Homemade delicacies in DayZ donate much more energy than packaged food! Today, we show you what options you have to cook food in DayZ!
That’s why you should cook! Packaged foods can give you an enormous amount of energy. Especially rice, cereals, or tactical bacon. However, these also take up a lot of inventory space.
However, self-prepared meals, especially meat, give you a multiple of it, take up less space, are eaten faster, and can even heat you from the inside out. So, like in real life, self-made food is a lot better than fast food.
How cooking works in DayZ
You can cook these foods: The variety of foods that you can prepare with various cooking methods in DayZ has grown quite large in recent years. Here’s how you can cook the following foods:
- Meat
- Fish
- Vegetables
- Mushrooms
- Fruits
There are also various options for preparing your dish. Different foods should also be prepared differently for maximum calorie retention – more on that later.
Equipment: For all methods of cooking, you need the following equipment:
- Container: saucepan, pan, stick
- Heat source: Camping stove (you don’t need matches for this), fireplace & tripod, fireplace or, since update 1.08, stoves in houses
- Additional: matches and a campfire, if you’re away from the camping stove
1. Cooking food
It’s that simple: To simply cook food, you need the saucepan, water, and a heat source of your choice from the list above and, depending on your choice, matches. If you cook in a fireplace, stone oven, or stove, you must of course light a fire in it beforehand.
Add water to the saucepan and then place it on the heat source. Now you can add the food listed above. But watch the contents of the pot carefully! Because the boiled status is quickly burned. You can also tell by the fact that the food looks different now.
2. Baking food
Butter the fish: This method works almost exactly like the first. However, you use fat instead of water. You get that by gutting animals – or, for the madmen, from other players too.
Incidentally, baked food retains a lot more nutrients and calories than its cooked counterpart. The fat itself, with which you make baking possible, can also be eaten afterward. Fat is by far the highest calorie income.
3. Grill food over the fire
Camping atmosphere thanks to fire: In order to make your food edible with the help of a campfire, you obviously need a fireplace first. To do this, simply combine small sticks with scraps of fabric. Paper, bandages & bark also works fine.
You can also cut up a large stick to make small sticks. It’s also best to add firewood, which you get from cutting down trees.
But you need a large stick anyway. Here you can skewer food and hold it over the crackling fire until it’s well done. However, to attach a saucepan, you will need a tripod that will be placed over the fire.
Alternatively, you can surround your campfire with eight large stones. You can use this to build a stone oven. Now it is possible to use the oven as a stove! To get stones, you have to remove them from a rock with a pickaxe.
4. Dry food
How to dry food: You will need a saucepan or pan. You normally fill these with fat or water, but you leave that here! You just have to put the food in the bare pan/pot and keep it below 100 degrees Celsius.
After a while, the icon will change and the piece of food will be given the status “Dried”.
DayZ has spoiling food
1.10 brought these innovations: Since the DayZ Update 1.10, food can go moldy. You can read in our guide, how to prevent this, and how long which foods can be kept.
Depends on food. My guidelines: soda is always safe, various bars and jerky are good unless they’re mouldy, canned goods over 50% are safe, meat over 80%, and sardines over 95%. Seriously, sardines are a trap. Not sure how accurate that is, but I haven’t had food poisoning for more than a year in game.