Cooking

Links

Useful Links

Recipes	Premade Recipes
Tutorial	Beginner level tutorial on cooking
BaseEffects	Ingredient stats
Timer Length	Detailed description of how duration is calculated (shortcut to the Table)
Bases	Premade Bases (old style recipes)
BaseLayers	Single Layer Bases (new style)
Ingredient Order	Bible of New Style Cooking

Tools

Cordon Bleu	Base designer/duration prediction	Kinniken
Cooking Thing (direct link)	Web-based recipe designer/duration predictor (no installing needed)	Sullivan (backend), Alya (web frontend)
Cooking Assistant	Genetic algorithm base generator	Gada
Herb Stats Tool	Herb stats database	Chichis

General Information

In order to start cooking, you need a few things:

• At least level 1 in the Cooking skill, learned at a School of Worship
• A kitchen
• Ingredients

Cooking Skill Levels

• Level 1 tuition: 100 carrots, 100 onions, 100 leeks, 50 Garlic, 50 cabbage, and 50 grilled fish.
• Level 2 tuition: 7 Bleeding Hand, 7 Colts Foot, 7 Camels Mane, 7 Eye of Osiris, 7 Peasants Foot, 7 Ra's Awakening, 7 Sand Spore Mushrooms.
• Level 3 tuition: 10 Common Sage, 10 Common Basil, 10 Common Rosemary herbs.

The higher your skill level in Cooking, the greater the stats you get from meals (Specific data on scaling needed). It is generally advised against making herb-expensive meals until you have the highest Cooking level available.

Ingredients

There are many things which can be mixed into a kitchen to make food (complete list at Food Types). Meats, fish, vegetables, herbs, mushrooms, and other miscellaneous items are the main categories of ingredients. Ingredients are added through the "Mix..." menu on a kitchen.

Eating the Food

When eating food, there are four possible results.

• "You eat a bit, but the food doesn't really do anything for you." This means that the timer length of the food is negative.
• "You eat the (name)" This means the food has a positive timer length, and whatever benefits it might give will be in effect until the timer runs out.
• "Yuck! It's spoiled!" This means the food has gone bad and you can no longer palate it.
• Masterpiece message. The food will change your stats as a normal stat changing recipe, but it will also affect your Gastronomy. Check Masterpieces for more information.

Checking the Recipe

You can check what the current recipe (set of ingredients) currently in the kitchen is by choosing "Show the recipe". If you add an ingredient in multiple small groups, it will show up separately (ex: "1 Perch, 6 Perch"), but this does not have any effect - order of mixing and whether or not it's split up doesn't matter.

If you have a Gastronomy skill of 7 or higher, you can critically evaluate the dish - this uses no servings, but tells you the stats it would give if eaten and how long it would last.

Gastronomy and Masterpieces

Certain combinations of food have a chance to be Masterpieces. Masterpieces increase your Gastronomy skill.

How Cooking Works

Servings

When preparing meals, you mix various amounts of edible resources in the kitchen, and then cook it into a meal. The serving size of the meal will be 1/7 the number of edible items you mixed into the meal (rounded down).

Freshness

Meals remain fresh for about two days base time before modifiers (currently eight days base time with pyramid modifiers). There is no evidence that the freshness of the food changes the effect the food has when eaten. Further research on freshness can be found at Freshness. Adding salt to a meal will increase the freshness by 2 days (effect only adds 2 days once, no matter how much salt is added). Building a Pyramid of Renewal (up to 7 pyramids Egyptwide) increases the base time.

Food Stats

Every ingredient has a set of between two and four attributes it changes. It will change a maximum of two positive, and a maximum of two negative. However, the more an ingredient is used globally, the less potent those changes will be. The basic ingredients like meats, fish, vegetables, etc. are used so commonly that they barely have an effect on the resulting stats of a meal. Very common herbs also tend to have a low potency. BaseEffects lists stats of ingredients - it is entirely possible these will be out of date, though the rarity of an ingredient constrains how often it's cooked and thus how strong it is. Stats of ingredients appear to be updated instantly the moment a meal is cooked.

Stats from each ingredient seem to be combined nonlinearly according to the amount of the ingredient versus the total size of the recipe. In practice, it is very hard or impossible to accurately calculate the stats of a recipe due to the strengths of ingredients changing constantly - an approximation of weak/medium/strong is about as good as we can do.

Duration

Recipe duration is very well understood, but requires a lot of data collection to get useful recipes (mostly done now by the Cooking Research Coordination guild). Duration depends on interactions between adjacent pairs of ingredients in a recipe. To illustrate how duration is calculated, we'll use an example recipe of: 2 perch fish, 3 carrots, 2 cabbage, 1 thyme and 1 bull's blood. The following steps occur:

1. Sort the recipe by quantities
   1. 3 carrots, 2 perch, 2 cabbage, 1 thyme, 1 paradise lily)
2. Sort ingredients with the same quantity using the sort order table
   1. 3 carrots, 2 cabbage, 2 perch, 1 bull's blood, 1 thyme)
3. For each adjacent pair of ingredients, look up the duration change causes in the duration tables
   1. carrots:cabbage -> +1min
   2. cabbage:perch -> -2min
   3. perch:bull's blood -> +5min note: all these numbers made up for the example (I'm lazy) - see the table for accurate numbers
   4. bull's blood:thyme -> +4min
4. combine these numbers according to the formula on this page (basically a weighted sum)

Without going into the details, the duration changes of each combination are weighted by the highest quantity in the recipe (in the example above, 3) - this means that the effects of interactions of the lower quantities are reduced in comparison to those in the top end of the recipe. This is good if you have a lot of unknown interactions (normally expensive and untested herbs) and want to drown them out with strong positive interactions at the top end (the base + additives method, see below), but if you know the interactions and design the recipe to take advantage of them, it's better to have a single layer recipe (all the same quantities with interactions determined only by the sort order).

Calculating duration by hand is slow - use the cooking tools.

Cooking for Stats

Many people won't be interested in designing their own recipes, though this is the best way to make use of the ingredients you have, so for those people just wanting proven recipes, see the recipes page. The rest of this section gives a brief description of how to design recipes. Those with an interest in cooking/food research may want to apply to the Cooking Research Coordination guild.

When designing a recipe to change stats, there are two methods. The first and older method is to use basic ingredients, common mushrooms, and common herbs in larger quantities to make the base (boosts duration), then use small quantities of many types of herbs as additives (boosts stats). This method was used mainly when many duration interactions between ingredients were unknown and needed isolating. It is also useful for very large numbers of servings. However, it is somewhat inefficient due to the way duration is calculated and non-optimal for stats.

The modern method, made possible by much more data on duration interactions, is to use single-layer recipes (or stacked layers if you need very high stats/higher numbers of servings) - a layer has a set of ingredients, all at the same quantity (e.g. 1 db of each), that all interact to add to duration and are positive (or neutral) for the stats required. This gives optimal duration (having all ingredients in the same quantity avoids a divisor in the duration calculation - see duration above) and maximises the stats (since there aren't large numbers of negative or neutral components from 'base' ingredients). Most of the modern recipes use layers. Some more information, examples and an explanation of how to stack layers can be found at BaseLayers

Base + additives method (old)

The Base

The base will be composed of meats, fish vegetables, mushrooms, misc foods, and common herbs. The purpose of the base to prop up the recipe's duration, and to provide filling to create a good number of servings. The duration is based on a somewhat complicated calculation of the interaction between all the ingrediants in a recipe. It is not something that is recommended to do by hand, but the procedure for doing so is described on Timer Length.

There is a couple tools which have been programmed to help automate the task of coming up with good bases. The first is Cordon Bleu created by Kinniken, which allows you to add ingredients in various amounts and predicts the duration of the recipe. The second is Cooking Assistant by Gada which uses a genetic algorithm to generate high duration bases automatically. Using one or both of these programs to come up with bases is recommended.

An ongoing research effort to fill in data describing the reactions between every ingredient continues so that we may make better predictions on recipe durations and make longer lasting recipes.

If you don't want to come up with your own bases, you can use predesigned bases from Bases.

Additives

Every ingredient changes stats, as listed in BaseEffects, but only rarer ingredients, specifically herbs, are potent enough to change stats in a large recipe. In order to design a recipe, you need to know which herbs to use to achieve the desired set of stat changes. You can do this by manually figuring out which herbs to use from this page of raw data, BaseEffects, or by using the Herb Stats Tool by Chichis. When adding herbs, you should use less debens of each herb than the least amount of debens of an ingredient in the base. For example, if the smallest ingrediant in the base is 4 mutton, you should use no more than 3 of each herb.

Subpages

Note that this includes numerous outdated pages and does not include other important pages.

• BaseEffects
• BaseLayers
• Bases
• Effects
• Food Types
• Foxkids Cooking Talks
• Freshness
• Herbs
• House Of Bes Cooking
• Iron Chef
• Masterpieces
• RareHerbWrappers
• Recipes
• Sedelyan's Kitchens
• Timer Length
• Tools
• Tutorial