Chef's Special: Enhanced Gastronomy Recipes + Kitchenware

About Chef’s Special Gastronomy food and drink recipes have new sustenance bonus durations, scaled to the skill level required to craft them.

Chef's Special recipes fed & hydrated bonuses

• Rank 1 - 1 hour fed/hydrated
• Rank 2 - 2 hours fed/hydrated
• Rank 3 - 3 hours fed/hydrated
• Rank 4 - 4 hours fed/hydrated

While the Nutrition skill applies a multiplier that extends durations in a similar manner, it applies modest bonuses evenly, to every food and drink item. Chef's Special addresses the progression of the Gastronomy skill specifically, adding meaningful advantages to higher-effort recipes over zero/low-effort recipes.

Critical Requirement: The Sustenance setting (under Gameplay Options / Player Experience) MUST be enabled in your game settings for these extended nourishment durations to function.

Note: Chef’s Special does not make any overrides or changes to ⠀- original crafted Gastronomy recipes; ⠀- the global sustenance system or timer mechanic; ⠀- produce, restaurant, and lootable foods; ⠀- leveled lists; ⠀- other craftable foods/beverages (i.e. recipes granted by magazines); ⠀- duration of other item-specific food/beverage bonuses (i.e. damage resistance, O2 fortification, carry weight capacity, etc)

Implementation and Crafting All relevant crafted food and drink recipes have been duplicated as completely new forms to avoid editing base files. The new durations for sustenance are only applied to these custom recipes. ⠀- Menu Sorting: All custom recipes will appear at the very top of the cooking workbench and ship galley lists, clearly indicated with the prefix "Chef’s Special". ⠀- Crafting Only: These new items are only available via crafting. They have not been added to any loot tables. ⠀- Research Project 1 Note: Recipes unlocked at Research Project 1 are not gated by the Gastronomy skill, so the Chef’s Special extended durations have not been applied to them.

New Exotic Drinks Four new drinks are included to give Exotic tier hydration benefits, as the only Exotic Recipes unlocked by the Gastronomy skill were foods. ⠀⠀ Plum Fizz: Unlocked by Research Project 1. Requires an input of the Chef’s Special version of Boom Pop! Dynamite (the base game version will not work) ⠀⠀ Alien Fruit Slush: Unlocked by Research Project 2. ⠀⠀ Pear Spritzer: A fruit-infused sparkling wine inspired by erdbeer bowle. Unlocked by Research Project 3. ⠀⠀ Last Call: A cocktail whose recipe may look familiar to some. Unlocked by Research Project 4.

Custom Cooking Stations & Other Buildable Items Several new cooking workbenches, storage containers, and outpost items are now available in the crafting menu in two rows, divided by aesthetic. All items use vanilla-aligned resource recipes and are available without any research or skill requirements. Note: all workshop items are available at outposts/player homes ONLY.

Known Quirks

• Microscopic Item Float: Several of the smaller countertop clutter items may appear to float very slightly above certain surfaces. Adjustments to the placement caused the items to clip or sink into surfaces, so I left them as they were.
• Inventory Icons: Items in the cooking station crafting menu intentionally do not have inventory icons. This is a deliberate choice, made to avoid a potential conflict in the CK that can disrupt icon generation. Workshop icons should render normally.
• Potential Item Clipping: Items stored in the display fridge or on the display wall shelf may clip depending on the size of the item and the rotation of the display node. This does not affect the function of the display nodes and is easy to correct by taking the item directly from the slot it is in.
• Cooking Station Camera: Entering and exiting the workbench in rapid succession can occasionally cause the camera to temporarily stick in the blurred, third-person perspective. Simply moving your character backward away from the workbench will finalize the exit.

Compatibility ⠀Nutrition Skill | The vanilla Nutrition perk adds flat multipliers specifically to the underlying Sustenance tracking states for all food & drink items (Fed and Hydrated). These multipliers apply correctly to Chef’s Special recipes, extending how long you stay nourished (e.g., Nutrition Rank 4 grants a 50% increase—meaning a Tier 1 recipe's Fed status will last 1:30 hours instead of the baseline 1:00 hour). Note that this only applies to the survival sustenance timers; unique food stat bonuses (like carry capacity or health regen) will still run for their standard durations.

⠀Workbench Organization | Both sets of foods and beverages will appear, with Chef’s Special premium recipes cleanly sorted to appear at the top of the list in increasing duration as you scroll down. Original recipes are sorted below, in the default alphabetic order.

⠀Custom Cooking Stations | New workbenches include all cooking station recipes.

⠀Outpost Build Menu | Items are in the Crafting tab in two rows, assigned a priority value for compatibility with other workshop mods, placing the sets most likely at or near the bottom of the tab.

Installation

• Precautions: Always make a hard save before installing mods.
• Conflicts: None observed.
• Suggested Load Order: This mod contains no scripts and adds new forms to handle recipes and durations. Placing it alongside other outpost mods should work fine.
• If Disabling or Deleting: To protect your save file, it is best to ONLY remove mods when you are about to initiate NG+ or start a new save. If you must remove the mod mid-save (NOT RECOMMENDED) make sure your character/Crew/NPC inventories do not contain any of the crafted items, and your outposts do not contain any buildable workshop objects from this mod. Loading a save from before you initially installed the mod is best.

Contact & Additional Info For support and feedback, please visit my author channel in the Collective Modding server on Discord https://discord.gg/JnmckM5fzZ

Special thanks to Saskia for testing and feedback, and for the information about bohle which inspired the creation of certain drinks for this project.