Cooking

The kitchen inside your farmhouse is used for cooking meals for recharging your body, giving as gifts, or selling to Van for profit. You don't need to collect utensils to cook a dish successfully, but you need the proper ingredients in your refrigerator or in your personal bag inventory. The kitchen won't see ingredients located in your outdoor Food Storage near Takakura's house. You can combine up to 3 ingredients to create a cooked meal.

The farmhouse refrigerator appears as part of the Chapter 2 house remodel when the kitchen becomes a separate room from the main living space. An oven installs in the kitchen after your cooking skill reaches level 3 and you are in Chapter 2 or later. The oven won't appear in Chapter 1 even with a level 3 cooking skill, as there isn't enough room in the starter-sized farmhouse for an oven.

To cook a meal, interact with the kitchen. You will choose one of two options:

• Choose Ingredients: While you can freely cook using any 3 ingredients by choosing this option, you do still have to select the category of your meal. If you're successful with making a dish, the recipe will be added to your cookbook.
• Make by Recipe: This option will let you select a recipe that you already know.

Cooking a recipe for the first time will add an entry for the dish in the Recipes section of your game Encyclopedia, located in the book next to the television. You can unlock some Wonderfuls by cooking 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100 unique recipes. There are a total of 123 cooked meal entries in the Encyclopedia.

Selecting a Recipe

Looking through your recipe book will list the recipes you know. When the recipe name is on a beige background, the kitchen acknowledges that you have the ingredients to cook the dish. But, when the recipe is on a grey background, you are either missing the ingredients or you don't have the necessary cooking experience.

Every recipe card will contain the recipe name, a colorful description, and a list of icons representing the ingredients needed to make the recipe. Some icons are obvious (i.e., a Turnip icon means the recipe requires a Turnip), while some icons imply that more than one specific ingredients can be used to complete the ingredient requirements.

You can find out what ingredients are required to craft the meal by investigating the Required Ingredients listed on the recipe card. Move your active cursor from the recipe name (on the left) to the recipe card (on the right), and then press the A Button to open the Recipe Info page. You can then see what ingredients will work for making that meal. Ingredients that are highlighted means you have that on-hand for the recipe. Darkened ingredients indicate that you don't have what the dish needs. Difficult generation 3 hybrid crops will be listed as "???" in the Recipe Info until you work with Vinnie to discover the crop.

Your ingredients' various size/qualities won't influence the resulting cooked meal. Making Carpaccio using a Li'l Scad will be the same as using a Huge Scad. A recipe that uses S-rank Star Milk will turn out the same as using a B-Rank Goat Milk. The same meal will stack together in your bag inventory no matter what combination of ingredients you choose. Ideally, if you're going to cook, use your available lower-quality ingredient before your higher-quality ingredients.

Learning New Recipes

Besides using the Choose Ingredients option to discover new dishes, you can learn cooking recipes in various ways. The easiest is to learn them from the Nature Sprites. Visit their house in the forest by eating a weird-looking mushroom found outside their front door. Once inside, talk to a sprite to learn a random recipe. You can save your game before talking to the little guys, learn your recipe, and then reload your save game if you learned a recipe you didn't want. The sprites won't teach recipies the day after the Starry Night festival or the summertime Fireworks.

You can learn most recipes in the game by talking to the Nature Sprites. The 2 recipes they won't teach you are the Failed Dish and the Unknown Dish. You can learn these recipes by using the Choose Ingredients menu when cooking.

• Failed Dish is made by combining 2 random ingredients.
• Unknown Dish is made by combining 3 random ingredients.

Besides the Nature Sprites, you can learn recipes by accepting Requests from the board next to the Lei-Over Inn. If the task requires you to bring the requestor a cooked meal, you'll often learn the recipe if you didn't know it before. Villagers can also teach you meals when you're good friends with them, but you can also learn these same recipes from the Nature Sprites.

Some recipes can be learned by investigating the objects around the valley or inside the villager's houses. Sometimes you'll learn full recipes. Other times, you'll find a note hinting at the ingredients to combine to learn the full recipe.

Sometimes, you'll learn how to make a recipe but not know what the recipe is called. These recipes will appear as "???" in your cookbook. The recipe's name will appear after you successfully cook the mystery meal.

Leveling Up Your Cooking Skill

At first, you can only cook Salad and Soup recipes. You must gain experience to cook Hors d'oerves, Desserts, and Entrées. Trying to cook a recipe that you know, but don't have the skill level in, will result in a message that says, "You aren't skilled enough yet. Try again after you've gained more cooking experience!"

Increasing your cooking skill is done by cooking meals. Each recipe has a hidden experience point value. Easy recipes are worth less experience than recipes that require hybrid crops or other rarer ingredients. Increasing your skill from level 1 (Salads and Soups) to level 2 will unlock Hors d'oerves and Desserts. Going from level 2 to level 3 will unlock Entrées.

Earning 1000 cooking experience points will unlock the next cooking skill level.

For example, Herbal Soup and Milky Soup are worth 15 cooking EXP each. After you make a total of 67 of those meals, your cooking skill will increase from level 1 to level 2. (67 x 15 points = 1005 points)

(Note: I cooked 70 additional Milky Soup and unlocked level 3 while still in chapter 1, so the above trick will works to get from level 2 to level 3 )

You don't have to cook meals one at a time to level up your cooking skill. Cooking multiple of the same recipe is OK. If you cooked 10 Milky Soup, you would earn 150 cooking EXP.