredients marked with Cook are available for your dwarves to cook, while ones marked with Cook your dwarves will ignore when cooking. All Template:Ls start out with cooking disabled, since you want to use them for farming‡, but after your fortress has been running for a long time you might have enough seeds that you can safely cook a few. All of your Template:L starts out as cookable, which we want to prevent, since we want to reserve booze for drinking. Scroll down (↑ and ↓) to the booze lines and toggle the cooking permissions off with c. Also turn off the cooking permission for the plump helmets, since cooking them destroys the seeds they contain, while eating them raw leaves behind a seed.

Now go back to the kitchen and add a Prepare Lavish Meal job. Four ingredients will be gathered and turned into a twenty serving "roast". Note that a 20 item stack‡ like that is too big to fit inside of a Template:L, so it will be placed directly onto the floor. This is nothing to worry about: there is no food contamination in the game (yet) so it wont pick up germs from sitting on the ground, and the combination of it being in a food stockpile and it being cooked will keep it from rotting for a long time.