Cooking Guide

Everyone can cook!

Family name: Nibbix

Last edit: 17-03-2021

This will be a simple guide to cooking. This includes a short explanation of what things you can cook, how to get to Master 1 cooking fast and what to do with your cooking materials. I can be done without spending any real life money, but it does make it a bit easier. You can also skip it and buy better clothes, but you do need some silver this. Hopefully this guide is helpful and helped you get started with cooking. Please make comments on any misinformation.

Starting to cook, the basics.

There are a couple of things you need before you can start cooking and I will list them here:

- Make a Shai (What is a Shai?)

Yes, making a Shai is probably the best for cooking or any lifeskilling you will be doing. The Shai has special skills where you can gain combat exp while doing lifeskilling, immediatly gain 2 Professional levels instantly (Gathering and Alchemy) and you also have a passive that will give you more weight limit.

- Get a house close to an Imperial Trade NPC

In every town there is an <Imperial Crafting Delivery>  NPC and these are important for later. 
Olvia: Lotz Pavarotti (Near 6-3)
Heidel: Pasvinder (Near Heidel 1-1)
Calpheon: Bech (North, North Gate 4, 1F)
Grana: Mizella (Near Grana 1)
Altinova: Liff (South, near 1-1, 1F)
Duvencrune: Drexin (Near Duvencrune 8)

- For 10 contribution points, rent a container from a storage manager!

Place this in your new house. This will allow you to easier get hold of your storage inside your house for your cooking materials.

- Get a Silver Embroidered Cooking Clothes

This is where you need to invest a little bit of money. If you are just starting out, a simple +0 (No enhancement levels) will do fine, but as you can see in the market that a +3 already reduces cooking time by 4 seconds. If you are able to get a +4 one, that will increase to 5 seconds and 25% more cooking experience. A +3 is fine for now, we are able to already reduce our cooking time by a lot.

- Get Advanced Cooking Utensils

These are the cooking utencils you need. There is a Superior one and we will be getting to that later in the guide. Buy about 10 of these and place them in your new house. As you can see these reduce your cooking time by another second.

- Optional Get Manos and/or Loggia gear for cooking mastery and more life skilling exp.

Yes, I know I put this as optional as this is a STARTING guide, but if you have enough money, buy yourself TRI Loggia accessories to boost your mastery level a bit and get a lot more lifeskilling exp. These stack and can be used for all likeskilling skills.

- Buffs!

There are quite some buffs that can reduce cooking time, but without the +4 or +5 Silver Embroidered Cook's Clothes, you will not be able to reach a cooking time of 1 second, unless you buy the Pearl Shop clothing. (REMEMBER: These Pearl Shop clothes can NOT be transfered from character to character and you should be careful on which character you get them. I had to get them twice, because I got them on my main, a Warrior and he is grinding at Aakman. I am wasting too much of time to keep running back and forth from the desert to Heidel to cook everytime I AFK. Get an alt and buy your Pearl Cookings clothes on that character)

 Sea Food Cron Meal - Reduce your cooking/alchemy time by 0.6 seconds.

You can easily buy these from the Oasis vendor (as of writing this guide) or the marketplace.

 Life Spirit Stone - Reduces your cooking/alchemy time by 1.1 seconds

These can be farmed at Polly Forest or bought at the marketplace.

Verdure Draught - Reduces your cooking/alchemy time by 1 seconds

To make these is quite tedious, you can just buy them from the marketplace.

- Materials

To go into all of the materials in this guide would be too long, so I am going to give you some basic items to cook. The same goes for a worker empire using nodes. If you have some contribution points though (or will be using the Witches Delicacies for contribution points early on, please only get the 900/30 one), you should set up a worker empire as soon as possible. Use your energy to get workers from the Worker NPC in every town (Try to get skilled and up only), get some housing in those towns and put them on nodes for cooking meterials. Here are some worker node cooking materials you can get:

- Potatoes

- Chicken Meat (Put human workers on these for Egg procs, human workers have more luck!)

- Corn
- Wheat

- Barley

These can all be found around towns around the world. 

All of the materials above are able to help us getting started. If you are unable to set up a worker empire at the moment, it's ok to buy some off the market to get you started. There is one thing that is best to cook and that's Vinegar, because you will be using it for another recipe. The second thing that is great to cook is Grilled Bird Meat, because you can use the Chicken Meat and use this to feed your workers. There is no need to cook beer or buy beer for your workers this way as well. Beer is a bit more expensive, so used Grilled Bird Meat where you can.

Strawberries!

Yes, you need these babies. The best way to get them is to g o to Calpheon, to the fruit dealer, this is probably the most central one. Get a horse and get yourself to Milano Belucci. Park your horse near the NPC and get off. Get as many Strawberries as you can! This will cost a bit of money, but it's worth it. (Sidenote: The recipe for Vinegar where strawberries are used can also be replaced by other Fruits such as Apples, Grapes, Cherries, Pear, Banana and Pineapple) Fill up your inventory and put the strawberries in your horse. Buy some more and put the strawberries from your horse in your inventory, then back into your horse. This is a small trick that allows you to store a lot of strawberries in your own inventory, while you can still go fast on your horse! Go back to whereever you bought your house and put your Container.

- Get some of the above materials, any will do. (Potato, Wheat, Barley, Sweet Potato and Corn).

- After that you get some Leavening Agent and Sugar from the Innkeeper in any town.

To repeat the steps or TL;DR

1. Made a Shai

2. Bought a house, put a rented container and Advanced Cooking Untensils in it

3. Bought the materials, clothes and buffs

Time to cook!

Now you want to start cooking. Apply all of your buffs and press R on the Advanced Cooking Untensil.

Sidenote: Here are some easy recipes to cook

- Grilled Bird Meat

- Exotic Herbal Wine

- Fried Fish

- Grain Soup

- Meat Stew

You will see something like this. The order of the materials doesn't matter, just start cooking. After that is done, you will get the knowledge of Vinegar. After that, you can start the batch production. (You don't need to cook one, you can immediatly start batch production, it's just nice to do it this I suppose) Select the materials you want to use, press F to max and start cooking, as simple as that. Sidenote: You will not be cooking as fast as 1 second, again if you don't have the Pearl Shop Cooking outfit or +4 or +5 Silver Embroidered Cooking Clothes.

Imperial Delivery

Can you remember the second point we talked about, getting a house close to a NPC for the Imperial Delivery? This is important and where you will be able to make money back from what you are cooking. Some people cook for the money, some people only cook for the Witches Delicacy's. These are confirmed to have the fastest way to get contribution points, but getting to Guru cooking is amazing, you will be able to make a steady amount of money with cooking. 

Whenever you're cooking a certain recipe, you will be able to create these meals into a box. These can be Apprentice, Skilled, Professional's, Artisans, Masters and Guru's boxes. From what I have heard only Professional and Guru cooking boxes are worth doing, but you are welcome to check out this wonderful excelsheet and calculate things yourself. I will be explaining how to make the Professional boxes. Sidenote: You do need professional cooking to make these, but you will be this within a day. 

Paprika

Remember when you went all the way to Calpheon to get the Strawberries? We are going to be doing exactly the same with Paparika. These are bit more expensive, only 200 MORE silver than the Strawberries, so you should be fine on that. Get as much as you can from these as well, we are going to be making Pickled Vegetables. You are able to create 18 of these into an Professional's Cooking Box. Sidenote: Paprika is the only vegetable you can buy from NPCs.

Go back to your cooking utensil and put in the ingredients for pickled vegetables.

These will have the same cooking time as any other recipe you put in there. Anything you will cook will be at the same speed, even higher tiered recipes. 

Imperial Cuisine

When you have made the Pickled Vegetables, you will be able to turn them into the Professionals Cooking Boxes. Put everything in your storage and just get the pickled vegetables, about a maximum of 1000. Press L and then go to Imperial Cuisine. Put in the Pickled Vegetables and press start. You will be making the boxes now. These are quite heavy and you will only be able to make a couple of them. Yes, this is normal and the only way to be able to make a bit more is to buy more weight for your character unfortunately. Sidenote: Pickled Vegetables is really great and easy to make. This should probably be best to use until Guru cooking even.

At a set time, this resets a couple of hours a day, you will be able to hand these in at the NPCs I mentioned above. Keep an eye on the imperial reset on: MMO Timer for BDO at the top right of the website. You will be able to hand in half of your contribution points. (At about 300 contribution points, you should be earning about 50m a day) Sidenote: Having a higher cooking master, increases the money you are getting from the Imperial Delivery.

Golden Seals - [Imperial Cuisine]

For every box you hand in, you will be able to get these seals. I would recommend only getting the Superior Cooking Untensil, as this has 5000 uses. You will be able to AFK a bit with cooking, even at a cooking time of 1 second. You can always remove some buffs to up your cooking time and AFK longer if you want to.

Hopefully this guide has helped you and will help many others after you. Have fun cooking and you can always contact me for more questions, Familyname: Nibbix.

EDITS:

06-03-2021

- Excelsheet was missing from the guide.

- Grammar mistakes.

21-02-2021

- Added almost all of Leppies suggestions.

- Changed some text so it's more consistant across the guide.

06-02-2021

- Fixed some grammatical errors

- Added multiple easy cooking recipes

- Some color changes

Nice guide.

Things that might be worth mentioning are:
 - Strawberries are the cheapest fruits that can be bought.
 - Paprika is the only vegetable that can be purchased from an NPC.
 - Use Loggia/Manos accessories to increase Mastery and life skilling XP gain.
 - Loggia and Manos belts will increase your chars weight capacity.
 - From Milano Belucci buy as much as your char can carry, offload onto your horse, then buy the same amount again, and take the fruits/vegetables back from your horse.
 - For most people Pickled Vegetables will be most profitable until reaching Cooking skill Guru.
 - Advanced Cooking Utensil is the highest that can be bought/crafted.
 - Higher Cooking mastery increases your profit when selling Imperial Cooking boxes (use Loggia/Manos accessories in combination with Loggia/Manos Cook's Clothes).

~Leppie

Thanks Lepp! I will improve the guide with the things you mentioned.

Ah, just noticed that you wrote 16 pickled veggies for 1 profi box, but it's 18.

~ Leppie

Sadly all these guides are as destructive as they are helpful.  BDO's economy is very fragile and streamers have exploded the economy several times by simply giving basic advice.  It's to the point where most streamers won't even give any advice on what items to make as they give the caveat that would destroy that item.  Historically, it's been correct.

Many of the suggestions to alleviate this have just been ignored.  Such as all the recommendations for Imperial turn ins.

The end result is often people cramming to turn in items.  The value of items being wrecked on the market or purchase orders for months.

Pearl Abyss really needs to take a deeper look at these issues.  

This must be one of the worst guides i have ever seen. From recommending shai for lifeskills to recommended dishes. You even failed with that verdure draught ( it's -1sec btw) not -1.1sec.

Best cooking guide 10/10 I recommend you buy valencia meal for turn in when you're guru.

It's a simple cooking guide. I was taught this way and everyone I know cooks this way until Guru. If you have a better guide or want to make changes to this one, please make them. 

Thanks for the Verdure Draught feedback, I changed the guide.

Thanks.  As a newbie.  I look for anything to gain the skill and gain some silver to invest in my gears.  I will try this and see if I how far I can get.  This is also give me a chance to play a Chai.  Want to try it out but never got a a little kick.  Maybe this is it.  Thank you again.