Cooking

The Cooking badge is a pure grind that rewards consistency over skill: you must cook 50 meals in a Crock Pot or Chef's Station across your playthroughs. With a friendly 1-star difficulty and a solid 5-diamond payout, it is one of the more generous repetitive badges, and the 50 meals accumulate over time rather than needing to be done in a single run.

Success here is really about food supply. Every meal you cook needs ingredients, so the players who finish fastest are the ones who keep a steady stream of berries, meat, and other raw food flowing into camp. Building or upgrading a Crock Pot early lets you batch-cook and feeds your team at the same time, turning a survival necessity into badge progress.

The smart play is to cook whenever you have spare ingredients instead of hoarding raw food, since cooked meals restore more hunger and each one ticks the counter. If you are playing in a group, volunteer as the designated chef so the kills and gathering of others funnel into your station. Over a few normal survival runs the 50-meal mark arrives almost passively.