In vanilla fallout, within the first few minutes of the game the meat starts throwing itself at you. Radroaches, molerats, mongrel dogs, all these "tasty" little stimpaks with legs that practically jump into your pockets- so much so that in survival, you can't even begin to carry it all. There's no feeling of scarcity, and you mostly end up just ignoring meat drops.

At the same time, for most of those raw meat items, there's a single, boring, recipe to grill them. Some mods have tried to make cooking more of a crafting system, but they always end leaving the crafting menu (even more of) a confusing mess. In vanilla, for the scant few meats where you actually have a choice about what to cook with it, the options are hidden away, impossible to easily compare, because there are so many useless recipes to grill a hundred different meat types (that you didn't bother to pick up in the first place).

In an effort to address these two problems, Feast and Famine makes the following changes

- Generally, things that are trying to kill you don't drop meat, there are only 7 types of raw meat that commonly drop, and have crafting recipes
- Squirrel, Iguana, Chicken, Rabbit, Mirelurk (dropped by Hatchlings only), Radstag, and Brahmin.
- There are also (chicken) Egg based crafting recipes, and vegetable based crafting recipes.
- A bunch of new recipes have been added that allow you to cook those 7 types of meat (as well as some vegetable based recipes) in a variety of different ways and combinations, with a variety of bonuses. Despite fewer types of meat to cook with, there are actually MORE things available to cook in the workbench than there were before.
- Some recipes are faction or location specific, and cannot be cooked by the player until you've eaten them at least once, so keep your eyes open for new foods when you visit vendors.
- Recipes are sorted into categories by the primary ingrediant, each different protein has it's own category, so it's easy to take a piece of meat to the bench, and see what are the different options that you can cook with it.

Balance
- Prewar food is the gold standard. It heals more, it heals faster, and it's more valuable, but it comes with the risk that 1 in 10 of them will have triple the rads.
- Cooked foods heal an amount based on the ingrediants that go into the recipe, cooking the food increases the healing by lengthening the duration, not by making the effect more powerful.
- Cooking doesn't remove radiation from food, prepared foods have the exact same total rads as the ingrediants that go into them, BUT those rads are applied as a DOT instead of all at once, which means that the Lead Belly perk is even more valuable than before.
- All food has had it's various properties rebalanced to work together as a system.
- "Dirty water" is now just called "Water", it's used for crafting and cooking, and Purified water is now considered a "pre-war tier" item, it's not craftable by the player, and you don't get it from from refilling bottles at a sink, or in the workshop bench just because you have a water purifier.
- Water no longer heals the player, instead it grants a small AP buff
- Soda no longer heals the player, instead it grants an AP buff (size depends on type)
- Sodas and Alcohol now have rads
- Lunch boxes now always drop a food item, and a drink.

Under the Hood
- Technically, this works by changing the workbench keyword on the cooking bench, allowing me to basically rip out the entire vanilla cooking system and start over from scratch. So, any mods that add food items will have their stuff dissapear from the cooking bench.
- The old vanilla cooked food items that are no longer craftable with this system have been repurposed, so if you add this to an existing game, those old items in your inventory will turn into the new items. 
- The old vanilla meats still exist, but have been removed from the levelled lists. A Base Object Swapper module is included that will replace the more common ones in the world with meat you can actually use.
- This mod is safe to add to existing games, however if you have a bunch of food and purified water in your inventory already, you are obviously not going to get the full benefit in terms of making food more scarce.

Compatibility
- Animals don't drop caps or other non-animal loot (this is to maintain compatibility with loot scarcity overhauls, most of which modify animal drops)
- This is designed to work well with my UNPC Creatures and Monsters Standalone version (which brings chickens and rabbits into the commonwealth), and A Forest (which brings the plant foods into the commonwealth as rare items), without those, acquiring the DLC items will obviously be slightly more difficult.
- Other mods that add recipes will need patching for those recipes to show up, and potentially balance adjustments. Without a patch, they will just be hidden.
- This mod also adjusts the Lead Belly Perk.

Recommended Mods


Part of the LitR Survival Suite
Lunar Fallout Overhaul: or other loot overhaul that restricts loot availability
Adjustable survival damage or Lunar Adjustable Survival Damages: recommend using damage values closer to normal
Feast and Famine: Overhauls food availability, makes water and sodas not heal
Less Dungeon Loot - Makes statically placed food and chems more rare.
Stimpacked - A Survival Healing Mod: Changes food healing to only heal up to certain thresholds
Barter Vendor Restrictions: Reduced vendor caps, and restricts what vendors buy