Spoilers: Early game
Abiotic Factor Cooking: Clean Water, Frying & First Soup
Boil clean water, cook Bland Pea Soup with exact ingredients and timing, serve it with a Soup Bowl, and fix common stove and recipe problems.
Boiling checklist
- Collect tainted water in a Cooking Pot or makeshift equivalent.
- Fill the pot completely: use 1,000 ml.
- Put it on a functioning stove.
- Let the conversion finish, then check the liquid before collecting it.
The output is 250 ml of clean water. Four such batches produce 1,000 ml in total. That arithmetic explains why one boiling cycle does not leave enough clean water to refill a pot.
Why is soup not available?
| What you are trying to do | Required setup | Common mix-up |
|---|---|---|
| Purify tainted water | A full pot and a functioning stove | Expecting a full litre of clean output from a litre of input |
| Fry raw food | A frying pan on a working cooktop, then a cookable raw item | Leaving cooked food until it burns |
| Make soup | Cooking level 3, a filled pot with suitable liquid, ingredients and power | Assuming that boiling water itself completes a soup recipe |
Soup requires Cooking level 3. Frying food is one way to raise the skill. A pot containing the correct liquid and a powered stove are separate requirements; merely owning a pot is not enough.
Do not combine a purification problem with a recipe problem. First confirm that the liquid is clean, then follow the intended soup recipe.
How do you get a pot and cook your first meal?
If you have not found a Cooking Pot, the Makeshift version uses two Staplers and three Metal Scrap at a Crafting Bench. It holds 1,000 ml and performs the same boiling and soup functions. Use the bench checks if you have the materials but cannot craft it.
For fried food, place a normal or Makeshift Frying Pan on the stove, then add the raw food. Watch for the cooked item and remove it. Leaving fried food on the heat burns it; leaving burned food longer can turn it into Bio Scrap. Do not begin a long expedition with your meal still in the pan.
Soup behaves differently from frying. At the required skill level, fill the pot with clean water or Antejuice, put it on a powered stove and follow a named recipe. A matching recipe changes the displayed name and records it in the Compendium. An unrecognized combination can finish as Bad Soup: a cooking animation alone does not validate the ingredients.
First complete recipe: Bland Pea Soup
Start with Bland Pea Soup: it needs Canned Peas and Salt. You can collect Canned Peas and Salt at Bounty Basket in Flathill during the Office Power Cell trip.
| Prepare | Amount or requirement |
|---|---|
| Cooking skill | Level 3 |
| Cooking Pot, including Makeshift | 1, filled with 1,000 ml clean water |
| Canned Peas | 1 |
| Salt | 1 |
| Working stove | 1 available cooktop |
| Soup Bowl | For serving the finished soup |
- Fill the pot with clean water. If you purified it yourself, combine the output of four full tainted-water batches; one batch only gives 250 ml.
- Place the full pot on the working stove and add one Canned Peas and one Salt.
- Check that the recognized recipe is Bland Pea Soup rather than Bad Soup. The listed cook time is 2 minutes; check the completion cues below instead of removing an unfinished pot because a wall-clock estimate elapsed.
- Remove the finished pot from the stove and place it as a deployable where you can serve it.
- Equip a Soup Bowl and collect a portion. If its recipe is missing, interact with a placed soup pot without a bowl to discover it. A pot provides four bowl portions under the base rules.
If your Cooking skill is still below 3, cook food to raise it. Once you reach the Blacksmith at F.O.R.G.E, inspecting the pot in front of him raises Cooking to 3 if it is lower. That later shortcut is not a prerequisite for making soup in Offices.
How do you know the soup is ready?
When cooking finishes, a lid appears and the uncooked designation disappears. Serve with a Soup Bowl as above. Soup does not burn or spoil like fried food, so a cooked pot and an unattended frying pan have different risks.
For other soups, use a named Compendium recipe rather than substituting a similarly named creature drop. Carbuncle Mushrooms and Raw Carbuncle, for example, are different ingredients.
What should you check when cooking stops?
Inspect these in order: the selected cooking process, the cookware, the liquid or food item, skill requirements, then the stove’s power. If it works in daylight but fails at night, compare battery charge and device load. Recrafting a pot does not repair an interrupted supply.
For repeated water shortages, calculate demand before boiling: one litre of clean output takes four full one-litre tainted-water batches by this method. Keep the resulting drinking reserve separate from the liquid intended for soup or a Mushroom Farm. These are game mechanics, not real-world water-treatment advice.
Keep two supply containers
Separate drinking supplies from unprocessed tainted water. Check the liquid label when transferring between them. This makes it easier to notice when your cooking supply has consumed your drinking reserve.
If cooking stops after the lights go out, inspect power and batteries before replacing the pot.
Choose your next meal
Open the Compendium and choose a soup for the buff you need. Gather its named ingredients before filling the pot, and keep enough clean water aside for drinking.
