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Food and Cooking

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Food in Last Frontier is not a fullness bar but a consumable class of its own. There is no hunger meter and it is deliberately switched off: your character will not die because you forgot to eat. Food earns its place elsewhere — between fights, on the road, and in the cold.

Two slots: a meal and a ration

What you eat occupies one of two slots, and they are independent:

  • Meal — cooked dishes and raw meat: health regeneration out of combat, warmth, and the risk a raw cut carries.
  • Ration — field food: stamina, foraging yield, carrying capacity and speed on the global map.

So one meal plus one ration is the deliberate maximum. Within a slot the last thing eaten wins: a new portion stops the previous one instead of stacking with it. Eating ten kebabs in a row and adding up their effects will not work.

What the meals give

  • Rust rat kebab — ten minutes of health regeneration, the simplest hot option.
  • Dog kebab — ten minutes: restores more slowly, but warms you.
  • Crab stew — ten minutes: the best regeneration and warmth together; the top of the cooking ladder.
  • Raw meat — five minutes of weak regeneration and a genuine gamble: every raw cut rolls for food poisoning, and rust rat and dog meat add a dose of radiation on top. Active radiation protection removes that dose entirely.

Health from food ticks only out of combat: in a firefight a meal is no substitute for a bandage.

What the rations give

  • Dried meat — twenty minutes: a larger Stamina reserve and faster recovery.
  • Hunter’s breakfast — fifteen minutes: more yield from butchering and more experience for it.
  • Trail ration — twenty minutes: faster travel on the global map and more carrying capacity.

Cooking removes the gamble

Raw meat stays raw material for quests, trade and recipes, and you can eat it. But the way out of the lottery is the kitchen: the same carcass becomes safe dishes at any kitchen station, and a campfire you lit yourself counts as one, as does a stove placed on the map. See the crafting article for details.

Warmth from hot food

A warming dish adds its warmth beside what your clothing gives and shows on the thermometer as a line of its own. But warmth has a shared ceiling: food can delay freezing in mild frost and will never replace warm clothes in a blizzard. Standing next to a warm ally does not cost you the bonus.

What to remember

  • There is no hunger — food is for what it does, not for staying alive.
  • One meal and one ration at a time; within a slot the latest replaces the previous.
  • Health from food returns only out of combat.
  • Raw meat is a bet on poisoning, and rust rat and dog meat irradiate you as well.
  • Hot food warms, but its ceiling is shared with armour.