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Nightingale: Cooking and sleeping to manage hunger and stamina

Nightingale Guide

• A Nightingale beginner's guide for getting started in the Fae Realms
• Cooking and sleeping to manage hunger and stamina
• Multiplayer options for playing in private and public parties
• How to move or remove Estate Cairns and other structures
• Realm Cards explained - How to find and use them
• How to upgrade your carrying capacity
• Gear Score - What is it and how do you increase yours?

Health and Stamina meters are commonplace in most games, but when it comes to survival, there are usually a few more, like Hunger and Rest. In Nightingale, Cooking is the way to keep most of those bars topped up while getting a good night’s sleep is vital for staying rested.

Cooking in Nightingale

First of all, remember to cook everything to ensure you’re getting the best bang for your buck. Sure, you can scoff down raw meat, berries and plants, but you won’t get the same benefits you get from performing some culinary magic. A little preparation goes a long way.

During the tutorial, you will learn how to make a Campfire. It only requires six Rocks, which is nothing compared to how useful it will prove on your adventures. Once lit, using some form of kindling – the type you use determines how long the fire burns – you are ready to get cooking.

Gathering meat, berries, and plants

Well, almost. First, you will need your ingredients. For plants and berries, that’s a simple case of wandering around the world and harvesting any form of vegetation you see. It’s worth crafting a Scythe for plants since it grants you more resources.

Similarly, for animals, get yourself a Hunting Knife to snag a few more chunks of meat to roast. Early on, I would recommend only trying to kill animals you can easily catch. Deers are flighty creatures and run much faster than you can. So, instead, target anything happy to fight you to make everything far easier.

Ready, steady, cook

Ingredients in hand, head back to your Campfire and get ready to cook. Now, where do we start? Well, that entirely depends on what you’re looking for. You see, different dishes provide various buffs based on the ingredients. Once consumed, the effects last for differing amounts of time, although this can be adjusted using minor Realm Cards and other tricks.

Regardless of what you eat, it will provide benefits to your stamina recovery, maximum health and health regeneration. However, generally speaking, a meat dish will increase your maximum health the most, while plants help your stamina recover more quickly. Once consumed, a timer will appear in the bottom left of the screen to let you know how long you can enjoy those buffs.

You can have three different food buffs active at one time. The keyword there is different. Make sure you’re cooking a variety of meals so you can have three bonuses active at all times. What you choose depends on what you’re after. If you want higher maximum health, have three meat-based dishes. If better stamina is what you need, opt for a plant-based diet. Of course, you can always mix and match depending on the situation.

Healing Salves, not your usual Nightingale cooking

Another item you can make in Nightingale – although it’s arguably not through cooking despite using the Campfire – is a Healing Salve. These can be crafted using Bones and Plant Fibre. Both materials come from plants and animals, so you shouldn’t find yourself short of them if you’re regularly hunting and foraging.

A Healing Salve is a great way to keep your health topped up, but it doesn’t affect the Hunger meter. Still, they’re worth keeping around for the health restoration and the ability to heal any injuries. If you misjudge the height of a fall and break something, a Healing Salve is your best friend. So, make sure to keep a few in your inventory at all times. 

Stave off hunger and rest often

While those aforementioned bonuses are wonderful, you need to eat regularly to keep your Hunger bar – indicated by the green meter – full. If you don’t, then your health starts to plummet. So don’t forget to eat!

The other bar you need to check is the Rest meter, which is blue and affects how quickly you recover stamina. If you try and force your character to stay awake 24/7, they won’t be able to recover their energy, slowing their movement to a crawl.

Therefore, sleep whenever that blue bar starts to dip. Doing so is easy enough. You have to approach a Bed Roll – which you can craft with six Sticks and six Plant Fibres – and press ‘E’. There are two types of rest you can do. The first is Short, which immediately regains a portion of your Rest bar. The second is Long, which is only an option at night and advances time to the morning. 

Where you build your Bed Roll is crucial for getting better sleep. If you lay it down in the open with no shelter, you won’t have the most rejuvenating kip. However, if you place it under cover or with a Campfire burning nearby, you will benefit more from resting there. It doesn’t feel entirely necessary, to be honest, but it’s worth bearing in mind.

And that’s everything you need to know about cooking in Nightingale. Remember to do it often so you don’t have to worry about that pesky hunger meter.