Prep Table

Where a dish is put together from a container and foods. It is the Tool Table with a dish filter and a knife where the hammer goes, and it is where the containers are made. It has three tabs: Parts, Assemble and Prepare.

Crafting

S S S
W W W

S is Smooth Stone Slab and W is any Planks. The Hand Knife is an Iron Plate over a Stick, which makes an iron blade on a wooden handle. A modular tool like any other: a better or different blade can be shaped at the Tool Table, and its material sets how long it lasts.

Making a dish

Put a hand knife in the knife slot. Every container and every dish you take costs it a point.
Parts tab: pick a container from the list (Ceramic Bowl, Ceramic Plate, Wooden Skewer), put its stock in the cells and take it. There is no rhythm to play: it comes out at once. The container decides which dish you get (see The dishes). The same list shapes foods from dough: Flatbread Dough (one dough, rolled thin; the wrap's container once baked) and Noodles (three dough in a row, three noodles: a starchy base, drier than dough, so it keeps longer and cooks quicker). The dough's state and knead carry over: rolling dough thin does not make it fresh.
Assemble tab: pick the dish type with the arrows over the left column (Bowl Dish, Plate Dish, Skewer). The slots are labelled with that type's roles, and the left column says what is still missing (for example Needs: main). Put the container and one of each food in the slots, one item to a slot. A food fills the role its kind says, never its name:
base: a starchy food (potato, bread)
main: a protein (meat, fish). Every dish needs one
side: a plant (carrot, apple, berries, kelp)
Take the dish. A seasoning is not put in here: it goes on last, in the Prepare tab (Finish). The parts are used up, whatever came of them.

Cooked and raw foods both go in; a food goes in as it is, with whatever you have done to it.

The dishes

Dish	Container	Made from	Holds	Eating time	Foods
Bowl Dish	Ceramic Bowl	3 bricks or clay balls	0.6 L (up to 12 hunger)	2.4 s	base, main, side
Plate Dish	Ceramic Plate	2 bricks or clay balls	0.9 L (up to 18 hunger)	3.3 s	base, main, side
Skewer	Wooden Skewer	1 stick	0.2 L (up to 4 hunger)	1.2 s	main, side (no base)
Wrap	a baked Flatbread	dough	0.5 L (up to 10 hunger)	2.1 s	main, side (no base)

The table names the dish ("Making: ...") for the type you picked; a container of another type makes nothing. A wrap's container is a food, not a shaped part: put a baked Flatbread in a slot (it counts as food for the dish, so a raw flatbread dough feeds almost nothing). A plate is the big meal you cannot eat in a hurry; a skewer is a bite you can eat mid-fight. Every dish needs a main food. It is named from what is in it: Beef and Potato Bowl with Honey, Beef and Carrot Plate, Beef Skewer.

Pies. A pie is formed, then cooked, then eaten. Put Pastry Dough (a dough and an egg, two from the bench) in as the container, a vegetable or fruit filling, optionally a meat and a second pastry as a lid, and form it at the Prep Table. It comes out raw: it feeds little and carries whatever was live in the filling. Set the whole pie in a heated vessel (a hearth, an oven) and it bakes through, killing the load and filling out the meal. Left on, it dries and then chars like any food. Sugar in the Prepare tab sweetens it. Named from its filling: Pumpkin Pie.

What the dish is

Hunger and saturation are the foods' own figures at their state (cooked through, dried, charred, going off), added up and then held to what the container can hold. A bigger container is a bigger meal and takes longer to eat; piling more food in than it holds wastes it.
Something live: one raw part taints the whole dish. Cook the parts first.
Toxin is a concentration over the whole mixture, not a sum: more food dilutes it, but it never goes away.
Buffs work as in a stew: the foods' compounds are blended by amount, and fat and fibre delay and stretch them.
Eat it like any food. It is named from what is in it, never from an item.

The Prepare tab

Put one food (to cut), one dough (to knead) or a finished dish (to finish) in the work slot. None of the minigames is needed to make a dish: a dish of whole, unpoured parts works. Hand work buys evenness and a clean pour, never access. The result stays in the work slot; take it out.

Knead (a dough, no knife): hold the left button to press the dough, let go to rest. Pressing builds gluten but tires the dough, so you push and wait; you read the dough (smooth and glossy, reddening and shaking, cracking when it tears), and press Done. The result is crumbly, good, glossy or tough and bakes into a better or worse loaf. Wet dough is sticky and slow, dry dough tears sooner, fibrous dough tenses faster, fatty dough is slack. See Dough.
Cut (any food that is not a seasoning, with a knife in the knife slot): left-click lays a cut across the food, right-click lifts the nearest, Done ends. No cuts leaves it whole, one to three makes it sliced, four or more minced; six at most. The pieces are drawn between the cuts, so an uneven cut looks uneven: the spread of the pieces grades it even, mixed or ragged. A ragged cut is allowed, and costs you. The knife loses a point per cut food.
Finish (at the end, on the real dish): put the finished dish in the work slot and a seasoning (honey, cocoa cookie) in the seasoning slot beside it, then hold the button to pour the seasoning onto the dish. The screen shows your dish with the sauce spreading over it; let go when the coat reaches the marks. A dish takes one finish, and the button says why when it will not work. Poured to the marks is a clean pour; a little off is shaky; well past is heavy (more of its compounds, so a stronger lift and a worse crash); well short is light. A dish with a finish nobody poured (made another way) counts as a light, sloppy pour.

What it does. A cut food (sliced, more so minced) rots faster, cooks and dries faster (on a rack too), and gives up its compounds sooner. A ragged cut also leaves the thick middle underdone: heat does not clear the last of what was live in it. A heavy pour multiplies the finish's compounds in the dish; a light one thins them.

How the material changes the game. The food itself changes how the minigames play, not only what they give. Fibre drags the knife toward the food's grain, so tough food is hard to cut evenly and soft food cuts exactly where you aim. Fat lets the blade slide on past where you aimed. Water makes it squirt and squish (a wetter food sounds lower). Viscosity sets the pour: honey runs slow and thick, in a fat ribbon, easy to stop on the line; a thin liquid floods in a fine, fast stream and is hard to stop.

Dishes spoil. A finished dish is as good as its worst part: it rots on the same clock as any food (warmer and wetter rots faster, nothing is ticked, so a chest or a pocket counts), the tooltip reads Going off then Rotten, a rotten dish feeds less and can make you sick, and the Ice Box, a Refrigeration Unit and a Drying Rack keep or dry it like any food. The clock starts when you first carry it or drop it. A dish's tooltip also says how its finish was poured (clean, shaky, heavy or light), when it has one. A dish cannot be cooked again.

Wet and dry. Water creeps between neighbouring foods in a dish: a dry food beside a soggy one is soaked. It takes on water (the dish as a whole holds the same), a dried-out food counts as merely done, and a soaked part feeds a little less. A wrap is covered, so water creeps and food spills half as fast, and it dries out slower on a rack. A bowl, plate or skewer is open.

Overfull. A container holds only so much. Put more food in than it can hold and the dish is still made, but the left column says Overfull: it will spill when carried. Each time you pick it up or throw it down it loses some of its wettest part (less hunger and saturation, a Spilling line on the tooltip, then Spilled N%), until it is down to what the container holds. The water goes; anything live or toxic in it does not, so the rest is no cleaner. A skewer with a main and a side is a little overfull by design; a plate is not.

Taking a dish apart. Put a finished dish in the work slot and press Take apart on the Prepare tab (a point off the knife). The foods come back as they are now, spoilage and all, with their cuts; the container comes back whole. The finish is lost, since it is on the dish. A soup cannot be taken apart: a stew is a mixture.

Soup. Pick Soup Bowl in the type picker, put in a bowl and one serving ladled from a Stockpot (broth, stew or scorched stew), and the serving is the dish's base. It is counted once (the pot already watered it down), the bowl still caps how much it feeds, and it can take a finish like any dish. It is named for what was poured in: Bowl of Stew.

The table's screen is fired brick with pale calcite trim; the Tool Table is cobblestone and the Gun Table black steel.

The reveal

When you let go of the pour the result is already decided, but you are not told yet. The dish is covered and music plays for how it went (a bright tune for a clean pour, a steady one for a shaky one, a sad one for a failed one), so you can hear it before you see it. Then the cover lifts, with a fanfare for a good pour or a failed one. Click or press Esc to skip the music. Kneading ends the same way, with the dough resting under a cloth, and so does the cut: on Done the board is covered with a cloth while the music of how even the cut was plays (a bright tune for even, a steady one for mixed, a sad one for ragged), then the cloth lifts with the fanfare and the pieces wobble apart.

Honey on a skewer

A skewer is still something you can hit with. Material perks on a dish's parts apply to a struck target, so a skewer with honey on it slows what you hit, as honey does everywhere else. This is deliberate. Other foods whose material has a perk do the same.

What containers are made of

A ceramic bowl or plate takes any ceramic that comes in small pieces: bricks, nether bricks, clay balls, shards, or the electronics Ceramic and Glazed Ceramic (one piece each). Terracotta and mud bricks only come as blocks, so a block breaks into 9 shards at the crafting table, and shards make bowls and plates. A skewer takes a stick, or any rod. A blaze rod skewer holds its dish warm wherever it is, and a warm meal comforts you when you eat it (a little Regeneration, and the cold shaken off). A breeze rod skewer is eaten faster. A metal rod skewer is just a rod, for now.