Cooking is an invaluable life skill in Black Desert Online. The long list of recipes produces meals and beverages with a wide array of benefits such as healing, combat buffs, or experience boosts.
With such a large payoff, you would expect the cooking process to be rather complex and involved. However, it's actually extraordinarily simple with mechanics such as AFK production and interchangeable ingredients. Here's everything you need to know about how and what to cook in Black Desert Online.
What You Need To Start Cooking
While easy to pick up, cooking can only be done from home. This means you will need to buy a residence in one of the regions, which warrants a bit of research. On the bright side, you only need to equip your home with the necessary cooking utensils, and you'll be good to go. It would also be best if you devoted some time to building up the farming and fishing life skills to go hand in hand with cooking.
Cooking Utensils
To get yourself started, buy a rudimentary Cooking Utensil from one of the cooking vendors. Then, find a chef by clicking the cooking button in the NPC window.
You can make higher quality utensils when you stop off in a city using the Tool Workshops in these more urbanized locations.
Dress The Part
Specialized clothing and other cooking enhancement items serve to cut the standard 10 second cook time. Different items offer various time buffs, and you can combine several items to increase the time reduction down to 1 second. However, certain items do interfere with others and cannot be used at the same time.
Below is a list of the special items from smallest to greatest time reduction and what cooking tier or requirement unlocks them.
- Teff Bread - .3 sec. - Beginner Level 6
- Teff Sandwich - .5 sec. - Professional Level 1
- Seafood Cron Meal - .6 sec. - Simple Cooking
- Alchemy Stone of Life - .5-2 sec. - Alchemy Tool skilled to level 5
- Verdure Draught - 1 sec. - Simple Alchemy
- Advanced Cooking Utensil - 1 sec. - Tool Workshop Level 3
- Life Spirit Stone - 1.1 sec. - Kamasylvia mob drop
- Canape Costume - 2 sec. - Pearl Shop
- Silver-Embroidered Cook's Clothes - 1-7 sec. (+5 second maximum enhancement) - Costume Mill Level 1
Ingredients You'll Need
Many ingredients are interchangeable, but the quality is something to keep in mind. If you're looking to profit from cooking or if you want to rely on cooking simply for your own health benefits, you will need to become self-sustaining. That is, you will want to build up your workforce so you have plenty of hands to gather from nodes and practice your farming skill to grow what you can on your own.
Interchangeability
Ingredients of the same classification can be swapped out; fruit for fruit, grain for grain or other starch, and so on. Ingredients can even be mixed and matched in the same recipe. For example, a recipe calling for 6 olives could use 4 olives and 2 tomatoes, or 3 pumpkin and 3 cabbage instead.
Quality
Recipes are based on a normal ingredient tier quality with two higher quality tiers available. The second tier, 'High-Quality' ingredients, are marked by a green border. Likewise, 'Top Quality' ingredient icons are rimmed in blue.
The higher the quality, the fewer ingredients you have to use for a recipe. Generally speaking, if a recipe calls for three of an ingredient, one High-Quality ingredient will suffice. Similarly, one Top Quality ingredient can supplement five base quality ingredients. All available recipes show up in the cooking section to tell you what ingredients you need.
Sources Of Ingredients
You can get ingredients by farming manually, collecting the yields from workers you send to various nodes, or you can buy items from cooking vendors. The first two methods are why you will want to build a solid foundational workforce and invest in complementary life skills such as fishing and farming.
Though it's easier to become self-sustaining in the long run, you will inevitably need to deal with vendors from time to time. You can locate cooking vendors through the NPC finder marked by a magnifying glass icon and selecting "Cooking." Cooking vendors have various titles, but they are the sort of names you would expect, such as Chef, Inkeeper, Farmer, and so on.
All Ingredients And Where To Find Them
Aloe
Thanks to the Mediah expansion, Aloe now grows abundantly in the new region. Aloe is used for baking Aloe Cookies which boost accuracy, and Aloe Yogurt to aid the fishing skill.
Cooking Honey
The Alejandro Farm node in Heidel is the sole source for Cooking Honey. Otherwise, you can craft it using three Wild Beehives. Honey is used as a base ingredient in a variety of recipes, being the key ingredient for the defensive boosting Honey Wine and the weight bolstering Honeycomb Cookies.
Dairy
- Eggs - Bartali and Finto farm outside Velia in Balenos have reliable Chicken Meat nodes and Narcion in O'dyllita. Chicken Meat also spawns Eggs as a chicken by-product.
- Milk - Milk comes straight from the source in BDO. Find a cow and milk it to obtain a few cartons. Calpheon has some good farmland, including Bain Farmland and Falres Dirt Farm, to the South and East of the city. These farms host dailies where you can earn ten milk.
Grain
- Barley - Calpheon; North Wheat Plantation
- Corn - Velia; Toscani Farm
- Potato - Velia; Bartali Farm, Finto Farm, Loggia Farm nodes
- Sweet Potato - Mediah; Shuri Farm
- Wheat - Costa Farm, Moretti Plantation, Northern Wheat Plantation
Fish and Seafood
Whether fresh or dried, recipes do not differentiate how the fish is prepared. However, you will need to double the quantity of fish the recipe calls for using the dried variant. There is a lengthy list of fish species in our fishing guide, but for this article, just know there are plenty of fish in the sea... and lakes, rivers, and ponds.
Recipes do differentiate seafood from fish. While all are caught through fishing, there is a select group of species that the game classifies as seafood rather than fish, and the two are not interchangeable. This means if you do your fishing in AFK mode, you will need to make sure the "throw away useless items" option is unticked; otherwise, seafood catches will automatically be trashed.
Seafood
- Crab
- Crawfish
- Cuttlefish
- Jellyfish
- Octopus
- Seahorse
- Shellfish
- Squid
- Starfish
- Terrapin
Flowers
- Rose - North Wheat Plantation (manual gather)
- Sunflower - Farm manually
- Tulip - North Wheat Plantation (manual gather)
Fruits
- Apple - Wild Apple Trees
- Banana - Milano Belucci in Calpheon
- Cherry - Milano Belucci in Calpheon
- Grape - Olvia; Casta Farm
- Pear - Milano Belucci in Calpheon
- Pineapple - Milano Belucci in Calpheon
- Strawberry - Farm manually
Meat
Meat is classified into three categories; regular, bird, and reptile. Meats are interchangeable within the same classification, but reptile meat cannot supplement bird meat and so on.
Regular Meat
- Bear - Balenos Mountains
- Beef - Balenos Highlands/Plains; Rock Head Bison, Small Stone/Stone Head Bison.
- Deer - Spotted Deer, Kamasylvia Deer.
- Fox - East of Olvia
- Lamb - Lynch Ranch
- Pork - Northern Wheat Plantation, Velia cooking dailies
- Rhino - Stone Rhino (Mediah), Rock Rhino (Kamasylvia Forest)
- Weasel - Grape Farms
- Wolf - East of Olvia
Bird Meat
- Chicken - Bartali Farm and Finto Farm (Velia), Narcion (O'dyllita) nodes
- Flamingo - Silk Shade Flamingos, Fan Flamingos
- Kuku Bird - Serendia (They staunchly defend their nests.)
Reptile Meat
- Cheetah Dragon - Mediah
- Lizard - Glish and Heidel (Serendia), Behr and Calpheon City (Calpheon)
- Waragon - Northern Wheat Plantation (Underground)
- Worm - Northern Wheat Plantation (Underground)
Seeds
Check Marketplaces for seed packs. Otherwise, there are several seed vendors you can seek out. Ahr, in Calpheon usually has the most abundant selection to choose from.
- Carrot Seed
- Garlic Seed
- Grape Seed
- Hot Pepper Seed
- Olive Seed
- Onion Seed
- Pepper Seed
- Pumpkin Seed
- Strawberry Seed
- Sunflower Seed
- Wheat Seed
Spices
Spices cannot be gathered. Instead, they can be acquired through Olvia cooking dailies, farming, or gardening. Cinnamon is an outlier and can be gathered via workers at the Kasula Farm node in Mediah.
- Cinnamon
- Garlic
- Hot Pepper
- Onion
- Pepper
Vegetables
- Cabbage - Market
- Olive - Balenos; Whale Farm node
- Paprika - Farm
- Pumpkin - Serendia Alejandro Farm, Costa Farm nodes
- Tomato - Farm
Grain Juices
Simple Cooking is the game's term for juicing essentially as this is the method for making Grain Juices, which serve as HP regenerators. Simple Cooking is conducted through the Production Activity window and doesn't require Cooking Utensils. Whatsmore, the highest tier juices are stronger than the strongest HP potion and lighter to carry in your inventory.
Grain juice simply requires three sacks of some type of grain and one Mineral Water per juice. You can't split the stacks of available resources to determine how many juices to make. Instead, you'll simply move your character when you want to stop juicing. Otherwise, Simple Cooking continues automatically until you run out of resources or breach your inventory weight capacity.
Grain juices can then be tiered up by combining three juices of a lesser tier to create one of better quality. Another tactic is to take ten lower-tier juices and add one thing of sugar for a yield of ten higher-tiered juices.
Leveling The Cooking Skill
There are seven tiers of cooking proficiencies, each with a set of levels or ranks you must progress through in order to move up through the tiers. This adds up to 130 levels of cooking proficiency in total.
Cooking Proficiencies
- Beginner 1-10 (Levels 1-10)
- Apprentice 1-10 (Levels 11-20)
- Skilled 1-10 (Levels 21-30)
- Professional 1-10 (Levels 31-40)
- Artisan 1-10 (Levels 41-50)
- Master 1-30 (Levels 51-80)
- Guru 1-50 (Levels 81-130)
There is an overwhelming plethora of recipes in Black Desert Online, which can aid in a wide array of areas from life skill boosts to HP regain and combat buffs or debuffs. All the required ingredients are given as the recipes are made available, and combining the ingredients is fairly straightforward. So, instead, we will look at the best ways to level the cooking skill in order to unlock the widest range of recipes as quickly as possible.
Leveling Tips By Tier
Beginner
To set out on the right foot, pick up the cooking tutorial questline, "Potatoes For The Chef." There is a base skill requirement of Gathering level 5, but once you have attained adequate proficiency, head to the Velia Inn and talk to Shelly. She'll be standing next to chef David Finto.
Brewing beer is a simple beginner-level process, and the effects of the malty beverages provide stamina regeneration for your workers. The stamina buff for your workers is important to aid the speed and capacity of the workers' productivity. This means you will want to stockpile a large store of ale to keep your workers productive without having to replenish the draught constantly. By producing or collecting the majority of ingredients yourself, you will save time, silver, and aggravation in haggling with merchants.
Beer is a great starter recipe because three out of four ingredients are readily available from vendors at easily affordable prices. Thanks to interchangeable item groups, the fourth is also wildly abundant in starter regions.
Beer Recipe
- Leavening Agent - Cooking Vendor
- Mineral Water - Cooking Vendor
- Sugar - Cooking Vendor
- Starch/Grain - Beer can use Barley, Corn, Potato, Sweet Potato, or Wheat as a base. The Bartali, Finto, and Loggia farm nodes in Velia are great starter region nodes for harvesting Potatoes.
Apprentice
Once you hit the Apprentice tier, you can really start focusing on grinding out Cooking Dailies.
- Olvia Dailies - Begin to unlock at Beginner level ten. Pick them up from Nadia Rowen.
- Velia Dailies - Begin to unlock at Apprentice Level one. Certain ones are locked until Skilled level six and Skilled level ten. Pick these up with Shelley, standing next to Chef Finto.
Outside of getting in the routine of running cooking dailies, it's not a bad idea to begin brewing tea as well. Milk and Sute Tea recipes become available as a Skilled cook, and the ingredients require a Tea With Fine Scent, which you can begin brewing as an apprentice.
Skilled
Milk and Sute Teas are both ingredients themselves in other recipes. Sute Tea is a component in the Seafood Cron Meal, a cooking enhancement recipe. Both Sute and Milk Tea are key components in various Imperial Cooking recipes, making them useful when doing business with Imperial Delivery managers. Milk Tea is also an ingredient in the Calpheon Meal, which provides healing effects and a damage reduction buff.
Professional
The rest of the journey to becoming a Chef Guru is a tedious grind. But once you're a professional, you can take your time and level up naturally as you cook meals and brew beverages you need or want to sell.
Sources: Altar of Gaming, Grumpy Green Cricket