A Gourmet Guide from the Start

[Draft in progress] Begins February 11, 2027

Western fantasy farming + survival and settlement building + food and cute pets + managing a territory

Blurb:

After transmigrating to another world by accident, he nearly dies at birth.

With a frail body and no aptitude for magic, Luca is thrown out by his family as soon as he comes of age and sent to a territory tainted by necromantic magic, where even black bread is nowhere to be found.

On the verge of death from hunger and dizziness, Luca finally activates his golden finger: a cookbook compendium.

[Collect ingredients to unlock recipes. Add ingredients to create food.]

The default beginner recipe is vegetables + vegetables + oil = one random vegetable dish...

Wait, can shoe polish really be gathered and used as cooking oil?

You can even put poisonous mushrooms into a recipe. That can't be right...

Should he starve to death, or eat the food made from dark ingredients? That's the question.

Fortunately, the delicious aroma attracts a resident.

This round little resident isn't human, and Luca can't understand what it says, but the food made by the compendium can motivate it to work tirelessly.

After surviving the initial crisis, Luca leads his residents in collecting ingredients from scratch, reclaiming land, growing crops, mining ore, hunting magical beasts, selling food, and building a city-state.

He turns a barren land where nothing grows into a food capital, a utopia everyone longs to visit.

Theme: No matter how desperate your circumstances are, never give up on yourself.