A Cooking Station is a heat source and something to cook in — a grill, a stove, a pot over a fire. It turns raw ingredients into meals that heal better and sometimes grant a lasting buff, and it is the only place alcohol is brewed and dirty water is made safe to drink.
A campfire is a Cooking Station
You do not need to find a kitchen. Any campfire the party can build counts, which means cooking, brewing, and water purification are available on the road, at camp, anywhere you can safely stop and light a fire.
This is what makes the food economy work while travelling. Scavenging and 🔨 Butchering produce raw ingredients; the campfire turns them into something worth carrying.
What You Do Here
| Operation | Test | Perk | 🔨 Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic recipes — grilled meat, boiled water | — (auto-success) | None | 15 – 30 min |
| Advanced recipes — stews, roasts, cakes, omelettes | 🏊 END + 🏕 Survival | 🎯 Wasteland Survivor (🏕 Survival +5) | 30 min – 1 hr |
| Brewing and distilling — 🍺 Beer, 🍷 Wine, 🥃 Whiskey, 🍸 Vodka, 🍾 Rum, 🥃 Bourbon | END + 🏕 Survival | None | 15 min – 1 hr |
| Purifying water — 2 🚰 Dirty Water → 1 💧 Pure Water | — (auto-success) | None | 15 min |
Every cookable item carries its own recipe and 📊 DC in the Crafting callout on its page. Advanced recipes run 📊 DC 15–20 and are where the real buffs live.
Two tiers of cooking
Anyone can cook. Grilling a steak or boiling water needs no skill, no perk, and no roll — it just takes time, and it beats eating the meat raw.
🎯 Wasteland Survivor (🏕 Survival +5) is what unlocks the recipes that matter: meals granting temporary buffs that last until your next 🏕 Long Rest.
There is no Tier 4 cooking. The ladder tops out at advanced recipes.
Failure
A failed cooking Test consumes the ingredients and produces a ruined or lower-quality result at the GM’s discretion. Ruined food still counts as eating for the purposes of avoiding 😫 Exhaustion — it is just not worth much else.
Why Cook At All
Raw meat can be eaten. It is simply worse, and often irradiated.
- Cooked food heals more than its raw equivalent, and drops the radiation.
- Advanced meals grant a temporary buff until the next 🏕 Long Rest.
- You may only eat 1 food and drink 1 drink per rest period — Short or Long. That cap is the whole argument for cooking: with only two meals and two drinks a day, each one should be as good as you can make it. (Super Mutants get 2 and 2 per rest.)
- Eating and drinking at all is what prevents 😫 Exhaustion. See 🛌 Rest.
Cooked food is consumed during a 🏕 Long Rest or 🏕 Short Rest, or from a Quick Slot mid-combat if the item allows it.
What a Cooking Station Can’t Do
| You want to make | Go to |
|---|---|
| Chems, medical items, explosives | ⚗️ Chemistry Station |
| Weapon, armor, or robot mods | 🔧 Workbench |
| Gear built from scratch, ⚙️ Scrap Refinement, kit refills | 🔧 Workbench |
Note that 🧼 Antiseptic is a chem, not a drink — it uses alcohol as a base ingredient, but it is brewed into a medical item at a ⚗️ Chemistry Station. Cook the liquor here, then take it there.
Finding One
Kitchens, diners, bars, and settlement mess halls all qualify, and so does any fire the party builds. Practically speaking a Cooking Station is available whenever the group is somewhere safe enough to stop — which is the same condition crafting already requires.
Related Systems
- 🔨 Crafting — the full crafting system
- 🔧 Workbench · ⚗️ Chemistry Station — the other two workstations
- 🏕 Survival — the skill used here
- 🛌 Rest — when food and drink are consumed
- 😫 Exhaustion — what happens when you skip meals
- 🔨 Butchering — where meat comes from
- Scavenging — where the rest of the ingredients come from