Cooking system in which you apply a knife to corpses to turn them into raw ingredients, then combine them over a hot surface such as a campfire or lava to turn them into food items that are superior to raw corpses, whether that’s by having increased nutrition, conferring temporary slow digestion, boosted intrinsic odds, raising attributes, or other benefits. One specific recipe mentioned is combining a cockatrice’s heart and potion of acid to produce a food that cures stoning and gives temporary stoning resistance.

The lack of cooking gear in the game (other than dented pots) means there might have to be some sort of fixed “cookpot” dungeon feature found at various places which acts like the ones in Zelda: Breath of the Wild; a specific place to combine food items together.

If the cooking system uses fixed recipes, there should be cookbooks containing various recipes so they don’t require spoilers to find out.

One major flaw pointed out with a cooking system is that it has to somehow establish itself as better than merely eating corpses, so it either has to deliver amazing benefits from eating the food or nerf corpse-eating, while still allowing it to be practical to play vegan or foodless. One possibility is to remove most roles’ ability to eat raw corpses (Barbarians and Cavemen could retain this ability as a role benefit).

Eating a monster egg (possibly after using some cooking system to prepare it) has a chance of giving you some intrinsics that the monster corpse can ordinarily confer.

New type of terrain, “fire terrain”, a square that is on fire. It displays as an orange period. (If this will be too nasty to people who play with color off, the glyph should perhaps be changed.)

• Fire terrain has a certain amount of burning wood material on it.
• Standing next to or on fire terrain grants cold resistance, but standing on top of fire terrain has the same effect as a fire trap whenever you end your turn on it.
• The fire eventually burns out and reverts to normal floor, the duration determined by the total weight of the burning objects.
• Killing a wood golem with fire or burning more than a certain weight of objects on a square creates fire terrain on that space.
• Throwing burnables onto a fire trap may make them spontaneously combust and produce fire terrain.
• Fire terrain can be used to cook corpses.
• You can create fire terrain by applying a lit candle to a space with burnables on it
• You can also create it by applying a tinderbox to a space, which is a chargeable non-magical tool. Archeologists and Rangers start with one.
• Fires provide a light source of radius 3, but cannot be moved.
• Monster AI will not travel over fire if the monster is not resistant.

Ideas around a system in which you can cook corpses:

• The general idea is to unbreak the hunger system by making regular corpses unsafe to eat, so the shortage in resources isn’t in food itself but is in safe methods of cooking it.
• Cooking sets a corpse’s rot timer to 0, lets them go longer without spoiling, or unspoils them.
• May also remove poison from some kinds of poisonous corpses.
• Cooked corpses are unsuitable for sacrifice and less likely to give intrinsics, or don’t at all (because the vitamins are destroyed).
• You can apply wands of fire to cook corpses.
• Or maybe eating raw non-vegetarian corpses is just plain dangerous, causing vomiting or sickness or other bad effects.
• Corpses can be cooked by killing monsters with fire or hitting monsters with fire attacks while they are carrying corpses.
• The problem is that nobody has yet proposed a mechanism for cooking corpses that would work well. Having firewood or some similar thing would massively affect the early game between characters that can and cannot manage to find it, and roles that start with or without it. Wands of fire have been proposed as a resource but those are valuable. Introducing a new item like firewood means that a whole lot of mechanics have to be reviewed for whether they should interact with or create that item.