Even the Crimson Desert marketing lead with 400 hours in the open-world game is stunned to learn this neat cooking tip: "I'm so excited to learn things from the community"

Crimson Desert drops players into a sprawling open-world sandbox with a seemingly endless variety of things to do, and even the game's marketing lead, who has professed to spending 400 hours in the game, is still learning about new hidden features.

One such feature, as pointed out by TheGameVerse on twitter, is the ability to use sunlight to cook food. No, you don't just throw some chicken breast on a sun-facing rock and let nature do its thing like you're in Phoenix, Arizona; there's an actual method to the process that's pretty neat.

It involves the Blinding Flash ability, which you get from a main quest early on in the game and which is necessary to progress through the story. The ability is great for combat, allowing you to blind your foes for easy striking, but as it turns out, it also comes in clutch when you need food, but there's no cooking station around. All you have to do is drop your raw ingredients on the ground and use Blinding Flash, direct its solar-powered ray to the food, and cook it instantly.

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This is definitely the sort of thing you could spend hundreds of hours playing the game and still not knowing about, and apparently, that's exactly what happened to Peal Abyss PR and marketing director Will Power, who reacted to a video of the trick on Twitter, writing:

"The funny thing is.... I have like 400h in the game and I didn't even know this. This is why I said I'm so excited to learn things from the community! Y'all are awesome."

Personally, it's these sort of subtle but meaningful secrets that make an open-world game substantially more interesting to me, calling to mind the near-infinite discoveries made in Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom over the years. Don't give me checklists to cross off, give me a glistening beach with razor clams beneath the sand that you can entice out into the open with salt. That's the cheese, man.

Crimson Desert "does rivers better" than Red Dead Redemption 2, says former Rockstar artist in praise of the open-world game's attention to detail: "I couldn't be more pleased to see this."