Hunting and cooking

What it is and whether it's on

• Hunting in GTS is built from several mods that all run from the start: Simple Hunting Overhaul (carry carcasses whole, skinning takes time, hunting permits), Gourmet (its cooking recipes and food effects), Survival Mode (hunger and warmth from food), and Skills of the Wild, whose Hunting and Culinary Arts skills sit in a Survival skills menu.
• Simple Hunting Overhaul has no menu of its own. Its rules are fixed values in its files, and one of them is changed by a GTS patch (see the settings at the end).
• Taking things from a dead animal plays a kneeling animation with a knife, and the camera moves to third person for it (Immersive Hunting Animations). You don't need to own a knife by default; its menu can make a dagger required. GTS's patch switches off its cooking animation at campfires. Setting

Carrying a kill home whole

• To pick up a whole carcass, hold Left Shift (the Dynamic Activation Key) and activate a dead animal: the prompt changes to Pick Up Carcass. The body vanishes and a carcass item goes into your bag. Setting
• You can carry wolves and ice wolves, deer, elk and vale deer, foxes and snow foxes, goats, skeevers, hares, dogs, mudcrabs, chickens and slaughterfish. Bears, sabre cats, trolls, mammoths, horses, cows and horkers can't be carried and must be butchered where they fall.
• The carcass must still be whole. Once you've taken its meat or another tracked part, it's too damaged to pick up. Wolves, deer, elk, foxes, goats, skeevers and hares also need their pelt still on them; dogs, mudcrabs, chickens and slaughterfish don't. You can't pick one up from horseback.
• Carcasses are heavy: a deer weighs 100, a male elk 150 and a female elk 125, a vale deer 80, an ice wolf 60, a wolf, goat or dog 30, a giant mudcrab 25, a mid-sized mudcrab 15, a snow fox 12, a fox or small mudcrab 10, a skeever 8, a hare 7, a slaughterfish 6 and a chicken 5.
• Drop a carcass from your inventory and a dead animal of that kind appears at your feet, ready to be skinned and butchered somewhere safer.

Selling carcasses and the hunting permit

• Carry a carcass to a buyer and a new dialogue option offers it for a fixed price, shown in the option. Hunters, and Markarth's food stall, take every kind. Innkeepers and a few named cooks and food sellers (the Drunken Huntsman in Whiterun, Addvar in Solitude, Marise in Riften, Hillevi and Aval Atheron in Windhelm, Markarth's castle cook, a Skaal trader) take small game, goats, deer and elk, but turn away skeevers, dogs, wolves and foxes; Orgnar in Riverwood does take skeevers. Fletchers and blacksmiths take wolves, foxes, goats, deer and elk, but turn away skeevers, dogs, mudcrabs, chickens, hares and slaughterfish. Garyn Ienth in Raven Rock takes them all. When a buyer turns you down, you keep the carcass and get nothing.
• Prices come in five steps: 25, 50, 75, 100 and 300 gold. Hunters, innkeepers and food sellers pay 25 for a skeever or dog, 50 for a wolf, fox, hare, chicken, slaughterfish or small mudcrab, 75 for a goat or a bigger mudcrab, 100 for a deer or elk and 300 for a vale deer, each only where that buyer takes the animal. Fletchers and smiths pay 50 for a wolf, fox or goat, 75 for an ice wolf or snow fox, 100 for a deer or elk and 300 for a vale deer. Garyn pays 25 for a skeever or dog, 50 for wolves and foxes, 75 for any small game, mudcrab or goat, 100 for a deer or elk and 300 for a vale deer.
• Selling to Garyn can go wrong: if the only small game you carry is a mid-sized mudcrab, he pays 75 gold but the mudcrab stays in your bag, so the same option comes back.
• Hunting permits are on. Now and then a guard who spots you carrying a carcass in a hold where you have no permit will stop you. You can buy that hold's permit from him for 500 gold, a thane of the hold gets one free, you can bluff that you carry nothing (it only works if you really have no carcass on you), or refuse and the guard attacks.
• You can also buy a permit ahead of time from a hold's steward for 500 gold, or ask for one free if you're a thane there. Each of the nine holds has its own permit, such as Hunting Permit for Whiterun Hold.

What each animal drops

• Simple Hunting Overhaul and GTS's food patch rework what animals carry. Deer: 4 venison, a deer hide and a chance of large antlers. Male elk: 4 venison, a deer hide, a chance of large antlers; female elk: 2 venison, a deer hide, a chance of small antlers. Goat: hide, 2 goat meat, a chance of a goat horn.
• Bears (brown, cave and snow): pelt, bear claws and 3 Animal Meat. Sabre cats and snowy sabre cats: pelt, a tooth, an eye and 2 Animal Meat. Wolves: pelt and dog meat (2 for an ice wolf). Foxes: pelt and 1 Animal Meat. Hares: a hare pelt and a raw rabbit leg. Skeevers: a tail, Skeever Meat and a skeever pelt.
• Trolls: troll fat and 2 Animal Meat (frost trolls 3), but no hide. Mammoths: a tusk, a mammoth snout and 6 Animal Meat. Horkers: a tusk and 4 horker meat. Cows: a hide and 6 raw beef. Horses: a hide and 2 horse meat. Mudcrabs: chitin (2 from a giant one) and mudcrab legs. Dogs: dog meat only.
• Skinning leaves the animal looking skinned. Your own horse can't be skinned, and nor can Barbas.

How long skinning takes

• Taking a pelt or hide off a body makes time pass on the spot. In GTS the clock just jumps forward, with no fade to black, and a note tells you roughly how long it took.
• Base times by animal, in hours: hare 0.15, fox 0.5, goat 0.66, skeever or dog 0.75, wolf, husky or bristleback 1, deer or elk 1.33, horse 2, sabre cat 2.33, werewolf 2.5, bear 2.66, dragon 4. The time is scaled by the animal's size.
• You get quicker with practice. Each pelt you take counts once, up to 100; the time is cut by 1% per pelt counted, never below a fifth of the base, and any single job takes at least about 9 minutes and at most 4 hours.
• Only pelts and hides the mod tracks make time pass. Cow hides, tusks, troll fat and meat don't, so butchering a cow, horker, mammoth or troll takes no time at all.
• Time Flies has its own skinning timer, but it's off by default, so pelts don't cost extra time on top of Simple Hunting Overhaul's. Setting

Hunters out in the wild

• Hunters you meet in the wilds butcher their own kills: after the fight they walk to the animal, kneel and take everything from it, and the body is left marked as theirs, skinned and too damaged to carry.

The Hunting skill

• Skills of the Wild's Hunting skill lives in the Survival skills menu with Camping, Beast Handling, Culinary Arts, Endurance and Wayfaring. All six share one pool of perk points, and Hunting can rise eight times.
• Hunting grows from three things: 0.2 for every animal or creature you kill, about 1.1 for every pelt you skin, and 2 for each hunting book the first time you read it. Kills and skins are only added up when you next sit down somewhere.
• The first rise needs 1 point and each one after needs 6 more than the last (7, 13, 19 and so on), and any points beyond a rise are lost. Simple Hunting Overhaul stops counting pelts at 100, so after about a hundred pelts skinning no longer feeds the skill, though each Unusual Harvest still adds to the same count.
• Hunting perks: Art of the Hunt (Hunting 1) gives Campfire's instinct power for sensing animals and resources; Handcrafting (2) lets you craft from natural materials by hand; Wind Impulse (2) adds bow damage outdoors; Cycle of Life (3) lets you bury or harvest people; Trapper (3) lets you make and set bear traps and tripwires; Bestiary of the North (3, two ranks) adds damage against animals.

Where you can cook

• Cook at any cooking pot in towns and inns, or at a Hearthfire oven. Out in the wild, a Campfire campfire is a cooking station itself once it's lit and built past its smallest size; carry a Cooking Pot and you can set it on the fire for the full cooking pot menu.
• Cooking takes time: about 15 minutes per dish, shortened at random to as little as two thirds, and cut further by your Alchemy skill (half the time at Alchemy 100). Eating takes no time, because GTS's setup sets it to zero. Setting

Recipes and what they need

• At a cooking pot, a plain cooked meat needs the raw meat and a Salt Pile: Venison and salt make a Venison Chop, Raw Beef makes Cooked Beef, and so on. Simple Hunting Overhaul's Animal Meat and salt make Cooked Meat.
• Over a campfire you don't need salt: the raw meat alone makes the same cooked dish, and Animal Meat alone makes Cooked Meat.
• Hot soups and stews are learnt from recipes. Hot Venison Stew, for example, needs Garlic, Frost Mirriam, Fire Salts and Venison at a cooking pot, with Survival Mode on and its recipe read.
• Gourmet's cookbooks make you a better cook. The Art of Cooking, Vol. 1 doubles how long food's health, magicka and stamina effects last; Vol. 2 stretches them by half again (or doubles them if read alone); Vol. 3 makes many recipes, such as the cooked meats and hot stews, give two portions instead of one.
• Pelts you can't sell whole can be worked: a skeever pelt or hare pelt makes leather at a tanning rack, and a skeever pelt can also be cooked at a cooking pot into a charred skeever hide. With Time Flies, tanning takes up to an hour (its default, which GTS's setup keeps), cut at random to as little as two thirds and further by your Smithing skill. Setting

What food does for you under Survival

• Survival hunger runs up to 468, and food knocks it down in four sizes: very small 25, small 50, medium 75 and large 150. For scale, the hunger stages begin at 40, 80, 140, 240 and 360.
• Raw meat (Venison, Raw Beef, Goat Meat, Horse Meat, Horker Meat, Mammoth Snout, Dog Meat, Raw Rabbit Leg, Mudcrab Legs, Skeever Meat, Animal Meat) fills a small amount, 50, and raises health regeneration by 10% for 1,200 seconds.
• Cooked meat (Venison Chop, Cooked Beef, Horker Loaf, Mammoth Steak, Rabbit Haunch, Cooked Skeever, Cooked Meat) fills a medium amount, 75, and raises health regeneration by 25% for 1,200 seconds.
• Stews fill a large amount, 150, with 50% health regeneration. Hot stews add warmth too: 50 extra warmth for 1,200 seconds, and they warm you by 200 cold points straight away, though never past the first cold stage.
• Eating raw meat, or anything sold as raw food, gives a 50% chance of Food Poisoning, but even a little disease resistance stops it completely. Argonians and Khajiit never get it. Food Poisoning makes magicka and stamina recover 50% slower. Setting
• Some animal parts eaten raw also take the edge off hunger: troll fat, a sabre cat's eye and a skeever tail count as very small food (25), and a charred skeever hide, human flesh and a human heart as small food (50).
• Food also changes your stress; comfort foods such as stews take it down. See the stress and fear page.

The Culinary Arts skill

• Culinary Arts can rise ten times. It only grows while you're working a cooking pot (a placed Campfire pot counts) or a Hearthfire oven, not when cooking straight over a campfire. Each dish earns its value in gold times 0.09, three times that the first time you cook it, and each cookbook gives 4 the first time you read it.
• The first rise needs 1 point and each one after needs 9 more than the last. Wearing a Chef's Hat while you cook adds a little extra.
• Cooking perks: Low Heat (Culinary Arts 1) makes stamina recover 15% faster, 30% at rank two, for 180 seconds after each dish you cook; Exotic Taste (2) does the same for magicka when you eat an ingredient; Healthy Diet (3) gives 15 or 30 extra health for 180 seconds when you eat a meal; Culinary Inspiration (4) raises cooking progress to 0.12 or 0.14 per gold and leaves you inspired; Frugal Gourmet (4) gives a 25% chance, 34% at rank two, of a free second dish.

Harvesting people, and meat from the fallen

• With the Cycle of Life perk you get the Unusual Harvest power. Used on a dead person outside combat, it takes an hour and can yield human flesh and a human heart; the more pelts you've skinned, the better your chances. Wood Elves come away At Peace (10 extra health for 1,800 seconds); anyone else suffers Unusual Behaviour, 40 off Speech for 10,800 seconds. Each harvest also counts like a skinned pelt, for skinning practice and for the Hunting skill.
• Simple Bosmer Harvesting's own rule, which gives Wood Elves meat from the people they kill, never switches on in base GTS: a GTS patch stops the quest that hands it out, and nothing else starts it. GTS carries the idea over to its Green Pact Follower trait instead, open to any race: people you kill, other than undead and ghosts, then carry a piece of meat. Nords, Imperials, Bretons and Redguards give Human Meat, elves and Orcs give Mer Meat, Khajiit give Elsweyr Meat and Argonians Saxhleel Meat.
• Those meats are raw food: each fills a small amount of hunger (50) and adds 10% health regeneration for 1,200 seconds, and Human Meat cooks with a Salt Pile into Cooked Meat at a cooking pot. The trait also unlocks a set of Wood Elf recipes at the cooking pot, and changes prices, bow damage and which plants you may pick.
• Harvest Your Blood isn't about hunting at all. It's for Septimus Signus's quest: if you're an elf or an Orc, you can draw your own blood with his extractor.

The settings

• Skinning time mode: in GTS time passes with no fade to black. Simple Hunting Overhaul's own default is a fade plus time passing; a GTS patch changes it. There's no menu for it. Setting
• Simple Hunting Overhaul's other values are fixed with no menu: permits on, skinned look on, your own horse not skinnable, skinning between 9 minutes and 4 hours, and practice cutting it to no less than a fifth. Setting
• The key you hold to pick up a carcass is Dynamic Activation Key's hotkey, Left Shift by default, and can be changed in its menu. Setting
• Time Flies starts switched off, but GTS's setup turns it on and sets eating to take no time; cooking keeps its 15-minute default and tanning its 1-hour default. Its skinning timer stays off. Setting

From base GTS 118's own files: the records as the game uses them, the mods' own settings files as Jay's collection ships them, and GTS's own menu setup. Each line was read by one reader and checked by a second. A line marked Setting is a menu or settings-file option: what it says is the default. Your own add-ons can change any of this.