Valheim cooking guide

The world of Valheim is dangerous. You won’t last long if your only lifeline is a set of leather rags and a handful of berries to top off your health. To stay alive in Viking purgatory, you must learn some culinary skills.

In this Valheim guide, we’ll show you the basics behind learning how to cook. Making meals involves finding the raw materials to cook with and the proper tools to cook on.

How to cook in Valheim

To begin cooking in Valheim, you’ll need to craft somewhere to cook. In the very early game, you can create a simple enough cooking solution that will grant you enough hearty food to tackle your first boss, Eikthyr.

Here’s what you need to build a rudimentary area for cooking:

• Campfire — stone 5x, wood 2x
• Cooking station — wood 2x

Image: Iron Gate Studio/Coffee Stain Publishing via Polygon

To get your cooking setup done properly, you first need to place your campfire. Be sure to place it somewhere nice and flat. Then you’ll need to craft the cooking station on top of campfire like the picture above.

This simple setup will allow you to cook two pieces of food at the same time.

To cook food in Valheim, you can walk up to your cooking station and press E on your keyboard to add any available raw food in your inventory. If you have a specific piece of food in your hot bar, you can press the associated number key to place it on the spit.

Once your food is above the fire, it’ll begin cooking. After a few seconds, your food will make a loud sizzling sound, letting you know that it’s finished. Walk up to your food, being careful not to walk into the fire, and press E again to take the food off the spit. If timed properly, you’ll have two pieces of cooked food.

If you wait too long, your food will turn into lumps of coal, which are useful for other things (that aren’t eating).

Valheim recipes

Image: Iron Gate Studio/Coffee Stain Publishing via Polygon

You’ll learn different recipes as you begin farming, find new sources of raw meat, and once you can craft more complicated cooking tools. Each piece of food has different benefits and effective durations. For instance, one of the most common meals you’ll make early on, cooked meat, does the following:

• Adds 40 points of health to your life pool
• Restores 30 points of stamina
• Gain two points of health every few moments, if you’re missing any health

The healing benefits of food have some unique properties. If you have full health, you will gain the increase in health offered by food, and your health will quickly grow to the new maximum amount. If you don’t have full health, your maximum amount of health will grow, and you’ll slowly gain health over time based on where your health currently is.

Odd as it may sound, this is how to heal in Valheim.

Another odd thing about eating to heal: You can’t eat another piece of the same food that you’re currently being healed by. For example, eating a raspberry prevents you from eating another raspberry for a while.

To max out your health in Valheim, you need a diverse diet.

Image: Iron Gate Studio/Coffee Stain Publishing via Polygon

At the bottom left of your screen, near your health, you’ll notice three boxes. Those represent the three meals you’re capable of eating at any one time. Use this sidebar to keep track of what food you’ve consumed. As the effective time of a food is nearing its end, it will begin flashing before disappearing — at that point, giving you another slot that you can fill with a new food item.

Very early in the game, you may not have access to different types of food, so at the very least, make sure you have some cooked meat and forage some raspberries as well.

If you’re short on raw cooking materials or edible food, you can always use cheat commands to spawn more.