Making your own food is vital in Valheim to increase the chances of your survival. You can harvest mushrooms and berries or cook raw meat to give yourself small boosts, but the more advanced cooking recipes require that you blend several raw ingredients. When you bring them to a cauldron, you’ll be able to make the best food to increase your health and stamina gauges vastly.
The cauldron becomes available to you when you’ve picked up tin ore and turned it into an ingot using the smelter. If you want to make a smelter you need to make sure you’ve picked up a Surtling Core from any of the Black Forest dungeons protected by skeletons. Unfortunately, these locations do no respawn, so after you clear one you have to find another for more Surtling Cores. Once you have the finished tin product in your inventory, you’ll learn the cauldron recipe. You only need 10 tin to create it, so you’ll have to head down to the nearby rivers to find enough tin.
Upon creating the cauldron, you want to set it up over a campfire place or a hearth. Both are viable options. With a fire underneath it, you can interact with the cauldron and you’ll be able to create various stews and mead bases. You then take the mead base to a fermenter, and after several days, you’ll be able to drink mead.
The cauldron is an advanced cooking instrument that you want to add to your camp, and you do not need to wait for anything to cook like the cooking stand.
