In
The Alters, cooking, though seemingly limited by few recipes, is crucial for directly impacting the mood and happiness of your alters. Keeping alters happy is vital for game progression; unhappy alters can fight or refuse to work, crippling your base's efficiency, which is essential for survival.Players can feed their alters two main types of food:
Mush and a
Cooked Meal. Choosing the wrong food type can severely handicap productivity. To maintain happy alters and ensure maximum output, follow this optimal cooking strategy in
The Alters.
How to Cook Quality Food in The Alters
Cooking quality food in
The Alters necessitates making
Cooked Meals instead of Mush. While Mush cooks faster, it's far more costly in the long run. Players should avoid this trap, as Mush appears to be the more efficient option at first glance, but it is not.Here’s a comparison between Mush and Cooked Meal:
Food Type: | Resource Cost: | Time To Cook: |
Mush | 5 Organics | 30 Minutes |
Cooked Meal | 1 Raw Food | 20 Minutes |
The advantages of a Cooked Meal are clear: it consumes no organic resources directly for cooking and takes less time to prepare. Organics are a vital resource to conserve, as they are essential for creating items like Radiation Filters, which protect your base from radiation damage. Cooked Meals also have a shorter cooking time, allowing your assigned alter (or yourself) to produce more food, ensuring everyone is fed, and freeing up time for other tasks, thereby increasing overall productivity.Clearly, focusing on Cooked Meals is the superior strategy. The following steps will help you make the cooking process as efficient as possible.
Focus on Making 10x Raw Food
Producing 10x Raw Food is the most efficient long-term method for gathering the necessaryresources for Cooked Meals. Let's compare the two Raw Food productionoptions:
- 1x Raw Food: 1 Hour and 10 organics
- 10x Raw Food: 16 Hours and 50 organics
At first glance, producing 1x Raw Food might seem better. However, a quick calculation reveals otherwise: making 1x Raw Food ten times would take10 hours (1 hour x 10) but would cost a significantly higher 100 organics (10 organics x 10). Since preserving organics is paramount, producing 1x Raw Food ten times is inefficient.
The good news is that there are ways to reduce the 16-hour production time for 10x Raw Food:
- Awaken the Botanist Alter: Jan Botanist is 100%+ efficient when working in the Greenhouse, where Raw Food isgrown. Assigning him to the Greenhouse will significantly reduce thetime needed to make 10x Raw Food.
- Research Efficient Food: Have the Scientist alter research "Efficient Food" in the Research Lab. This upgrade alone will reduce the 16-hour creation time of 10x Raw Food to just 12 hours.
- By combining the Botanist's efficiency with the "Efficient Food" research, 10x Raw Food becomes much faster to grow and harvest without heavilydepleting your organic resources.
Assign the Doctor to the Kitchen and Make Cooked Meals
With Raw Food now consistently flowing into the kitchen, it's time tooptimize the cooking process itself. Similar to the Botanist in theGreenhouse, there's an alter who can significantly speed up cooking time in the Kitchen. Given that a Cooked Meal takes 20 minutes to make,efficiency is key to producing as much food as possible in the shortestamount of time.
- Awaken the Doctor Alter: The Doctor alter is essential for reducing cooking time. Besides his healing capabilities, the Doctor has a +50% efficiency bonus when cooking meals in the Kitchen. Assigning him to make Cooked Meals will drastically reduce productiontime and ensure your alters receive high-quality food consistently.
There's one final step to fully automate and optimize your cooking process:
- Set an Uphold Quantity: Once the Doctor is assigned to the Kitchen, set an Uphold quantity for Cooked Meals in the cooking menu. To do this, press the Middle Mouse button on the "Cooked Meal" option until you reach your desired quantity instorage. If the number of Cooked Meals in storage ever falls below thisset number, the Doctor will automatically begin making more, provided he has sufficient Raw Food resources.
It's ideal to maintain anywhere between 10 and 25 Cooked Meals in storage at any given time. This ensures that even if an unexpectedevent occurs and alters require more food, you'll have enough reserves.It also prevents constant resource consumption, allowing you to avoidbuilding additional storage depots and set up your base moreefficiently.
By implementing this cooking strategy in The Alters, you can automate food production, ensure your alters are consistentlyfed high-quality meals, and benefit from the positive mood buffs thatcontribute to an overall productive and happy base.
Platform(s): PlayStation 5 PS5, Windows PC, Xbox Series X/S
Developer(s): 11 Bit Studios
Publisher(s): 11 Bit Studios
Release date: 13 June 2025
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