Fires and cooking

Look at a lit fire and choose Cook. Kneel at it and lay food on the grill: an open fire takes four things at a time. Food only cooks while the fire is burning.

Taking it off in time

You can watch food cook on the grill. Take it off too early and you get it back raw. Take it off when it's done and you get the meal. Leave it too long and you get Burnt Food. Fish fillets are done in about a minute, beef in two, venison and rabbit in two and a half, pork in four and fowl in five. Some foods cook in pairs, two raw pieces for one dish. Cooking practice makes you quicker.

How you cook it

How food is cooked changes what it gives you. Raw meat gives your body little, because raw muscle is hard to digest, and it can make you ill. Grilled, roasted or fried through, you get all of it and it's safe. A stew or a broth is safe and gives back water from the pot. Smoked meat, jerky, pemmican and salt cod pack a lot of food into a little weight and keep for weeks, but the salt makes you thirsty. Burnt food is mostly charcoal: safe, bitter, and barely food.

Stoves

• Folding Stove: burns Hexamine Fuel Tablets, ten minutes each. It only boils water or heats a can.
• Camping Gas Stove: a Propane Canister lasts an hour and a half and cooks anything a fire does, two things at once. Change the cartridge with the valve off once it's nearly empty.
• Stoves don't care about rain and don't draw the dead at night the way an open fire does.
• A Brick Barbecue has a hood, so rain doesn't put it out, and it gives off no fumes.

Smoke indoors

An open fire, a fire tub, a barrel stove or even a gas stove in a closed room fills it with carbon monoxide. First a headache, then a pounding head and nausea, then confusion and stumbling, then collapse and death. An open fire in a sealed room gives you a headache within a minute. Open a door or a window, or better, cook outside. A fireplace with a chimney and the brick barbecue give off none.

If you're poisoned, get into fresh air. It clears slowly on its own. An Oxygen Mask Kit clears it faster, and the oxygen concentrator at a med station fastest. See Medical and the Bloom.

Don't stand in the flames. A few seconds in a fire sets you alight.