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"plaintext": "When our weekly gaming group decided to jump into Abiotic Factor as our next long-term project, I wasn't that interested. The survival games we'd played before never really clicked for me and—having seen some Abiotic Factor gameplay previously—I expected this would run into similar personal roadblocks of failing to find a concrete goal. "
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"plaintext": "That reaction faded slightly once I saw the \"Hobbyist Chef\" perk in character creation. Similar to titles like The Outer Worlds and the Fallout series, Abiotic allows players to select a handful of boons and banes that affect how your character plays. While there are some quirky options available mixed in with more rote experience-gain boosts, seeing a cooking-focused option caught my attention. "
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"plaintext": "Food in most of the survival games we'd played always felt like a mandatory afterthought, a bunch of inventory slots dedicated to making sure that your \"I'm alive\" bar never fully empties. Why would there be a perk to gain experience in this faster? Is that something worth doing? I was certainly curious, so I made my wannabe chef prodigy and joined my friends in the depths of the GATE Cascade Research Facility."
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"plaintext": "Almost 80 hours of gameplay later and I feel compelled to gush about why I love how Abiotic handles its food. There are many other details to love about Deep Field Games' work that all deserve their own praise, but since I spent probably 50% of my playtime thinking about feeding a party of five I want to dig into what made those hours so enjoyable."
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"plaintext": "And not just inventory and storage space! If you make a pot of soup, it has to be put somewhere in the environment for folks to take a serving. This led our group to have a dedicated kitchen/dining room space in each of our bases. "
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"plaintext": "I loved these spaces (probably because I spent so much time in them). A table or wardrobe with plentiful food options, a handful of cozy decor items, and a storage place for spare cups helped make the base feel more like a home. Coming back from gathering supplies? Stick any ingredients in the fridge and grab a bite! Preparing for the next big story encounter? Let's all meet in the dining room and restock while we talk strategy! Because edible food isn't just left in a storage crate with a label, it helped breathe life into our main spaces in a new and interesting way."
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"plaintext": "This experience was probably shaped by the fact that our playgroup of five people needed a lot of food to survive. While it's possible to make soup, apportion it, and stick the resulting portions into a fridge/container for later use, the amount of actual storage slots (and soup bowl components) that would be required to do this type of meal prep would have added significant logistical overhead. Leaving all the food in one common place for people to grab with their personal dishware ended up being more efficient, in a way. "
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"plaintext": "Most meals require 2-4 ingredients to make, and those ingredients often span different categories. Enemy protein loot, miscellaneous pantry items, and vegetables are common items for most recipes, but you're unlikely to find them all in the same place. "
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"plaintext": "Specific meats require hunting at that enemy's spawn location, while a vegetable may need to be harvested from another biome and then cultivated at home for repeat usage. Meanwhile, items like salt and canned peas are just tucked away in cabinets and drawers around the facility, often requiring a wild goose-chase to get your hands on. While I can imagine this getting draining for a solo player, playing with a group meant meals were a communal effort. People collecting certain loot drops or item spawns partnered up with those on larger material hunts or quest endeavors to help spread the load out evenly. "
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"plaintext": "Then you have skills like Cooking and Fishing, which have level requirements to effectively catch and process ingredients into their edible forms. Having multiple folks with a minimal skill level is helpful, but cultivating a specialist unlocks more potential recipes and ingredients. Encouraging specialization in this way creates opportunities for unique player identities to form outside of the main combat skills (e.g. my experience playing as our group's chef). Simultaneously, it also creates an opportunity for group play, as someone who's spent their time cooking may not have the combat skills to go hunting for food solo (e.g. me asking my friends to go hunt low-level mobs with me to make a favorite soup)."
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"plaintext": "I'm not the biggest fan of the \"do a skill until your number gets higher\" model in general, but Deep Field has done a good job of adding a handful of meaningful milestone perks to make these resource processing skills feel worthwhile to invest in. I'm still looking forward to when our group returns for the next major update and I can get an extra two servings of soup per pot (two servings!!!)"
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"plaintext": "This section is a bit tricky for me to write, as the system for logging recipes changed over the course of our group's playtime. Originally, making a new soup required a shot-in-the-dark style guessing game of putting three ingredients into a pot, only informing you whether the recipe was any good after you'd locked in your choices. An incorrect recipe would result in \"Bad Soup\", which has to be portioned into containers before the pot could be used again. Eating bad soup would also cause your character to lose their lunch, draining your hunger and thirst meters as the voice actor reminds you that they \"don't feel so good.\""
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"plaintext": "In the patches since, Deep Field added a Recipe Journal that will automatically track which ingredients go with which soups, showing you any ingredients you've seen before while unknown items remain as question marks. While the loss of trial and error takes a little bit of the mysterious shimmer away from exploring new areas, it also allows the imagination to run wild about what the mystery ingredients might be. Partially completed recipes offer a similarly tantalizing teaser of what may be hiding in the next biome that kept me motivated to see what came next."
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"plaintext": "In both variants of recipe-discovery systems, there's also the constant fact that you can mess up. Rather than restricting the player to only inputting correct items into a recipe or having the menus streamline cooking by selecting the recipe you want and auto-filling ingredients, Abiotic always leaves the potential reality of \"Bad Soup\" as an outcome. While this can be frustrating, it also adds a slapstick-esque levity to group play and emphasizes the scrappy situation the Cascade scientists are dealing with. Shamefully walking around with a pot of mistakes and trying to avoid vomiting on your peers leads to very silly voice comms more often than not, and I think that's beautiful."
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"plaintext": "I know that these sorts of food systems won't make sense in every survival title. Heck, sometimes I don't know if they always make sense here (why can't we empty out pots of \"Bad Soup\" somewhere other than a soup bowl??)! But I do know that having a little kitchenette that allowed me to support our group's romps in Cascade labs has made Abiotic Factor one of my favorite games of the past few years, as well as one of the few survival titles where I'm genuinely excited to jump into new updates."
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"plaintext": "Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go cook up some chemical experiments."
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"description": "When our weekly gaming group decided to jump into Abiotic Factor as our next long-term project, I wasn't that interested. The survival games we'd played before never really clicked for me and—having seen some Abiotic Factor gameplay previously—I expected this would run into similar personal roadblocks of failing to find a concrete goal. That reaction faded slightly once I saw the Hobbyist Chef perk in character creation. Similar to titles like The Outer Worlds and the Fallout series, Abiotic all...",
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"publishedAt": "2026-03-03T01:37:24+00:00",
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"textContent": "When our weekly gaming group decided to jump into Abiotic Factor as our next long-term project, I wasn't that interested. The survival games we'd played before never really clicked for me and—having seen some Abiotic Factor gameplay previously—I expected this would run into similar personal roadblocks of failing to find a concrete goal. \nThat reaction faded slightly once I saw the \"Hobbyist Chef\" perk in character creation. Similar to titles like The Outer Worlds and the Fallout series, Abiotic allows players to select a handful of boons and banes that affect how your character plays. While there are some quirky options available mixed in with more rote experience-gain boosts, seeing a cooking-focused option caught my attention. \nFood in most of the survival games we'd played always felt like a mandatory afterthought, a bunch of inventory slots dedicated to making sure that your \"I'm alive\" bar never fully empties. Why would there be a perk to gain experience in this faster? Is that something worth doing? I was certainly curious, so I made my wannabe chef prodigy and joined my friends in the depths of the GATE Cascade Research Facility.\nAlmost 80 hours of gameplay later and I feel compelled to gush about why I love how Abiotic handles its food. There are many other details to love about Deep Field Games' work that all deserve their own praise, but since I spent probably 50% of my playtime thinking about feeding a party of five I want to dig into what made those hours so enjoyable.\nFood needs space\nAnd not just inventory and storage space! If you make a pot of soup, it has to be put somewhere in the environment for folks to take a serving. This led our group to have a dedicated kitchen/dining room space in each of our bases. \nI loved these spaces (probably because I spent so much time in them). A table or wardrobe with plentiful food options, a handful of cozy decor items, and a storage place for spare cups helped make the base feel more like a home. Coming back from gathering supplies? Stick any ingredients in the fridge and grab a bite! Preparing for the next big story encounter? Let's all meet in the dining room and restock while we talk strategy! Because edible food isn't just left in a storage crate with a label, it helped breathe life into our main spaces in a new and interesting way.\nThis experience was probably shaped by the fact that our playgroup of five people needed a lot of food to survive. While it's possible to make soup, apportion it, and stick the resulting portions into a fridge/container for later use, the amount of actual storage slots (and soup bowl components) that would be required to do this type of meal prep would have added significant logistical overhead. Leaving all the food in one common place for people to grab with their personal dishware ended up being more efficient, in a way. \nMeals require (or at least benefit from) collaboration\nMost meals require 2-4 ingredients to make, and those ingredients often span different categories. Enemy protein loot, miscellaneous pantry items, and vegetables are common items for most recipes, but you're unlikely to find them all in the same place. \nSpecific meats require hunting at that enemy's spawn location, while a vegetable may need to be harvested from another biome and then cultivated at home for repeat usage. Meanwhile, items like salt and canned peas are just tucked away in cabinets and drawers around the facility, often requiring a wild goose-chase to get your hands on. While I can imagine this getting draining for a solo player, playing with a group meant meals were a communal effort. People collecting certain loot drops or item spawns partnered up with those on larger material hunts or quest endeavors to help spread the load out evenly. \nThen you have skills like Cooking and Fishing, which have level requirements to effectively catch and process ingredients into their edible forms. Having multiple folks with a minimal skill level is helpful, but cultivating a specialist unlocks more potential recipes and ingredients. Encouraging specialization in this way creates opportunities for unique player identities to form outside of the main combat skills (e.g. my experience playing as our group's chef). Simultaneously, it also creates an opportunity for group play, as someone who's spent their time cooking may not have the combat skills to go hunting for food solo (e.g. me asking my friends to go hunt low-level mobs with me to make a favorite soup).\nI'm not the biggest fan of the \"do a skill until your number gets higher\" model in general, but Deep Field has done a good job of adding a handful of meaningful milestone perks to make these resource processing skills feel worthwhile to invest in. I'm still looking forward to when our group returns for the next major update and I can get an extra two servings of soup per pot (two servings!!!)\nBetween the specializing of specific skills and the distributed nature of resources, the preparation for cooking creates so many little moments for emergent group play!\nRecipes are specific and fallible\nThis section is a bit tricky for me to write, as the system for logging recipes changed over the course of our group's playtime. Originally, making a new soup required a shot-in-the-dark style guessing game of putting three ingredients into a pot, only informing you whether the recipe was any good after you'd locked in your choices. An incorrect recipe would result in \"Bad Soup\", which has to be portioned into containers before the pot could be used again. Eating bad soup would also cause your character to lose their lunch, draining your hunger and thirst meters as the voice actor reminds you that they \"don't feel so good.\"\nThis initial system was enjoyable in a masochistic way, but also led to many wasted ingredients and upset stomachs. Yet it also led to an air of mystery where any food-related items (and some only slightly food-related items) gave a spark of hope for a new suite of potential recipes. It made exploring the game for the first time magical.\nIn the patches since, Deep Field added a Recipe Journal that will automatically track which ingredients go with which soups, showing you any ingredients you've seen before while unknown items remain as question marks. While the loss of trial and error takes a little bit of the mysterious shimmer away from exploring new areas, it also allows the imagination to run wild about what the mystery ingredients might be. Partially completed recipes offer a similarly tantalizing teaser of what may be hiding in the next biome that kept me motivated to see what came next.\nIn both variants of recipe-discovery systems, there's also the constant fact that you can mess up. Rather than restricting the player to only inputting correct items into a recipe or having the menus streamline cooking by selecting the recipe you want and auto-filling ingredients, Abiotic always leaves the potential reality of \"Bad Soup\" as an outcome. While this can be frustrating, it also adds a slapstick-esque levity to group play and emphasizes the scrappy situation the Cascade scientists are dealing with. Shamefully walking around with a pot of mistakes and trying to avoid vomiting on your peers leads to very silly voice comms more often than not, and I think that's beautiful.\nI know that these sorts of food systems won't make sense in every survival title. Heck, sometimes I don't know if they always make sense here (why can't we empty out pots of \"Bad Soup\" somewhere other than a soup bowl??)! But I do know that having a little kitchenette that allowed me to support our group's romps in Cascade labs has made Abiotic Factor one of my favorite games of the past few years, as well as one of the few survival titles where I'm genuinely excited to jump into new updates.\nNow if you'll excuse me, I need to go cook up some chemical experiments.",
"title": "(Abiotic) Factor Meal Prep for Five",
"updatedAt": "2026-05-22T01:42:13+00:00"
}