The new and improved cooking system is used by taking a frying pan or a cooking pot into your hand and selecting an ingredient with the right mouse button. In order to cook the food then the mouse wheel has to be kept pushed down for the amount of time you want to cook it. Of course this only works when standing close to a lit fireplace. After cooking you can serve it via the left mouse button. Frying something results in food which is put on a plate, cooking something results in a drink which is put into a cup. Finally eating or drinking then is done by pressing the left mouse button again.
(There is also a little explanation text in the upper right corner of the screen to help out with this.)
The cooking process also has a little bit of a mini-game bacause each food group (fruits, vagetables, nuts, fish, meat, eggs and spicery) has its own best cooking duration. From the beginning the quality of the cooked food gets better and better up to the point where you reach the best time and then the quality drops again until it eventually even becomes worse than in the beginning. Because of this you should have to experiment a little to know which food group has to be cooked for how long.
Even though the previous cooking system (1.0, only included in the German edition until version 0.0.0.1d) allowed set meal/menu combinations of up to 4 ingredients, I removed this in order to implement the new system which just feels a lot more natural and intuitive than selecting food into the slots of a graphical menu.
If you carry any spicery with you, a random one is now automatically being used if your cooking skill is high enough.
Next there are a few changes for the fireplaces, now it works like this:
Once you have built a simple fireplace you can add 2 types of add-ons which can each be upgrades once:
Stonecircle
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Stoneborder (to protect against flying sparks, thus decreasing the fire hazard)
Stoneholding
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Grill rack (to hold a pan or pot above the fire, thus increasing the food quality)
This allows for 9 different combinations:
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