How to cook in Nightingale

Want to know how to cook in Nightingale? As with most survival crafting games, knowing how to cook can quite literally mean life or death in Nightingale. Campfires not only provide warmth and refuge within the wilderness but they can also be used to make Healing Salves and cook ingredients from hunting, fishing and gathering.

As such, we’ve detailed below how to get started with Campfires, how to cook, get recipes, manage your hunger meter, and the best ways to survive your first night in the spooky gas-lamp fantasy realms.

In this guide:

How to cook food in Nightingale

As you journey through the opening Byway Realms with Puck, you’ll be instructed to make a Campfire. A Campfire is a basic but extremely useful structure in Nightingale as it can offer warmth against cold weather, can be used to craft Healing Salves if you’re suffering from ailments like a sprained ankle, or used to cook food.

You can make a Campfire from six Rocks, which should be easy enough to come by in all of Nightingale’s starting biomes. Loose Rocks can be picked up from circular piles, scattered across the different realm maps.

Once you make a Campfire as instructed, you can interact with it to access the list of available recipes you can make. Different recipes will apply different buffs, so remember to check these within the inventory display menu when choosing what to cook first.

How to get cooking ingredients and recipes in Nightingale

As well as the various berries you can get from foraging bushes (these are particularly prevalent in the Forest biome), you can also hunt Fae creatures in the realms for meat. As stated above, this meat will go a lot further when cooked at a Campfire first.

There is also fishing in Nightingale, but beware of waterways in Swamp biomes as these are often poisonous and will start building up your disease meter if you stay submerged in them for too long. If you become diseased, you’ll need to cook yourself the appropriate cure.

You will naturally unlock more varied cooking recipes once you start collecting ingredients. We suggest prioritising crafting a Hunting Knife and Scythe first. The Hunting Knife will increase the yield when harvesting materials from animals, and the Scythe will similarly increase the yield of any flora gathered.

How to manage hunger in Nightingale

There are three bars on the bottom of your Nightingale screen, each representing different values. You can hover your cursor on each of them to see more info about what they represent. As seen in the image above, the red bar indicates Health and the green bar is your Hunger meter. You’ll need to keep your Hunger topped up in order to energise your character, and if you ever begin to starve, your Health will drop dramatically.

(In case you were wondering, the blue bar represents Rest, which is basically a measure of how fast you regain lost Stamina. Rest can be replenished after taking a Short or Long Rest in a bed, and is just as important as Health and Hunger.)

As with all other resources in Nightingale, in order to keep your Realmswalker well-fed and healthy, you should always assign food to a hotkey in order to access it quickly. Raw food such as berries or uncooked meat can be consumed if needed, but cooked food will replenish your Health and Hunger meters much faster, so we recommend having at least one cooked food type assigned at all times so you can eat on the go.

That rounds off our guide to everything you need to know about cooking in Nightingale. For more Nightingale coverage, check out our guide on how to play multiplayer in Nightingale or see our magic wood adventures where the RPS team had a chance to sample Nightingale during a pre-launch playtest. Expect hijinks and chaos ahead.