Cooking Guide

This guide is created to educate people with an in-depth guide of cooking as well as some tips and tricks. It will be broken down into 3 sections (Preparing, Cooking, Alchemy) which are each separated with their own tab within cooking. If you have any questions, feedback, or parts that are not clear? Feel free to /whisper ChloeNebula in game.

Preparing

Preparing is breaking down your ingredients into their base components with some being edible for small amounts of healing in combat. There are Cooking ingredients such as Flour or Diced fruit some of which can be used in cooking AND alchemy as well as Alchemy essences that are only usable in alchemy for potions.

UI

The Preparing Screen

First to break things up further, there are 2 Notable sections on the preparing page

• The ingredient you hover over/select gets shown on the left side.
• The preparation queue shown on the right shows all the ingredients you can prepare (ingredients in your vault are not shown here).

The Ingredient you have selected or that you are previewing will show some information on what raw materials you will receive from preparing that ingredient, how much of each raw material you will get per action and 3 symbols.

These 3 Symbols on your Preparing Page are under the ingredient name on the left side of your page and are pretty straight forward:

• The Person walking: The number below this signifies the average amount of ingredients prepared per action (Influenced by blitzing and inferno).

• The Hourglass: The time it takes to prepare 1 of said ingredient (the brackets below indicate the time it will take to prepare all the ingredients you have selected, Enchantments are included in the total time calculation).
• The Experience: The experience you will gain from preparing 1 ingredient (before scholar comes into play). The brackets below indicate the total exp you will gain from all the ingredients you have selected.

(Prepping is also a really great way for cooking exp early on and remains prominent as the way to get cooking exp in late/endgame cooking as it is impacted by blitzing as well as inferno).

Ingredient Size and components

Every ingredient with a size or alchemy size can be prepped on the prepping page, each with certain rules to how much of each base component you get by prepping an ingredient. This can be calculated by their tags and respective sizes shown when hovering over an ingredient.

Take a  Potato for example, It has a tag of Vegetable and flour. Just from this you can know that Prepping it will give at least 1  Chopped Vegetables and 1  Ground Flour. Let's go a little deeper. Below its tags it also states a potato has a size of 2. This means that It will give you 2 of the Ingredients that are Cookable in the cooking tab. These Are Chopped vegetables and Ground Flour so you will receive 2 of each.

Another more complex example is  Thorny Vine where it has the tags Vegetable and Bitter, Bitter being one of the four Alchemy Essences ( Sour Essence,  Bitter Essence,  Sweet Essence,  Spicy Essence). Again, from the start you can see that it will yield Vegetable as well as Bitter essence. This case is different as Size determines how much of the Cooking ingredients you will get and Alchemy size determines the amount of essence. The Vine with a size of 1 and alchemy size of 3 means that you will get 1  Chopped Vegetables and 3  Bitter Essence upon prepping.

The time it takes to prepare an ingredient is also influenced by its size with a larger size taking longer to prepare with the formula for time in seconds to prepare being: $3\times (0.8+0.2\times size\times 0.85).$

Useful Enchantments

More than 1 action of prepping can be done per action if you have the blitzing enchant on your ladle or cooking gear if you have any. A higher effective cooking level has more of an impact on your prep speed if you are using blitzing. This means that upon completing an action both Inferno (up to five times) and Blitzing can proc. The free actions from Blitzing can also again trigger on Inferno.

Useful Enchants for Preparing Include, Blitzing, Inferno, Efficiency, Scholar, Prolonging.

Blitzing

"Gain a chance to prepare another ingredient by 0.05% per effective cooking level" as said on the scroll. This means a Golden Spoon (lv 80 Cooking legendary tool) with all 8 enchant slots of blitzing has a 0.40% to prepare another ingredient every effective cooking level, someone with 400 effective cooking levels (0.4 * 400) will have an effect of 160% from the enchant. This means that for every preparing action you are guaranteed to prepare 2 ingredients and have a 60% chance to prepare a 3rd.

Useful Gear

A high level cooking setup

This is likely the gear you will be using for all your cooking in any tab. Useful Gear for preparing Includes:

•  Dwarven Manufacturing Pendant: This is just a flat increase of 20% in production speed because of the dwarven manufacturing enchant as well as an additional 1 cooking level per augment, because of this it is really powerful as there is no downside to the enchant in preparing. This also means that the  Elven Logistics Pendant with it's enchant is one of, if not the worst, pendants for preparing.
•  Dwarven Adventurer's Backpack: Extra shards could never hurt, If you are grinding shards for your Golden Spoon and it's augs or the Cooking Set, this really speeds up the shards per hour even though no additional cooking levels are granted per aug, another lesser version of this is the  Newbie Adventurer's Backpack.
• Cooking Set ( Chef's Pants,  Chef's Coat &  Chef's Hat): Extra effective cooking levels always help. Not only does the set offer 1 effective cooking level per aug per piece, but while wearing All three pieces you get an additional 20% effective cooking levels from your equipment and with the Golden spoon it goes to 40%. (This boost affects levels offered by any of your equipment including Cooking set, Pendant, Jewellery and Cape).
• Gloves: ( Awakened World Shaper are best as they offer 7 enchant slots) These can have Prolonging, Inferno or Efficiency.
• Boots: ( World Walkers also offer 7 enchant slots) These can have Prolonging, Inferno or Efficiency.
•  Prismatic Necklace: This can have Haste or Scholar - If you want additional exp for no output. The prismatic variant is also the best necklace as it offers 1.5 Cooking levels per aug
•  Cloak of the Void: The cloak has Empowered Haste II enchant which equates to an extra haste level. It also grants 1 Additional cooking level per aug

Affixes For A Preparing setup

Be aware that affixes are final and cannot be changed so i would recommend affixing your ladle based on your food or potion needs as Cooking doubling and preservation has a minor effect in preparing.

• Ladle: Cooking Level, Cooking Doubling, Cooking preservation.
• Pendant: Production Chance to double and Production Chance to preserve - This means more raw materials per ingredient.
• Cloak: Production Bonus Shard chance - Extra shards means a higher Spoon aug.
• Necklace: Production Tool Multiplier is a must have - It grants More effective cooking levels from your spoon and therefore blitzing has more of an effect.
• Ring: Experience Multiplier - Not a necessity but extra exp is good.

Preparing Tips

Some noteworthy Ingredients to prepare for experience:.

•  Lotus Flower- Great exp/h.
•  Raw Tentacle Meat - Great exp/h.
•  Apple - Normally mass quantities available and decent, Seed sifter Talent can offer Apple seeds back for replanting.
•  Pumpkin - Normally mass quantities available and ok exp in preparing (These are especially good because of the large masses of Chopped vegetables you gain from them where you can either cook for food or scholar them for even more exp!).
•  Raw Huge Tuna - Great exp/h AND Offers great return from Oil at 40% per fish and a large amount of fillets (to be cooked for even more oil and exp).

Cooking

This section will be divided into the basics of cooking, and also talk about cooking for experience.

Cooking

The actual skill of cooking your prepped ingredients into food via a recipe selection page for meals usable in combat for much more hp than their raw ingredients. (What you will be eating for Healing in combat.) These can also have combat buffs such as Nimble, Demon Skin, Flame Resistance or Rune reserves but will always be a tier 2 buff.

Once you have a specific raw ingredients in your inventory (Vaulted Ingredients don't show up) recipes that you have the valid type of raw ingredients for will show up in your cooking page menu under the "Recipes" tab. A good way to view every Recipe for options on what you want to make is to have every ingredient. These are (Filleted Fish, Ground Flour, Churned Dairy, Diced Fruit, Chopped Vegetables, Minced Meat and Butchered Monster).

UI

There are 2 main sections to this page, The Recipe book showing all the recipes available and the Cooking pot section. This shows what recipe you have selected, the required materials and some stats for this recipe.

The Cooking pot section can be further broken down into, Output section, Alternate Output (namely for Oil), 2 Input sections for raw materials, a Slider, and a bar of stats.

• 

  Preview of the cooking page
  Output Section: This is a box showing the food you are going to end up producing, This can be hovered over with your mouse and will show the specific stats of that meal e.g. HP, Buffs and Healing Ticks of the food. It also shows the Quality of your food (the + in the top right affected by your effective cooking level and the slider).
• Alternate Output: This shows what chance you have of receiving a fish oil from each cook with a 5% of oil per fillet cooked (100% will always give an oil, 120% is 100% for 1 oil and 20% for another oil) you will only get fish oil if filleted fish is in the recipe.
• Input Section: This will show you how much of each raw material as well as heat that the meal will cost, The quantities of these cost materials are heavily influenced by the slider with higher qualities on the slider costing more of each material.
• The other Input Section: This section is found to the left of the Output section, It is where you put food buffs such as Ichor for demon skin or Spider Legs for Nimble. These buffs will only be tier 2 and will get added to your food, at a rate of double the food quality + 1. (+20 Food with Nimble will have 41 Stacks of Nimble II) This also means that the best method for getting combat stacks is cooking a higher quality meal, more info on this found in the section below. The additional size and difficulty added from the buff ingredient is also taken into account in the cooking time and % chance to cook.
• The Slider: This slider ranges from +0 to +10 for 3 ingredient foods +0 to +15 for 2 ingredient foods and +0 to +30 for 1 ingredient foods. Any amount on the slider is affected by your effective cooking level and the quality goes up at a rate of +1 every 40 effective cooking levels. This means someone with an effective cooking level of 400 will and the slider at +0 will produce a +10 meal 100% of the time, someone with 420 effective cooking levels will have a 50% chance for a +10 and 50% chance for a +11 (the higher quality) this can be negated by a super strong Talent known as the Consistent chef purchased for 2 points.

The section of stats has 4 parts to it:

• The Person Walking: This will show how many available attempts you have.
• The Hourglass: Time per action and in brackets the time to complete all actions.
• The Dice: The chance to successfully cook and in brackets the total difficulty.
• The Experience: The experience upon successful cook or failed cook with a searing ladle or golden spoon (offering full exp on burn), 1/2 exp is awarded on burn and in brackets the total exp upon completing all actions.
• More on The Dice (Shows sucessful cook chance): If a meal gets burnt you will be instead awarded with  Burnt Fish,  Ashes or  Burnt Food depending on what you were cooking rather than the meal you were cooking

Notable Recipes

Notable Recipes for combat / buffs:

• Pies ( Cottage Pie,  Fisherman's Pie,  Fruit Pie) - Good HP food, You gain Oil from cooking fisherman pie but all pies have roughly the same hp with cottage having the most.
•  Grilled Veggies /  Fried Fruit /  Seared Fish - Can cook this up to super high quality, this means it is good for a high quantity of combat buffs such as nimble, demon skin and treasure hunter, once again Oil back from cooking seared fish.
•  Milkshake - Very good HP food with one of the best tick delay and food cooldown. Try to make as high as possible.

Notable Recipes for Exp (these should be scholared and cooked on the highest slider setting):

•  Seared Fish - you still get the oil regardless if you scholar or not. (The oil normally covers the fillet and heat cost)
•  Fried Fruit or  Grilled Veggies - You can often find the raw materials for these in bulk on the marketplace or if playing Ironman they are available in abundant sources via growing pumpkins or farming apples.

Talents for Cooking

There are currently 6 Talents for Cooking:

• Seed Sifter: "Gives a 1% chance to produce a seed when preparing a vegetable" This is one of the weaker talents, Not much practical use out of it, I would pass if you don't have abundant talent points.
• Cooking Master: Grants a Cooking level (Decrease chance to burn food by 4%) Less burn chance can never hurt! I would get this Bulk Cooking - Gives a TBD% chance to instantly complete another Cooking action.
• Pyromania: Grants a level of Pyromancy, Less heat usage is always good, I would get this.
• Fresh Forager: "Gives a 1% chance to instantly prepare an ingredient", Costs 9 points (12 if you don't have Foraging Prodigy as it is a prerequisite). Not a very Strong talent.
• Consistent Chef: It Forces the highest Quality food to be made ignoring the chance By far the strongest talent for cooking food, especially when paired with Affixes, It is a MUST have.
• Farm Blitz: This is found under the farming section but helps in preparing - "gives up to 10 Blitzing 3 stacks every time a 1x1 seed is harvested" - 6 points its on the more expensive side but you can let your farm sit on 1x1 seeds to gather a ton of blitzing III stacks which will help a lot when prepping.
• More On Consistent Chef: Consistent chef makes you cook the highest quality food that you can cook on that slider level, without this talent your food inventory filled with 2 or more types of different qualities all stacking separately which can be annoying for combat loadouts as well as filling your inventory with lots of items.

Useful Gear

Basically the same gear for Preparing except do note that there is the heat cost increase as a downside to using the Dwarven Pendant but regardless it is still Bis for producing food as heat cost for cooking is not much.

Useful Enchants

Great Enchants for A Food cooking setup include:

• Master Chef: Best enchant for cooking harder difficulty foods as it offers the highest burn reduction chance by far unless your effective level is below 100
• Cooking: If your recipes are still very hard to cook (Not 100%) the cooking scrolls can be used on worldwalkers/aws or any other cooking gear piece to offer an additional 4% cook chance per tier of the enchant (potions can also be used if it is still to hard after this)
• Inferno: Extra actions means more food/h - It is a Must have for normal level food cooking
• Efficiency or Prolonging: can be used if you reach 100% without cooking enchant gear for extra food or saved stacks
• Haste: the more the better extra speed provides more meals and more experience/h
• Leftovers: Provides extra random tier 2 potions with random buffs with the amount of potions directly correlating to how many ingredients were used in the cook, can give you any food buff cookable but does fill your inventory with many items, In Alchemy the tier of buff is the same as the potion tier output that you are receiving.

Affixes for a Food Cooking Setup

• Ladle: Cooking Level, Food quality bonus and Food quality bonus chance, the last 2 and consistent chef talent are a must have for good food
• Pendant: Production Chance to double and Production Chance to preserve - This means more food produced with less ingredients in a given amount of time
• Cloak: Production Bonus Shard chance - Extra shards means a higher Spoon aug
• Necklace: Production Tool Multiplier is a must have - It grants More effective cooking levels from your spoon which means higher quality food
• Ring: Experience Multiplier - Not a necessity but extra exp is good

Alchemy

This section will be divided into the basics of Alchemy:

Alchemy - Brewing your prepped ingredients into potions (with a vial bought in general shop or crafted with sand and heat.) These potions are always made with a buff ingredient and some sort of essence received from prepping ingredients. These potions have 1 stack of their buff, will always be a non combat buff eg, Gathering, Superheating, Intuition and can range from tier 1 to tier 4 buffs.

Potions are the way to gain stacks of certain non combat buffs, you can cook straight from empty vial to tier 1,2,3 and 4 as well as recook any potion tier (1,2,3) to any higher tier. This is useful as some potions have a very high difficulty and to get 100% success chance for the downside of using more time as you must cook potions at least twice. This process of course can be skipped and you can cook straight to a legendary potion (tier 4) if your cooking is high enough level saving time.

Starting at 50 potions per cook and every 5 effective levels your number of potions cooked per action increases by 1 with no cap on the amount per action so the higher the effective level the more potions you can make per second as well as the number of potions made per ingredients.

UI

Cooking a potion from a vial into a legendary potion

The Alchemy page can be broken down into multiple sections, Everything works the same as said above in the cooking tab except you can only use non combat buff ingredients. e.g. Durian for naturalist or Sageberries for Intuition.

Your Equipment for Potion making should be the generally the same as it is for your preparing and cooking setup except for the ladle affixes,

Ladle

Cooking Level, Alchemy quality bonus and Alchemy quality bonus chance.

These are more preferable for Potionmaking but because of the current nature of affixes not being swappable should not be picked if you intend on cooking high quality food for yourself of the market. This is because the Potionmaking affixes can be substituted easily by just cooking potions for slightly longer whereas the food quality affixes cannot be and there will be a cap where you can not go any higher.

(alchemy is a great mix of high production of potions and a decent chunk of exp)

Notable Ingredients

Some Great Ingredients to prepare for fast essences include:

•  Lotus Flower - Good all round Spicy and Sour.
•  Fairy Dust /  Black Berry - Super fast Sweet essence, Fairy dust offers a mix of sweet and spicy .
•  Glow Spore Shroom /  Ghost Shrooms - Both can be gathered really quickly in fungal grotto and are quite fast for their respective essences.
•  Mandrake - Fast Bitter essence.

Useful Buffs

Buff Stacks to always have at hand for more efficient cooking include:

• Inferno: if you had to pick one this would be the one you would choose as it applies to all aspects of cooking.
• Pyromancy: Applies to Cooking and alchemy but their heat usages aren't too much but it all helps.
• Cooking: can get you to that 100% cook chance on your meals and potions.
• Efficiency: Predominantly used when cooking expensive things such as Intuition pots, where extra pots are big money but can also be used in all aspects of cooking.
• Deep Fry: an increase in speed is always helpful.

Affixes for an Alchemy Setup

• Ladle (listed in Chance to roll, Roll range then Effect - (They are all additive)). (these values only apply to the regular ladle. higher rarity ladles have a larger buff range.)
• Chef - 34.84%, 1 to 5, grants 5 effective cooking levels.
• Food Quality Chance - 17.42%, +10% to +110%,chance for additional quality.
• Alchemy Quality Chance - 17.42%, +10% to +110%.
• Food Quality - 8.71%, +1 to +2, additional quality granted.
• Alchemy Quality - 8.71%, +1 to +2.
• Heat Cost Reduction - 8.71%, +1% to +5%, Reduces heat cost.
• Miraculous Cooking - 3.48%, +1% to +5%, Chance to unburn food.
• Cooking Doubling - 0.35%, +1% to +3%, Chance to double food.
• Cooking Preservation - 0.35%, +1% to +3%, Chance to preserve Ingredients used.

Cooking Gear

There are Four Pieces to the full cooking set;  Golden Spoon,  Chef's Hat,  Chef's Coat and  Chef's Pants, 2 of which come with their own enchant. one of these enchants (Blitzing on your Chef's Coat) can be swapped for and enchant such as Cooking or Masterchef and replaced and returned back to Blitzing at anytime. Be aware that swapping the Deep Fry enchant on your Pants means that you will never be able to put it back on and so It is highly recommended to not make an irreversible action.

The Cooking set offers the set bonuses

• Master Chef at 3 pieces worn - "Increases Equipment based cooking stats by 20%. Reduces damage taken and increases damage done by 25% in dangerous gathering encounters" Similar to any other Gathering/Production set
• Legendary Chef at all 4 pieces worn - "Increases Equipment based cooking stats by 40%. Reduces damage taken and increases damage done by 50% in dangerous gathering encounters"

Where Can I Get This Cooking Gear?

The  Chef's Pants and  Chef's Coat can be crafted with 450  Cooking Shard and 1  Bleached Cloth after completing the Cooking Set Quest. The  Bleached Cloth is found in the Nature Atheneum ( Heart of the Oak dungeon grown from  Ancient Oak Seed) or the Respective Caches

The Golden Spoon can be crafted with 3000  Cooking Shard, various gems and some gold bars after completing the Cooking Set Quest and Legendary Ladle Quest. (9000 Cooking Shards to unlock the recipe for additional Golden Spoons)

The  Chef's Hat is rare found from the  Torn Goblin Settlement Map or the Respective Caches of that dungeon.

What Other Options Are There?

• The  Searing Ladle is a great alternative and also drops in the same places as the  Chef's Hat so you will likely get one when going for your hat, It offers Full exp on burn and An additional Haste level and another enchant slot above normal ladles.

Useful Terminology

Ingredient: refers to the preparable ingredient

Raw Material or Raw mat: refers to Post prepared ingredients

Prep, Prepping, Alch: Chefs refer to Preparing as Prep or Prepping and Alchemy could be called Alch.

Stacks: Any combat or non combat buff can be called Stacks and the strength of the buff referred to in tiers. e.g. 3 stacks of Pyromancy II buff can be called 3 stacks of tier 2 pyro.

This concludes the Cooking guide and I hope that you have found it helpful.

Written By ChloeNebula, a very Established Chef.