COOKING
Recipes in CHEF are split between more categories and separated into tiers. Roasted meats, soups and beverages can be made at any cooking station, but a full oven is required for more advanced dishes. Advanced cooking recipes usually require more ingredients, and are split between light-weight efficient travel fare and heavier entrees that are more filling and grant longer, larger buffs. The stats of all* food have been tweaked with the intention of keeping ingredients thematically consistent and ensuring there are no clear best choice recipes. Also, recipes across the board use Purified Water instead of Dirty Water. (There are no recipes to contaminate your clean water, and adding one seemed silly. Don't cook with cesium, kids!)


HUNGER
Survival mode in Fallout 4 is weird.The game calculates hunger and thirst reduction values of food in the simplest way possible: cap value (eg: food that costs 10 caps removes 10 hunger.) CHEF modifies the hunger and thirst values of select foods as part of the balancing process. The system is modular, using keywords that adjust hunger values alongside the vanilla survival mode scripts.


EXPANDED FOOD
Many common ingredients in Fallout 4 are used only one recipe (most types of meat), and some are used in none (pre-War food and half of growable crops). CHEF adds more than 50 new recipes to improve your cooking options, with an eye towards lore-friendliness and balanced effects. These new foods are available
from vendors throughout the Commonwealth though leveled list injection. Most are available from the start, but some are learned from pre-War magazines scattered throughout the Commonwealth.

*Sorry, no recipes or rebalance work yet for cat meat or synthetic gorilla meat.

DETAILS:

NEW INGREDIENTS: Added Coffee Beans and Sugar as luxury commodities you'll usually have to trade for or find as rare loot (though sugar can be extracted from other goods with an advanced cooking station). Brahmin milk has a variety of uses, and can be obtained from vendors or by milking the brahmin of your settlements. Your settlers will deposit the milk in storage daily if you have better things to do.


BEVERAGE: Magnified the effects of all the types of alcohol more potent than beer. Added recipes for brewing different tiers of coffee. Added a number of recipes for cocktails and fruit juice. Moved purifying water down to the utility category.
New Recipes:

• Awful Coffee
• Weak Coffee
• Black Coffee
• Boston Coffee
• Irish Coffee
• Black and Tan
• Ward Eight
• Boston Flip
• Rum and Nuka
• Sea Breeze
• Mutfruit Juice
• Melon Juice
• Tarberry Juice
  

ROAST: A lot of minor tweaks to basic meat dishes, often to differentiate ones that were too similar in effect. Moved any recipe with more than 1 or 2 ingredients to other
categories. Roast is now the category for the most basic meat preparation and a handful of new recipes from farmable ingredients.
New Recipes:

• Flatbread
• Sourdough Campfire Bread
• Roasted Carrots
• Baked Tatoes
• Crispy Gourd Wedges
• Hard-Boiled Radscorpion Egg
• Fried Deathclaw Egg
  

SOUP: Soups are hydrating, while stews are filling. Dirty Water replaced in recipes with Purified. Recipe for Noodle Cup altered and yield doubled. Five new recipes add
various kinds of noodle cups to stretch meat stores (Also ramen's awesome!). Basic soups using farmable ingredients added.
New Recipes:

• Brahmin Noodles
• Deathclaw Noodles
• Iguana Noodles
• Mirelurk Noodles
• Ant Noodles
• Creamy Mac and Cheese
• Gourd Soup
• Melon Gazpacho
• Molerat Stew
• Mulligan Stew
• New England Lurk Chowder
• Softshell Bisque
• Yankee Pot Roast
• Boston Baked Beans
• Rabbit Stew
• Harborman's Chowder
  

UTILITY: Cutting Fluid's been moved to the chemistry station.
New Recipes:

• Bowl of Sugar Bombs
• Caravan Lunch
• Cooking Oil
• Food Compost
  

LIGHT: Buzz Bites, Deathclaw Wellingham, and Seasoned Rabbit Skewers moved here. Mirelurk Jerky (don't cook with anti-freeze, kids!) redesigned as Lurk-Wing BBQ
Skewers. Light foods are generally snacks and finger food with good weight to nutrition ratios and fairly complex ingredient lists. They also require advanced cooking stations to make and are meant as travel food.
New Recipes:

• Bloatfly Sliders
• Brahmin Burger
• Commonwealth Salad
• Lurk Roll
• Softshell Roll
• Sovereign Roll
• Glazed Tarberries
• Mushroom Clouds
• Sweet Roll
• Ratburger
• Nuka Dog
• Bradburton's Best Nuka Dog
• Summer Sausage
  

HEAVY: Mirelurk Cakes, Radscorpion Omelette, Roast Yao Guai, and Tasty Deathclaw Omelette. The Deathclaw Omelette has been redesigned into the Wasteland Omelette from earlier in the series. Heavy meals provide long duration buffs and have larger effects than other recipes, with the drawbacks of weight and complex ingredient lists. They require advanced cooking stations to make, and are meant to be consumed before setting out on a journey.
New Recipes:

• Braised Haunch of Mutant Hound
• Broiled Radscorpion Tail
• Brahmin Wellington
• Deathclaw Roulade
• Encrusted Blood Cutlet
• Stingwing Pie
• Boston Cream Pie
• Mississippi Quantum Pie
• Shepard Pie
• Cricket Pie
  

ARTISAN: Artisan recipes, for the most part, make unfinished goods that can then be placed in the workshop crafting menu as objects where they age or brew, then are harvested the next day and processed again into finished foodstuffs. This requires an advanced cooking station.
New Recipes:

• Homemade Wine
• Microbrew Beer
• Brahmin Cheese
• Sugar from Sugar Bombs
  

WORKSHOP: Cooking stations are now split between basic cooking stations (campfire cookpots, spits, etc) which can cook Beverages, Roasts, Soups, and Utility  recipes, and advanced cooking stations (stove tops and ovens) which can also cook Light, Heavy, and Artisan recipes. A functional hotplate has been added. It and all cooking stations have been fitted with snap points for pots. These snap points are required for new modular cookpots and coffeepots, as well as a water distiller that can convert any type of water in the Commonwealth into Purified Water. Irradiated produce can be washed and trimmed with a new Trim Produce Station and Produce Brush. This convert all Wild produce in your inventory into their normal versions.
New Constructions:

• Hotplate
• Cook Pot
• Coffee Pot
• Water Distiller
• Trim Produce Station
• Produce Brush
  

COMPATABILITY:

• Compatible with Survival Options and the Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch
• Patches are available for Valdicil's Item Sorting, Modular Kitchen, More Cooking Stations, CREAtive Clutter, CWSS Redux, and Better Cooking Stations
• Proven incompatible with Give Me That Bottle
  

Types of incompatible mods:

• Anything that modifies hunger / thirst values may result in weirdness. CHEF adds or subtracts hunger and thirst based on assumed vanilla values. Mods like Survival Options that only change the size of hunger and thirst pools are fine. Obviously, only a concern if you use survival mode.
  
• Mods that alter cooking stations may remove access to advanced cooking categories (Light, Heavy, and Artisan). Modified cooking station models may lack snap points for CHEF's addons (which snap to P-Pot-Dif connect points). There are patches for Better Cooking Stations, More Cooking Stations, CREAtive Clutter, CWSS and Modular Kitchens in Files.
  
• Any mod that alters the recipes or stats of vanilla or DLC foodstuffs will overwrite CHEF's changes. Similarly mods that edit entries to attach scripts (like Give Me That Bottle, for instance) will either replace CHEF's changes or function improperly.
  

LOAD ORDER:

CHEF should be loaded after any mod(without a patch) that affects food items or cooking stations, and compatibility patches should be loaded after both CHEF and their respective mod.