Smokehouse

The Smokehouse is the next station in the Butchery overhaul, a Butcher station from level 3. Touch it and it opens the Smokehouse app, in a HUD in-world or in your browser: load the cabinet from what's in your pack, light the fire, and walk away while it smokes.

Cold smoke flavours and keeps: bacon, kippers, haddock, salmon and sturgeon. Hot smoke cooks as it goes: ham, brisket, pastrami, venison jerky, mackerel, trout and eel. One fire is one or the other. Gravlax, corned beef and coppa cure without a fire, and corned beef is where pastrami starts.

Choose your wood: oak for more health, cherry for more social, maple for more energy, and fir, which fills you most but makes you a little sick. The wood goes into the name, an oak-smoked ham or a cherry-smoked salmon. A fire burns 10 chips an hour, from an hour for kippers and trout to three for a ham, and the hover text over the pit shows the time it has left.

Carve the big pieces at the work block, a stroke a slice: 8 slices from a ham and then the hock, 8 rashers from bacon, 6 from a salmon. Or set the whole piece out from your HUD's Rezable menu, and anyone wearing their meter takes a portion, 8 from a ham, 6 from a salmon, with a label saying who smoked it and how much is left.

The grade is the meat's own, so a Choice brisket makes a Choice smoked brisket, and every piece pays Butcher CXP. Owners choose who works it, Owner, Colony or Public, and one butcher's fire runs at a time: the goods always go to the butcher who smoked them, or to the colony's storage on a colony station.