Cooking¶
Cooking is a profession you do, not a menu you click. You buy stations, place them in your own kitchen, gather produce, and work each dish through the stations it needs. A finished plate carries your name, your Cooking level and the quality of everything that went into it — so two players making the same recipe do not get the same item.
Start with Kate
Kate is Sylari's chef, in the farmhouse and bakery she shares with Keidi. Talk to her to get started — she'll explain the stations, sell you your first one, and tell you what's worth cooking at your level. Everything on these pages, she can walk you through in person.
The short version¶
- Buy a station from the Cooking section of the server shop, and place it wherever you like.
- Gather ingredients — crops, animal produce, and pantry staples from the shop.
- Cook. Each dish is made at one particular station.
- Eat it, or sell it. Cooked food is traded through the market, and good food sells.
And when you're ready to pour instead of plate: Brewing makes drinks with no recipes at all, and Alchemy turns the same knowledge into potions. Food, drink and potion buffs all stack — the fully-buffed run uses all three.
What a dish gives you¶
Every dish restores hunger, saturation, health and mana. How much depends on its rarity — a Common dish restores less than a basic health potion, while the top of the ladder is in a different league entirely.
On top of that, dishes grant timed stat buffs:
| Rarity | Buffs |
|---|---|
| Common | One stat, briefly |
| Uncommon | One stat, for longer |
| Rare | Sometimes two stats, or one that runs much longer |
| Epic | Same shape as Rare, but stronger and longer — plus a Saturation effect |
| Legendary | Always two stats |
| Unique | Any number of stats, and very hard to make |
The stats themselves span the whole roster — health, mana, damage, defence, crit, movement speed, regeneration and more. A few dishes carry something rarer still: effects that boost profession experience, class experience, dungeon party experience, or the quality of traits you roll, for half an hour at a time. Those are worth saving for the run you actually care about.
The cook is baked into the dish¶
This is the part that makes a good chef valuable.
Whoever eats it gets your numbers
A dish's strength is calculated from the cook's Cooking level at the moment it was made, and then stored in the item. A meal from a master chef is exactly as strong in a brand-new player's hands as it is in theirs.
Which is the whole argument for having a dedicated cook in your guild — and for buying food from one rather than making your own while you're still levelling.
The item itself tells you the truth: every dish is stamped with who prepared it and at what level, and its lore lists the real numbers that plate will give you.
Ingredient quality¶
Crops come in three grades, and cooking carries that grade all the way through to the plate.
| Ingredient | Dish becomes | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Normal produce | Ordinary | Baseline |
| Silver Star | Amazing | Stronger |
| Golden Star | Perfection | Strongest |
Quality is proportional, not all-or-nothing — cooking with some starred produce lands you part of the way. It also survives processing: dice a golden-star crop and the result is still golden, so a batter made from good produce bakes into a better cake.
Some recipes go further and demand a grade. A handful of Legendary and Unique dishes will not accept anything below Silver or Golden star, which is what makes them projects rather than recipes. See Farming for how to get starred crops reliably.
Levelling¶
Cooking is one of the ten professions, and it levels from cooking — plus a trickle from harvesting crops, so farmers gain it without trying.
Level does three things:
- Unlocks recipes. Rare needs 15, Epic 35, Legendary 65, Unique 100.
- Strengthens everything you cook, in both effect size and duration.
- Sharpens the timer at the stove and oven. Below level 10 you get a progress bar and nothing else; at 25 the last digit appears; at 60 the seconds are readable; at 100 you see the full countdown. Early cooks learn timing by feel, and veterans read the clock.
Where to go next¶
| Page | What's in it |
|---|---|
| The Four Stations | What each station does, and how to run one |
| The Recipe Book | Discovering recipes, and trading them on paper |
| Knives & Tools | What each tool does at the board |
| The Menu | Every dish in the game, by rarity |
Cooking can also be automated once you've learned a recipe — see Bots.