Cooking

Cooking turns what you grow, catch and buy into real dishes, food can fill your wallet as much as it can your stomach, and empower you in a way nothing else can. Every dish you finish is signed with your name, and the better your ingredients and your attention, the better the result.

The full menu, every recipe, ingredient and price, lives in the recipe browser. This page is more for how the kitchen itself works.

Your kitchen

The Kitchener at spawn sells everything a kitchen is built from. There are three pieces that do the actual cooking:

• The Cooking Station is a three block wide station, with a chopping board on the left, the stove and pot on the right. The board opens the Preparation Counter, a crafting grid where all food recipes are assembled, and the pot side boils things.
• The Kitchen Oven bakes. Mixture on top, coal below, exactly like a furnace.
• Everything else, counters, the wash station, cabinets, are all just cosmetic pieces.

Both fires take coal, charcoal or coal blocks, fed by hand with a right-click or dropped into the fuel slot. A lit oven glows and murmurs, so does a working pot.

From ingredient to dish

Most cooking is two steps. At the Preparation Counter you combine ingredients into a mixture, unbaked cake, curry ready for the pot, a tray of unbaked donuts. The mixture then cooks at its station, with the oven for baked things, the pot for boiled. The arrow fills, the dish lands in the result slot.

Some dishes skip a step. Simple staples like boiled rice cook straight away, and sushi is assembled and finished entirely at the board, no fire involved. Some recipes yield by the batch, for example a dozen donuts, eight nigiri, four slices of roll cake.

Do not walk away from a lit oven. A finished dish left sitting in the fire scorches after a minute, and a scorched dish is worth ashes. An unlit oven keeps food warm indefinitely, it’s the fire that is the risk.

Understanding Quality

A mixture remembers the grades of the ingredients folded into it. Two prime bananas make a mixture that genuinely can come out as a prime pudding, where two neglected ones never will. When the cook finishes, the dish resolves into one of three grades, ★, ★★, ★★★. With better food, you get stronger and longer effects, and a much better price should you wish to make it a career.

That chain runs all the way back to the field, the right biome and careful watering give you better produce, the graded produce gives you graded dishes. See Custom crops for the growing half.

Staples with no graded ingredients such as cheese, rice, an omelette come out plain and honest every time. Rice is rice, however lovingly you watch the water.

The chef’s signature

Every finished dish carries “Prepared by” and the name of whoever made it, stamped at the board for assembled dishes, carried through the fire for cooked ones. Signatures don’t change what a dish does, but a named chef’s prime work means something across a counter. Staples stay unsigned so they mix freely into other recipes.

What cooking pays

• Experience. Claiming cooked food drops XP orbs like a furnace does, more for higher grades, and every craft at the board pays a pinch.
• Gold. The Confectioner buys every dessert at every grade, the Barkeep buys the savoury menu - curries, sandwiches, sushi, pudding. Prices sit in the recipe browser next to each dish.
• Effects. The savoury line is built for a fight! Curry for strength, sushi for speed, a sandwich that shores you up. Desserts run sweeter and stranger, jellies that soften a fall, coffee cake that hurries you along.

Where ingredients come from

Grown things come from your fields and vanilla farming. Made things, dough, cream, custard, cheese, chocolate are all recipes themselves, listed under Components in the browser. Imported things such as coffee, rice, the spice powders are sold by the Greengrocer, until the day the server learns to grow them.