Quick Links
Between hunting down outlaws and building up settlements, New World players will find a lot of things to do while immersing themselves in the setting. One such skill that can be a lot of fun to delve into is Cooking, though, as with many in-game skills, players will need the right materials, tools, and knowledge to become truly proficient at it.
Besides being able to marvel at the delicious dishes one can make (while likely also wishing they could be transported spontaneously into the real world), players can consume meals to gain great temporary buffs to one's stats. In order to make the most useful and tasty foods in New World, gamers can thankfully rely on some easy-to-follow methods. The very best meals require a high Cooking skill level, so focusing on raising it should be the top priority for aspiring chefs.
Where To Do Some Cooking
As with crafting most things in New World, players will need to find the right workstation to see their culinary task to completion. There are different tiers of Kitchen that can be found, ranging from Tier 1 to Tier 5--the latter being needed for the most gourmet goods in the game.
Pretty much every Kitchen in New World so far exists in a settlement or just outside of one in a camp, so, to get some Cooking done, be sure to seek one out these spots. Kitchens can be found on the map by looking for the icon that resembles a fork and a spoon in an 'X' shape.
However, players should be sure to set an external camp as their respawn point if one desires to do some Cooking there, as this will allow more recipes to be made.
The Fastest Way To Level-Up The Cooking Skill
Easy Level Grinding When Cooking
The Cooking process tends to get bottlenecked by the availability of certain ingredients, therefore, to level up as quickly as possible, quantity is preferable to quality here. To level up the Cooking skill quickly, it's recommended that lower-level players stick to crafting large numbers of Tier 1 foods for the best XP-gain efficiency.
With that said, the higher Tiers of food will get easier and easier to craft thanks to better resource availability resulting from players simply being higher level and able to harvest from different areas. As such, when players find they have bulks of unused goods, it's advised to make higher-tier foods over Tier 1 recipes when possible.
Light Rations & Why Players Should Make A Lot Of Them
Arguably the easiest food to cook in the game, Light Rations provide a healing buff for a short period, which can always be useful, so having a ton of them on one's person won't ever be a bad thing. Being so easy to cook due to many possible ingredients makes Light Rations an excellent choice for bulk-crafting in order to level up the Cooking skill faster.
In addition to relatively commonly found meat-related raw food items, such as Poultry and Pork, players can craft Light Rations from raw foods such as Nuts, Mushrooms, Eggs, and Milk as well, meaning the recipe is very versatile.
How To Save On Materials To Maximize Cooking Production
About Stretching Recipes
As mentioned before, since the Cooking process gets bottlenecked by material requirements, being able to stretch one's ingredients matters quite a bit when it comes to cutting down harvesting time (as well as reduces having to buy more ingredients if players don't want to harvest them from the wild).
When players start crafting Tier 2 foods (and higher-tier ones), they will need more than the basic ingredients required for Tier 1 foods such as Light Rations. In addition to the primary ingredient, players will need secondary ones, and, for this, Honey is one of the best options for Cooking material. The reason Honey is so useful is that, in addition to being usable as a secondary ingredient, it can also be used as a seasoning. Since most other seasonings are comparatively more difficult to find (and expensive to buy), Honey is a great substitute.
Furthermore, if players want to save on Honey to use in the seasoning section of a recipe, players can use different kinds of raw foods for all the other ingredient slots, as those all take the same kinds of materials.
Best Places To Find Honey
Honey can, appropriately, be harvested from Honey Trees, which can spawn in many locations, though, a few places have more of this type of vegetation than others.
Southwest of the Windsward settlement, there is a farm called Willette's Homestead that is sparsely surrounded by Honey Trees. Players only need to skirt around the farmstead to get large yields of the sticky golden syrup.
Another location that can be great for grabbing Honey from Honey Trees is just south of the lake near Forellac, which itself is located southeast of the Cutlass Keys settlement. There are a bunch of Honey Trees to harvest here as well, so go nuts.
New World is available on Microsoft Windows.