Fallout 4 Guide: Cooking and Chemistry

Aspiring chefs will want to pay attention to Fallout 4’s cooking and chem crafting capabilities. You can forage for items that turn into beverages and soups and restore health and increase stats. You can also create drugs and explosives at chemistry stations. 

Table of Contents

• Basics
• Advanced Cooking
• Advanced Chems

Basics

Cooking doesn’t require any perks, but some chems do.

Demolition Expert (PER 5) – +25% damage when you use explosives, and you can make explosives at all chemistry stations.

• Rank 2 (Level 10) – grenades get a throwing arc, +50% damage
• Rank 3 (Level 22) – explosives destroy a larger area, +75% more damage
• Rank 4 (Level 34) – +100% damage (including mines and grenades used in VATS)

Science (INT 6) – lets you use high-tech mods

• Rank 2 (Level 17)
• Rank 3 (Level 28)
• Rank 4 (Level 41)

Chemist (INT 7) – if you take chems, they last +50% longer

• Rank 2 (Level 16) – they last +100% more
• Rank 3 (Level 32) – they last +150% more
• Rank 4 (Level 45) – they last +200% more

Chem Resistant (END 4) – your odds of getting addicted to chems go down 50%

• Rank 2 (Level 22) – you will not become addicted to chems anymore

Advanced Cooking

This recipe will make items that you can scrap for materials:

Vegetable Starch => 5 adhesive

(need 3 corn, 3 mutfruit, 1 purified water, 3 tato)

Beverages

Dirty Wastelander – lower INT -1, increase STR +3, increase CHR +1 (temporarily)

Purified Water - +40HP

Roasts

You can turn body parts from various creatures into soups that recover HP and modify stats (usually temporarily).

Soups

You can make these using crops; they usually help recover HP and increase experience.

Advanced Chems

This recipe will make items that you can scrap for materials:

Cutting Fluid => 3 oil and 1 steel

(need 2 acid, 8 bone, 2 purified water, 3 steel)

Drugs

They temporarily boost health and other stats, warp time, and modify your character’s ability to inflict damage.

Grenades

Molotov Cocktails (fire damage), Baseball and Frag grenades (physical damage), Cyrogenic Grenades (freeze enemies in addition to causing damage), Pulse Grenades (energy damage), Plasma Grenades (energy and physical damage).

Healing

In addition to upping your health, these can take away radiation.

Mines

They’re explosives that you leave on the ground, rather than throwing, like the Bottlecap Mine.

Syringer Ammo

These can affect enemies in numerous ways, like by causing paralysis.

For more simple Fallout 4 guides and tips, check out a few of our explainers: increasing inventory space, scrapping, changing your field of view, skipping the intro video, unlocking frame rate, which settings to turn on or off, companions, basic and advanced console commands, and disabling mouse acceleration.