Cooking Bell Timer

Cooking Bell Timer is a simple quality-of-life cooking helper for How to Fish.

Instead of repeatedly picking up and inspecting your fish, clam, seagull, or other cookable food to check the cooking multiplier, the mod gives you an easy visual timer directly on screen.

Just put the food on the fire and watch the bar.

Visual cooking timer

As soon as the item begins cooking, a horizontal progress bar appears on screen and follows the cooking multiplier toward the perfect 1.50x point.

The overlay gives you a quick visual reference without needing to open the item's inspection view.

While cooking normally, the bar transitions through:

green → yellow → orange → red

The current cooking multiplier is displayed above the bar.

1.45x marker

The bar has one simple marker at:

1.45x

This gives you an easy visual warning that the item is getting close to the perfect cooking point.

Bell at 1.48x

When the food reaches:

1.48x

the mod plays a single bell sound.

The bell is deliberately quiet enough to work as a notification without overpowering the game's audio.

In v0.3.9, the default bell playback volume is 0.27, which is 30% of the previous 0.90 volume level.

The bell only plays once for the current item.

Perfect cooking point

The target is:

1.50x

The overlay continues updating so you can visually time when to remove the item from the heat.

Burning indicator

If you leave the food on the fire past the 1.50x peak, the overlay stays visible instead of disappearing.

Once the item begins burning:

• the normal cooking colors are replaced
• the entire bar starts brown
• the bar gradually darkens toward black
• BURNING appears above the bar in yellow text
• the displayed multiplier continues updating as the food burns

This makes it easy to tell at a glance that you have passed the ideal cooking point.

Why use Cooking Bell Timer?

Normally, judging cooking progress means repeatedly checking or inspecting the food.

Cooking Bell Timer gives you a much more convenient alternative:

• put the food on the heat
• watch the progress bar
• use the 1.45x marker as your visual warning
• listen for the quiet bell at 1.48x
• remove the food around 1.50x

You can keep your attention on the game instead of constantly inspecting the item just to see its cooking multiplier.

Burning multiplier behavior

The normal cooking side from 1.00x to 1.50x is unchanged.

After the food reaches the perfect 1.50x peak and continues cooking, the game begins reducing the multiplier. Cooking Bell Timer now mirrors that falling side at the same gradual rate as the rising side:

raw cookness 1.00 = 1.50x
raw cookness 1.10 = 1.45x
raw cookness 1.20 = 1.40x
raw cookness 1.50 = 1.25x
raw cookness 2.00 = 1.00x

This prevents the burning overlay from dropping much faster than the actual in-game multiplier.

Audio

The mod uses only one sound:

sounds/
└── ding.ogg

There is no sizzle or tick-tock audio.

Configuration

Configuration file:

BepInEx/config/ponyfisher.howtofish.cookingbelltimer.cfg

Default settings:

BellThreshold = 1.48
BellVolume = 0.27
Overlay.Enabled = true
Overlay.Width = 560
Overlay.Height = 32
Overlay.BottomOffset = 235
Overlay.HideDelay = 0.90

BellVolume = 0.27 is intentionally a new setting name. Older versions used Volume, so an old saved 0.90 value will not override the quieter v0.3.9 default.

Multiplayer

Cooking Bell Timer is a client-side visual/audio helper.

Each player receives an independent overlay and bell only for food that player placed on the heat. Other players' cooking does not trigger your timer or bell. The bell is local two-dimensional audio and cannot be heard by proximity.

It does not modify:

• cooking speed
• item value
• the game's cooking mechanics
• multiplayer/server cooking values