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Cooking Guide
If you are here, you must be interested in cooking. Without cooking, Egypt would be a pretty dull place, as it would be rather difficult to do many things in the game world without the stat bonuses that cooking provides. This guide is designed to serve both as an overall introduction and summary of the various cooking systems used in game, as well as a means to access other cooking resources here on the wiki.
Two Cooking Systems:
There are two different cooking systems used in the game:
- Grilled Food - This is the most basic system, allows food to be grilled in a fire pit, and stored in inventory until desired.
- Kitchen Cooked Food - This is where the bulk of the cooking system exists. It involves mixing food in a kitchen and eating it from the kitchen. Cooked food can not be carried in inventory.
There are also other sources of temporary performance boosts.
- All aqueduct towers can provide a blessing that will boost one of your performance stats by 1 point for 24 hours.
- Christmas Chocolate provide a performance boost, usually Carry and one other stat, for about 10 minutes.
- Banquets provide a 7 point stat boost in all stats for 24 hours.
- A True Leadership Beacon provide a stat boost when it is visible.
- A Phoenix (when the test is released)provides a stat boost when it is touched.
Grilled Food
Fish and vegetables can be skewered on a sharpened stick, up to 20 of each at a time, and grilled in a firepit. Grilled food provides a small temporary attribute bonus when consumed, and has the great advantage of being portable.
| Food | Stats effect | Time | Notes |
| Grilled Fish | +2 Endurance | +/- 3 min | |
| Grilled Garlic | +2 Focus | +/- 3 min | |
| Grilled Onion | +2 Endurance | +/- 3 min | |
| Grilled Cabbage | +2 Speed | +/- 3 min | |
| Grilled Carrot | +2 Perception | +/- 3 min | |
| Grilled Cucumber | +2 Strength | +/- 3 min | |
| Grilled Pepper | +1 Strength and +1 Dex | +/- 3 min | |
| Grilled Eggplant | +2 Dexterity | +/- 3 min | |
| Grilled Watermelon | +2 Constitution |
- the +/- 3 mins is 10 game minutes (type /clockloc)
- Leeks can't be grilled. They burn into ash instead.
Cooking Meals in a Kitchen
All serious cooking is done in a Kitchen that has been upgraded with a cookpot. The option is then available to mix various food ingredients in the pot and cook them. You get to name your meal when you cook it. Cooked meals are not portable -- they can only be consumed at the kitchen in which they were prepared, where they stay edible for 2 days (4 days if salt is one of the ingredients in a meal). On the other hand, their bonuses can last for half an hour or more. For each 7 deben of ingredients used, 1 serving will be produced.
It may be beneficial to give sources for duration and length, as this is not what is being observed at the moment. On making a dish today, I see a life span of 16 days, but critically evaluating the meal shows a length of just 17 minutes. - SanderDolphin
Lifespan - refers to how long your food will remain fresh in the pot.
Duration - refers to how long the stats of that food will last on you once you have eaten.
IMPORTANT NOTE : Since the cooking system used in this telling is completely different from the last telling, it is probably not surprising to know that many bugs and changes have been found since the start of the telling to today. This has made the majority of the data previously on the wiki obsolete. Here are some of the major bug fixes that have been made:
- Randomization fixed : One of the first bugs found appeared to make cooking random and avatar specific. This caused many people to think that cooking skill 1 was somehow unrelated to higher cooking skills. This was in fact a bug that has since been fixed. Cooking 1 now works the same as the rest of the cooking levels, in regard to only single base ingredient recipes being allowed.
- tied bases fixed : Another early bug allowed people to create high stat meals with only equal quantity ingredients in the meal (i.e. 4 honey + 4 cabbage), this created a situation where no clear base was in use, and thus caused weird effects to happen. This has since been fixed, and now equal quantity recipes will no longer work, which was the original intent.
- masterpiece fixed : One bug discovered in mid July 2006 prevented masterpieces from being correctly flagged when created by players. This prevented players from being able to gain Gastronomy points and reach a point where they could critically evaluate food. This bug has been fixed, and masterpieces appear to be working normally now.
- nerfed stats fixed : Another bug discovered in mid July 2006 is that many of the recipes were having their stats nerfed due to some error in the background stat calculations. This was fixed by a Copper Pot being released in addition to the original Iron Pot used in kitchens. The only difference between the Iron and Copper pot is that the Copper pot uses the correct, higher-stat modifier recipe system, and the Iron pot uses the old nerfed system.
As you can see, many bugs and fixes have been found. As a result, much of the cooking data posted to the wiki is now completely obsolete and invalid.
Ingredients List
An enormous variety of edible ingredients can be mixed in a cookpot:
- all varieties of fish
- all varieties of grilled fish
- many varieties of meat (camel meat, rabbit meat, chicken meat, and coconut meat)
- all vegetables
- all grilled vegetables
- all varieties of mushrooms
- all varieties of herbs
- all varieties of barley and malt
- mutton
- oil
- honey
- dates
- camel milk
- cabbage juice
- salt
Effect Stacking
You can only receive bonuses from one food at a time, whether it be a grilled item or a kitchen meal. Eating anything will end the effects of the last food you ate.
- is this true for eating a meal before or after eating herbs fresh from the ground?
- Yes, You can stack an herb with food (eat the food first).
Cooking Skill Level
The school of Worship offers up to 6 levels of Cooking skills :
- First degree (level 2) - 100 Cabbage, 100 Carrots, 100 Onions, 100 Leeks, 100 Garlic
- Second degree (level 4) - 20 Common Sage, 20 Thyme, 20 Common Rosemary
- Third degree (level 7) - 49 Salt
- Fourth degree (level 11) - 7 Cobra Hood Mushrooms, 7 Camels Mane Mushrooms, 7 Peasant Foot Mushrooms, 7 Iron Knot Mushrooms, 7 Slave's Bread Mushrooms, 7 Dead Tongue Mushrooms, 7 Toad Skin Mushrooms
- Fifth degree (level 16) - 7 Chukkah, 7 Crimson Lettuce, 7 Crumpled Leaf Basil, 7 Dwarf Wild Lettuce, 7 Jaivanti, 7 Royal Rosemary, 7 Wild Garlic
- Sixth degree (level 22) - 100 Cucumbers, 100 Peppers, 100 Eggplant, 100 Coconut Meat
Your cooking skill directly determines the number of base level ingredients you are allowed to have in your meal. A minimum skill of 1 is required to do any kitchen cooking at all (since it's not possible to cook a meal that has no bases). See the Understanding Ingredients section below for additional information on bases, and their impact on recipes.
Understanding Ingredients
In order to be an effective cook, you need to know a little bit about how meals work, and the role that the various ingredients added to them play.
To start with, it's important to understand Servings. A Serving is at least 7 debens of food. For every 7 deben added, an additional serving of the food will be created.
Understanding Bases and Additives
For every meal that you create, the ingredients that you add into it will be split up into 2 groups. The Bases group, and the Additives group. All of the food items that tie for the highest quantity in the recipe become your Bases group. All the rest of the items in your recipe are considered to be in your Additives group.
Your cooking skill level determines the number of Bases you are allowed to have in your meal. If you have more than the allowed number of bases for your skill level, or if you have more than 21 unique ingredients in the meal, you will get a message that the flavors have been muddled, and your attempt to create the meal will fail. Each Base ingredient in your meal may react with 1 or more additives. The additives that a base will react to are determined by where the Base ingredients and the additive lie in a plane ( a 2 dimensional space or R2).
You are only allowed to have as many Bases in your meal as your current cooking level. Thus, a player that had a cooking level of 3 would be able to make meals with up to 3 bases.
EXAMPLE: A meal is created using the following items: 5 Cabbage, 2 Honey, 2 Grilled Fish, 5 Carrots. The highest ingredient count is 5 (cabbage and carrots), thus, the meal is assumed to have 2 bases. The honey and grilled fish are assumed to be the Additives. If a player with cooking level 1 tried to make this meal, they would get a failure message
The R2 Grid and Distances
Every usable food item in the game has been assigned a position in a 2000 x 2000 grid. This location never changes. When the game tries to decide which additives a base will react with, it looks for the closest additive to that base in relation to the R2 Grid. The closer two items are to each other, the higher the duration and stat bonuses will be. As such, the smart cook will select bases and additives that are as close to each other as possible.
-- I believe it is the other way around. In order to determine which BASE an ADDITIVE reacts with, it looks for the closest BASE to that ADDITIVE. That is, each additive reacts with one base. A base may react with more than one additive (that's bad). In most cases, to be sure, people will select pairs far from other pairs, so there will be no distinction, but it does matter for "high precision" cooking. -- Kummick
WARNING : When making meals with more than one base, it's possible that one of your bases may be closest to 2 or more different additives. If this occurs, then the overall duration of your recipe will suffer severe penalties. As such, make sure that each of your bases will only react with one additive.
Refer to the Food Reference Chart page for a list of the R2 coordinates of various food items. This data is also available in a searchable format at Aberdon's KitchenAid (offsite link)
Also available at Dachannien's Cooking Directory, but this site is no longer maintained.
Understanding Potency
Just like R2 grid positions, every usable food item in the game is also assigned a potency value. Unlike it's grid position, this value will fluctuate over time for each item. It's believed that the potency of a food item is directly linked to either how much of that item is used, or how much of that item exists in game. Very common items such as Camel Meat or Honey will usually have very low potency values, while very rare herbs will often have very high potency levels.
The potency value of a food comes into play the most when the food is an additive in a meal. When functioning as an additive, the potency of a food will give boosts to both duration, and to the overall stats the food provides. This is one of the main reasons that meals using herbs as additives often provide significantly higher stat modifiers than meals that do not use them.
Refer to the Food Reference Chart page for a list of the known potency values for food items. New measurements: http://perl.atitd.wiki/wiki/tale3/Users/Kummick/PotencyTable
Putting it all together : the basic meal
In practice, a standard basic (1 base) will either use a ratio of 4 base to 3 additive, or 6 base to 1 additive, depending on how expensive your additive is, and how important the small boost in duration is. Stat wise, your ratio of Base to Additive has no effect. But duration wise, using a higher amount of an additive will increase the potency bonus for duration.
As such, common items with very low potency will have almost no visible difference in duration from meals using 6:1 ratios vs. 4:3 ratios. However, food items with very high potency values, like herbs, may see several minutes difference.
And as always, to increase the number of portions made by your meal, you simply increase the ingredient quantities.
Multiple Base Meals
If your cooking skill is 2 or higher, you can make meals that contain multiple base items. (remember you are allowed 1 base item per cooking skill level). This is where you can start combining your favorite basic meals into even more powerful meals.
DURATION : For the most part, unless you have more than one base that reacts with the same additive, and you suffer huge duration penalties, the ending result of your meal will be close to the sum of the durations making up the meal.
STATS : Quizzical has made a post which discusses the formula in detail for how stat combining works, which you can read from the Additional Reading section below. However, a basic way to look at stat combining that will work most of the time is to take the stats of all the base meals your coming, square each value, add then, and take the square root of the result. For example, if 1 base:additive pair contributes +7 to END, and the other base:additive pair contributes +4 to END. the sum of the squared END modifiers would be 7^2 = 49, 4^2 = 16, 49 + 16 = 65. The rounded square root of 65 is 8. Thus, the end result would be a recipe that gives +8 END.
Guide to cooking for stats: http://perl.atitd.wiki/wiki/tale3/Users/Kummick/CookingForStatsGuide
Advanced Topics
This section of the cooking guide is only for those who are very familiar with the basics of the cooking system, and are looking for more information in regards to the inner workings of the system, or who would like to help contribute with research
Calculating Potency
In order to calculate the potency of a food item, you will need a Gastronomy skill of at least 7. This level provides the menu option 'critically evaluate meal' for cooked meals.
The easiest way to calculate the potency of a food item is to find another food item that is far enough away from it, such that you get a negative duration time when you evaluate the meal. Since only food additives have their potencies effect duration, the item you are testing will use the smallest ratios. Generally, I use 1:6 and 2:5. Using these two ratios, you can subject the smaller from the larger. This will give you the potency effect for 1/7th of the meal. Multiply that value by 7 to get the full potency.
EXAMPLE : Assume we want to find the potency of Barley (raw). Using the Food Reference Chart we see that Camel meat is far away from Barley (raw), so we will use that as our base to test. A total of two meals are made. using ratios 1:6 (1 barley (raw) and 6 camel meat) and 2:5 (2 barley (raw) and 5 camel meat). We critically evaluate each meal. For the 1:6 meal, we are told that it lasts -863s. For the 2:5 meal we are told that it lasts -763s. The difference between the two times is 100, which gives us the potency for 1/7th of the overall meal. multiplied by 7, our calculated potency of Barley (raw) is 700.
HINT : If you are calculating the potency of an expensive herb, you can calculate this value using only 2 deben instead of 3, by using ratios of 1:6 and 1:13, and multiplying by 14 instead of 7.
-- Some of this is now obsolete, although the general idea is ok. Now you get no information about duration less than 0, but precise information about positive duration. So instead of finding a far-away base to test your item, you want a close-enough one. When testing a rare herb, this could mean you get screwed if your first guess is far away and the potency is not enough to get you a positive duration. You also would rather maximize the potency effect, so use 6:1 and 7:1 and potency = 56 * (T1 - T2). At least a rare herb will tend to have potency in the 5000+ range, so if you select something in the center (e. g. garlic) and the herb is within the 2000x2000 grid (very likely, but who knows what Pharaoh will do?) then T1 = dist - 1000 + pot/7 and T2 = dist - 1000 + pot/8 will almost certainly be positive. -- Kummick
Calculating Distance
If you understand how to calculate the Potency of an item, then it should be simple for you to calculate the distance of an item as well. To calculate the distance between two items, you will need to select 2 items that are far enough away from each other such that when you critically evaluate them, a negative time is returned. You must then remove the potency effect from that time to get the base distance. -- See above, now you want close enough to get a positive duration (including the potency bonus), not far enough to get a negative duration.
In regards to duration, potency bonuses are only applied for the ratio of the overall meal that the additive makes up. Thus, if you are testing a meal that uses a 6:1 base to additive ratio, the additive makes up 1/7th of the meal, thus you would need to divide the potency of the additive by 7, and remove that from the meal time given to get the distance.
The specific formula to use is : distance = 1000 - time
EXAMPLE : You wish to calculate the distance between Common Basil and Carp Fish. You use 6 carp and 1 basil in your recipe. You know the current potency of basil is 2044. When you evaluate the completed meal, you get a meal duration time of -306s. Since basil is your additive, you must first adjust the reported time for the ratio that basil made up in regards to the entire meal. basil's current potency of 2044 / 7 = 292, so -306s - 292 = -598s. The potency adjusted time for our meal is now -598s (this is the time the meal would have lasted without the potency bonus). using the distance formula above, we plug in our time to get: distance = 1000 - (-598) or distance = 1598. Thus, the distance between Common Basil and Carp Fish in the R2 grid is 1598.
Calculating R2 Grid Coordinates
The R2 grid coordinates of a food item allow us to know exactly where a food item is in relationship to any other food item in the game. By knowing positions, it's possible to determine the best pairings for items by looking at which items are the closest to each other. And in the case of multi-base meals, this also helps in making sure that you do not accidentally select item pairs where a base item will react with multiple additives and thus suffer huge duration penalties. There may be other uses for knowing R2 grid coordinates which have not yet been determined.
The formula that I used is slightly more complex than the one used for calculating potency or distance. As such, to not clutter up the cooking guide too much with the formula, I've placed it on a seperate Grid Coordinate Formula page for those who are interested in looking at it.
For each distance between a pair of known and unknown points that are tested, 2 possible R2 grid locations are provided. It's for this reason that I like to test at least 3 or 4 different distances. That way, the results from all the tests can be compared, and the coordinates that are closest together can be used to determine the actual calculated R2 coordinates.
I'm sure that there are probably better ways using more advanced math formulas to more accurately determine coordinate locations. However, for our purposes in game, these values should be more than sufficient to determine item pairings, and multi-base validations. Further, there is currently a member in the community, who is using more scientificly sound methods of calculating this information, who plans on possibly making his data public at some point over the next few weeks to few months. When that happens, calculation of R2 coordinates will no longer be needed. But for those players in the community who do not wish to wait months for the information, this method is available now.
NOTE : If you are interested in helping with R2 coordinate calculation for the food items that do not yet have released R2 grid locations on the Food Reference Chart page, please contact Zackron in game so that he can make sure your data is included in the combined master set of data.
Other Resources
This section contains links to other areas on and off the wiki that may be of interest to current or future cooks.
Kitchen Enterprises
- Kitchen Enterprises explains this starburst graph, and provides a variety of other cooking tools.
- Tests has recent test results.
- Contributions is a comprehensive list of what is currently known about cooking ingredients.
Helpful Information
Here are links to other useful places of interest here on the wiki:
- Food Reference Chart
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Useful Recipes
- Herb Position Overlay
- Aberdon's KitchenAid (offsite link)
- Twokay's Cooking Database (offsite link, player has left)
- Dachannien's Cooking Directory (offsite link, player has left)
- Herb Tracking Database (offsite link, player has left)
Additional Reading
Here are some posts that have been made on the forums by the lead cooking researcher, Quizzical, that you may find helpful:
Here are links to places where raw research data can be found which has been used to create or validate much of the information found in the above links, or may be used for future updates as more is learned about the cooking system:
User Cooking Pages and Tools
Here are links to some of the personal cooking pages of other users. Please note that the recipes that some people have listed on their personal pages may be from the older bugged cooking systems.
- The main Recipes page (can this be merged with Recipes maybe?).
- Sobe's Cooking Data
- Greyhawk's food page
- Aten
- Arame Not sure how useful, but data is data.
- Users/Archilochus/Cooking Data
- Poodlehat
- Mehyt's recipes (you gotta love coconuts and cabbage!)
- Xirxx's Cooking Experiments
- Nef's Cooking Page
- Skeet's Cooking Data Page
- Baldur's recipes and experimental recipes some decent recipes to be found here