Cooking

The farmhouse Felix sets up for your new life in Zephyr Town comes with most everything you need, including a kitchen located in the back of the house. The kitchen can be used to make meals by combining ingredients and utensils to create masterful dishes. These dishes can be sold at the bazaar, given as gifts, or eaten to activate special meal powers.

The kitchen includes several recipe cards: Turnip Salad, Herb Salad, Herb Soup, Egg Drop Soup, Boiled Egg, Sashimi, Bread, Cooked Rice, Onigiri, Egg Over Rice, Grilled Fish, and Walnut Juice. The remaining 256 recipes (268 total) can be obtained by eating store-bought meals, searching the bookcases in villagers' houses, completing requests from villagers (without invading their privacy), and winning festivals. Unfortunately, you can't make experimental meals by combining ingredients to see what will happen. You must be given the recipe before you can make a meal.

Some recipes require extra utensils that must be purchased from Garon's Construction. His booth appears after the bazaar reaches Rank 3 (Town Bazaar). The Frying Pan costs 10,000 G, the Cooking Pot is 30,000 G, and the Oven is 50,000 G. The utensils will be instantly added to the kitchen after purchase.

Recipe Instructions

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Interacting with the kitchen will open the recipe book. By default, all the recipes you know are displayed, though you can skip to specific categories by using the Left/Right options on your controller or keyboard. Recipes you do not know are marked with a lock icon and are sorted to the end of the list. If you need to see the full list of recipes sorted in their proper order, whether known or unknown, check the Cooking list in the farmhouse bookshelf.

The recipe categories are:

The Others category encompasses everything left over, such as tea, fruit jam, juices, and other similar drinks.

Select the recipe you want to cook to see its required ingredients and whether it requires a cooking utensil installed in the kitchen. You must have the ingredients in your bag to cook the meal. Unfortunately, the kitchen won't use materials you have in storage. The qualifying ingredient will be pictured as an icon under the Items Needed section. Sometimes a recipe can accept a variety of ingredients, such as either Egg or Silkie Egg.

There are title/achievements rewards for cooking meals, found under the Cooking category. The Zephyr's Top Chef title in the Marvels category unlocks after cooking every meal at least one time, regardless of quality, and then entering the farmhouse on a sunny, cloudy, or snowy day between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm to trigger a small cut scene with Clara, Madeliene, and Nadine. Felix will also mail to you the Elegant Cooking Balloons large decor for your bazaar booth.

The Sale Price on a recipe card is the base price; essentially, what the profit would be if sold at 0.5 Star Rank. The cooked meal's Star Rank will be higher than the base price depending on the resulting Star Rank. For example, a cooked meal with 1 Star is 5% higher than the base price, a 3-Star meal is 25% higher than base price, and a 6-Star is 200% (2x) the recipe's base price. If you do get a 7-Star recipe, then you'll earn 300% (3x) more money.

There are always two items in a recipe that can be used to Adapt the resulting meal. While those qualifying ingredients aren't noted on the recipe card, use the View Materials List option on the recipe to see what ingredients can be added to increase the resulting dish's Star Rank. Typically, a meal's Star Rank is the average of the Star Rank of its ingredients, but by adapting the recipe to add extra ingredients beyond the average calculation, you can boost a recipe's resulting Star Rank.

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When crafting the meal, you can play around with various ingredients to see the resulting Star Rank before the meal is cooked. Pick the ingredients and any adaptations, and then press the Begin button. The resulting dish's Star Rank will then appear. If you want it to be different, simply cancel to return to the ingredient selection screen and pick a different combination of materials.

Collecting higher-quality ingredients for recipes is done by:

Some ingredients don't have a Star Rank, such as Oil, Seaweed, Urchin, Sugar, Salt, and Pepper. Though they have no quality, these items don't negatively influence the resulting Star Rank.

Star Rank influences the meal's profit when sold (recipes noted as Trending sell for even more that season), the amount of bonus friendship points earned when giving the meal as a gift (more stars = more love, up to 2x for a 7-Star gift), the amount of stamina recovered when eating the meal, the active period of a dish's meal power effect, and the chance of winning the autumn season Cook-off and Bake-off contests.