Survival Log Food Systems: Cooking vs Trapping vs Farming

The short answer

Cook first, then trap, then farm for food. Cooking is the only system that improves what you have rather than producing more, so it pays from the first meal and needs no space to work. Trapping returns 70 Satiety a day across 11 placements once Trapping is levelled, and below that a trap returns less food per dollar than the shop shelf. General farming needs about 15 pot cells running without a break to cover Wage Slave’s 48 Satiety a day, which is more room than a house has early.

Holds when: You have food and no way to make it go further. Cooking is the only one of the three that adds Satiety to a stockpile you already own: the average recipe returns 1.28× its ingredients at Normal and 2.15× at Perfect, and it takes one appliance rather than a room.
What it costs: Only 263 of the 380 measured recipes gain at Normal. 74 return less Satiety than went in and 43 return exactly the same, and a Failed dish returns 0.61×, so cooking your reserves before you can clear Normal destroys them.
Otherwise: If Morale is what you are short of, farming pays it too: 7 crops give Morale eaten raw, and Watermelon alone gives 30, more than the 10.2 an average Perfect dish gives.

What you have on hand A stockpile and nothing built Rooms to spare, Trapping still low Trapping 5 and planter space

A stockpile and nothing built

Buy the appliance and cook what you already own. Nothing else you can build turns 48 Satiety of ingredients into more Satiety. Check the dish before you commit the ingredients, though: the losing recipes are mostly drinks, and Cappuccino turns 18 Satiety of ingredients into 5. How cooking works has the quality rules.

Rooms to spare, Trapping still low

Plant mushrooms in the darkest room. 9 crops need no light at all, 8 of them return Satiety, and they are the bait profile that favours the heaviest prey. Do not fill the trap placements yet: at Trapping 0 a Simple Mousetrap returns 0.84 Satiety per dollar against 2.50 for on the shelf.

Trapping 5 and planter space

Now fill every placement: 101 Satiety a day, and 4.52 Satiety per dollar of trap, which finally beats the shelf. Give the lit planter cells to the crops that pay Morale rather than the ones that pay the most Satiety. Watermelon is 30 Morale and 60 Satiety in one unit.

Open the recipes list Every recipe with the Satiety of its result at each quality. This opens on Hot and Sour Potato Shreds, the best conversion in the game at Normal: 3.5 Satiety of ingredients into 27.

They are not really alternatives. Trapping and farming make raw ingredients; cooking decides what those ingredients are worth. But the three do not trade off evenly, and two of the reasons usually given for cooking first do not survive the tables.

The three systems side by side

What each food system returns against Wage Slave's 48 Satiety a day.
System	What it does	Space it needs	Returns	Pays Morale
Cooking	Multiplies ingredients	One appliance	1.28× to 2.15× the Satiety put in, on average	Yes, 6.7 at Normal
Trapping	Produces raw food	11 placements	70 Satiety a day	No, all 19 prey are negative raw
Farming	Produces raw food	15 pot cells for a day	3.38 Satiety per cell a day	Yes, 7 crops, up to 30

Trapping is the only one of the three that pays no Morale at all. Every one of the 19 animals a trap can catch is negative eaten raw, averaging -4.1, and 0 of them pay anything. That is the honest version of a claim this page used to make about cooking, and it is worth stating the right way round, because Morale decides whether a run holds together.

[Main Quest] Cook a Hot Meal — An appliance is the whole cost of the cooking system. Everything after that is ingredients you were going to buy anyway.

Why cooking comes first

The same named ingredients, cooked to each result. Measured across 380 recipes.
Result	Satiety returned	Morale returned
Failed	0.61× what went in	+2.4
Normal	1.28× what went in	+6.7
Good	1.70× what went in	+8.6
Perfect	2.15× what went in	+10.2

Cooking is where Morale comes from cheaply. The same ingredients eaten raw average -2.8 Morale between them. Cooked, they return 6.7 at Normal and 10.2 at Perfect, a swing of 9.4 points per meal. Farming reaches higher on a single item, but it needs 6.2 days of growth and 4 pot cells to get there. Cooking pays that Morale on the food already in the bag.

The average is not the promise. The 1.28× above is the mean across every measured recipe, and the spread behind it is wide enough that the mean alone would mislead you.

How the Satiety multiplier is actually spread across the measured recipes, at each of the two results worth cooking for.
Result	Recipes measured	Return more than went in	Return the same	Return less	Median
Normal	380	263	43	74	1.11×
Perfect	380	372	0	8	1.74×

At Normal the median recipe returns 1.11×, not 1.28×, and 117 of 380 recipes give you nothing or lose you Satiety. The mean is pulled up by a handful of very cheap conversions: Hot and Sour Potato Shreds turns 3.5 Satiety into 27, 7.7×. At the other end Cappuccino turns 18 into 5. So cook, but read the result before you commit expensive ingredients to it.

At Perfect the picture is much cleaner: 372 of 380 gain, and only 8 still lose. That is the real argument for levelling Cooking rather than just owning a stove.

The caution is the bottom row of the tier table. A failed dish returns 0.61×, destroying about 39% of the Satiety you put in, which is why the quality rules matter before you start cooking your reserves.

Why trapping comes second

Trapping returns the most food per unit of space of the two producers. Your house has 11 trap placements; filled with the right trap for each room they return 70 Satiety a day, 1.5× the daily bill, rising to 101 at Trapping 5.

Rat Infestation - Set Traps — A trap is a consumable, not a fixture. What decides whether it is worth setting is how many captures it survives, and that is a Trapping level, not a purchase.

The catch is the durability. costs $20 and survives 4 captures at Trapping 0, so over its whole life it returns 17 Satiety, or 0.84 per dollar. The richest food per dollar on any shelf, , is worth 2.50, 3.0× as much. At Trapping 5 the same trap survives 16 captures and returns 4.52 per dollar, and the shelf loses.

So trapping is second because the skill, not the purchase, is what makes it pay, and because everything it catches costs Morale eaten raw and has to go through the kitchen anyway. Build the traps while you level, not before. Where each trap goes matters more than which trap you buy.

Why farming comes last, with two exceptions

Farming is the most space-hungry of the three. The highest-yielding crop returns 3.38 Satiety per pot cell per day, so covering Wage Slave’s 48 takes about 15 cells producing without a break, against 11 trap placements that already cover more than a day.

What one unit of each producer returns per day.
Producer	One unit	Satiety a day	Needs light
Trapping	One placement	6.39	No
Farming	One pot cell	3.38	Most crops, yes

The first exception is the dark room. 9 crops grow with no light at all, and all of them are mushrooms. 8 of those return Satiety, which makes them the only thing a windowless room can produce, and they carry the bait profile that favours the heaviest prey. A dark room of mushrooms is not competing with your traps, it is feeding them.

The second exception is Morale. 7 crops produce food that pays Morale eaten raw, which is something no trap does at all, and it arrives without a shop trip or a stove.

Crops whose produce pays Morale eaten raw, with what one unit gives and what a pot cell returns a day.
Crop	Morale a unit	Satiety a unit	Satiety per cell a day	Grow days
Watermelon	+30	60	2.43	6.2
Cucumber	+4	14	2.2	4.8
Carrot	+4	14	1.65	4.3
Tomato	+3	10	2.98	5
Strawberry	+3	2	1.69	3.6
Onion	+1	9	1.63	5.5
Garlic	+1	8	1.25	6.4

is the outlier: 30 Morale and 60 Satiety from one unit, 2.9× the 10.2 an average Perfect dish returns. It costs 4 pot cells and 6.2 days to get one, which is why it is a treat rather than a supply. The kitchen still holds the ceiling, though: the richest cooked result in the game is Summer Fruit Salad (Perfect) at 57 Morale. What the crop table changes is that farming pays Morale at all, which this page used to say it did not.

Rooftop Garden — Planter space is the scarce thing, not seeds. Give the lit cells to the crops that pay Morale and the dark ones to mushrooms.

So the honest case for farming early is not as a food supply. It is bait, Morale, and a use for rooms that can do nothing else. As a food supply it starts to matter once you have the planter space to run 15 cells at once.

Open the crops list All 34 crops ranked on the same per-cell-per-day measure used here, with light, cold and grow time on each. This opens on Watermelon, the crop that pays the most Morale.

The order, and what each step costs

What to build, in order, and what stands between you and it.
Order	Build	What it needs	What you get
1	An appliance and seasonings	Cooking levels for the quality floor	1.28× to 2.15× on the average meal, and 6.7 Morale a dish
2	Mushrooms in a dark room	Seeds and a planter	Bait, plus food from a room that has no other use
3	Traps, room by room	Trapping 5, or the shelf is cheaper	Up to 101 Satiety a day
4	Lit cells for Morale crops	4 cells and 6.2 days for one Watermelon	+30 Morale a unit
5	Planters for food	Roughly 15 cells and the light for them	3.38 Satiety per cell a day

How the figures on this page are worked out

The cooking multiplier is the Satiety of a recipe’s result divided by the summed Satiety of its named ingredients, worked out per recipe and then averaged. Only the 381 recipes that name what goes into them can be measured, because a recipe that asks for a type of ingredient does not say what actually went in, and one of those has ingredients worth no Satiety at all, leaving 380. The spread table counts those same recipes one at a time rather than averaging them. Morale per result is the Morale of the result item, averaged the same way; the raw figure is the Morale of a whole ingredient set eaten as it is.

A trap’s Satiety per day is the average Satiety of one capture, empty draws included, multiplied by the captures its interval allows in a day, with the room’s coefficients applied. Its Satiety per dollar is the captures it survives before breaking multiplied by the Satiety of a capture, divided by the shop price of the trap item. A crop’s Satiety per pot cell per day is a normal harvest’s Satiety divided by the pot cells it occupies and by its grow time in days. The shelf benchmark is the highest Satiety per dollar of any food a shop actually stocks.

Where this page stops: the trap figures assume a trap is bought rather than crafted and that every placement is kept baited, and the crop figures ignore perfect harvests, seed returns and anomalies, all of which move the real number up or down. Nothing in the data prices the appliance against the planter, so the order here is argued from what each system returns, not from a single cost.

What to do

Cook before you eat, but read the result first. The average recipe returns 1.28× at Normal and the median 1.11×, yet 74 of 380 return less than went in.
Do not cook your reserves until you can clear Normal reliably. A failed dish destroys 39% of what went in.
Plant mushrooms in the darkest room you have. They cost nothing in light and they are the bait that draws the heaviest prey.
Level Trapping to 5 before filling every placement. Below it a trap returns 0.84 Satiety per dollar and the shelf returns 2.50, so you are paying more for the same food.
Spend your first lit cells on Morale rather than Satiety. gives 30 Morale a unit, 2.9× what an average Perfect dish gives, and no trap pays Morale at all.
Leave general farming until you have planter space to spare. 15 cells is a lot of room to find for one day of food.

Quick reference

Cooking: 1.28× Satiety at Normal on average, 1.11× at the median, 2.15× at Perfect, 0.61× on a failure.
Not every recipe gains: 263 of 380 gain at Normal, 372 at Perfect.
Morale: ingredients -2.8 raw, 6.7 to 10.2 cooked.
Trapping pays no Morale: all 19 prey are negative, averaging -4.1.
Farming does pay Morale: 7 crops, up to 30 a unit from Watermelon.
Trapping: 11 placements, 70 Satiety a day, 101 at Trapping 5; 0.84 Satiety per dollar of trap at Trapping 0 against 2.50 on the shelf.
Farming: 3.38 Satiety per cell a day; about 15 cells for one day of food.
Mushrooms: 9 crops that need no light, and the bait that draws the richest prey.