I've always wondered if Fallout: New Vegas's survival skill would depend on how well you cook your meat or meal. What I mean is, if your survival skill is 10, then that means the meat you cook will be crap. If it's, for example, 90, the meat you cook is done well. I don't just wanna have a low survival skill and be able to cook everything to perfection, I also want a type of consequence.

Such as in your inventory, if you cooked your meat well, it will just be called "Cooked Meat." If done bad, then it will be called "Burnt meat, ruined meat, etc."
If you are really on the edge of survival without anything to set up a fire, you would have to eat your deadly creation. It would cost you though, such as if you eat your burned meat, a message will appear saying "You have eaten burned meat and fell ill. Charisma -3" Or something on the lines of that. Or even better: "You have eaten burned meat and felt nauseous, you throw up on your t-shirt and reek of a hideous scent. Charisma -4" For me, I think it would make hardcoe more fun. Having that type of consequence out in the wastes would be nice.

Love the idea.
I'm kinda against jobs in fallout but I would so love to become a chef at Lucky 38's restaurant (if they have one) and then cook crappy meals so everyone gets food poisoning. :laugh:

http://bethblog.com/index.php/2010/09/21/fallout-new-vegas-official-strategy-guide-blog-crafty-beggars-living-off-the-land-and-on-the-lam/

Presumably there's a large range of effects, probably from failing to perfection, genuinely don't know anything but it seems likely. With the attention to detail elsewhere I'd suspect there'd be adverse effects to eating poorly prepared foods out there (maybe a nod to eating 200 year old salisbury steak in the pop up eh? ). Particularly on hardcoe mode where you may have no choice.

besides Sawyer said that the higher the skill the better the benefits from the stuff you cook...

burned food has never made anyone I know sick you would actually be more likely to get sick from undercooked food ,maybe burned food could have less of an effect.

Hmm, well I think it was confirmed that eating raw meat in hardcoe mode (not sure if it's the same in normal mode) has some sort of negative drawback, so it could be possible that eating poorly prepared food could cause some complications.

Maybe a tapeworm. Uhhh.. gross

Maybe if you eat enough you get cancer (then get a note from the Daily Telegraph saying "Told you so!!!") . I don't think you can get ill from burnt food, not at all, but it would be less nourishing, totally charred food would taste rubbish and lose a lot of it's nutritional value. Undercooked food would be far worse, especially in a survival situation.

Would give an excuse to utilize the toilet animations.

Most implementations of this type of feature are more of a Pass/Fail at the low end, and better or more effects at the high end of the skill set. I don't think it would do much for gameplay for your early attempts to hurt or kill you.

In fact, Failure is "punishment" enough as you lost the ingredients you worked so hard to obtain.

One alternative; if you cook something bad because of a low skill, it could set-off an Idle Animation in which a passing NPC says, "Ewwww What are you eating?!" or if you cook up something nice, "That smells absolutely delicous, got any to share?". Adding some idle pvssyr (like the low-int responses that NPCs can give) would add some spice.

What I meant was undercooked, not burnt. I was lost on words for a minute. And thanks mod, the clears it up a bit. Still, if I eat something horribly disgusting, I want my character doing puking animations.

Does the survival skill just have to do with finding/cooking food or is there more to it?

I'd guess that the effects of the cooked food would range from 'undercooked', where you'd get sick, maybe loose some health or it might give you a 'headache' for awhile (where your vision would go blurry like with a head injury in Fallout 3, and you might temporarily loose some health, but gain it back when you were better), to perfectly cooked meat (which would have some bonus effects on it, such as maybe giving you a lot more energy than normal (temporary boost to HP, like with Fallout 3s Buffout). Some of the effects in the middle would mostly be about how much health you get from the food (i.e. undercooked meat might give you only 10hp, while perfectly cooked meat might give you 50hp, and other versions that go in between the two.)

I know that eating raw food will make your Endurance or Strength go down, so I imagine poorly cooked food will have a similar effect.

Meh. I think it'd be fine if you simply had skill requirements depending on the recipe and the actual effects didn't scale with your skill like Alchemy did in Oblivion. Set recipes and effects would make for a much more balanced game than 'oh, you have Survival Skill 100 and your Mirelurk Pie now gives you +50 to all skills and +100 HP' or whatever. That'd just be silly.

That said, poorly cooked food would be fine as a consequence of failure instead of simply losing the items entirely. Not really sure if you can 'fail' at it at all, though - it may just be 'if you have Skill 25 or more, you can make this, but if you don't, you can't.'

It also has has to do with healing powders you can create and poisons for your melee weapons.

imo you can't fail at cooking you just don't make quality food. so at survival 10 your Mirelurk pie stats are +5 health +5 rads and at 100 they are +40 health -5 rads.