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Guides/Cooking for Dummies
The Foundation of this Guide
Cooking in ATITD is great. It gives you stats! Who doesn't want to be able to run faster, carry more, or get more from a hookah? Everyone should be able to do it.
People who want to learn to cook are most commonly referred to the Recipes page for recipes, and to the famous Ariella and Pascalito's Cooking Tutorial to learn about how recipes work and to learn how to craft your own. This approach would perhaps be better called Food Science, since it is very involved in the science and maths you need to create recipes.
But for the Dummy Cook, creating recipes is not cooking; cooking is throwing some food in a pot to make a meal. In other words, to make an omelette, I don't need to know the science of an egg's albumin breakdown; I just need to know that for a country omelette, I hardly stir my eggs in the pan at all, and for a classic French omelette, I stir them almost constantly as they cook. (Thanks, Jacques Pippin!)
Most of us do not start out (or ever get to) creating new recipes; we cook from existing recipes on the Wiki. So this guide is for the budding cook who just wants to be able to throw some things together in a pot, feed some people, and not kill everyone in the process.
Step 1: Get Some Cooking Skills
You cannot use a kitchen until you have the Cooking skill. Your cooking level (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7) determines how many ingredients you can cook with. The more ingredients you can use, the sexier the resulting stats will be, and generally the longer the magic of your recipe will last.
So, the more levels you can get the better. At Cooking 4, some nice recipes with attractive stats open to you, so it is worth getting this skill level if you can!
Step 2: Understand Recipe Fundamentals
Recipes are made from two parts mixed together: base ingredients and additives. For the purposes of this guide, we're going to say that base provides the bulk and additives provide the magic.
Go look at the Recipes page, which is broken down by Cooking skill level. You will see that for Cooking 1, all of the recipes involve just one kind of "base" ingredient like camel meat or mutton or a single herb. These Cooking 1 recipes also call for just one additive, like one kind of herb or dates or a single mushroom type. Cooking 4 recipes uses four bases, like camel meat and mutton and royal jelly and carrots. You will also see that each recipe for Cooking 4 uses four different additives, normally four different herbs.
Step 3: Understand Serving Calculations
You will see that any example Cooking 1 recipe calls for 6 debens of base (like 6 mutton) and 1 deben of additive (like 1 leek), for a recipe totaling 7 deben of ingredients. This makes one serving of food, because A single serving of any meals is always 7 debens.
"Oh great," you're probably thinking, "so if I want 10 servings, I just need to multiply those ingredients times 10 and put in 60 mutton and 10 leeks."
No. Nothing in ATITD is that easy!
Remember: the base provides the bulk; the additives provide the magic. To add additional servings, you add more base. You NEVER add more additives.
So, a Cooking 1 recipe might look like this for different serving amounts:
| BASE | ADDITIVES | TOTAL DEBEN | SERVES |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 mutton | 1 leek | 7 | 1 |
| 69 mutton | 1 leek | 70 | 10 |
| 349 mutton | 1 leek | 350 | 50 |
And a Cooking 4 recipe might look like for different serving amounts:
| BASE | ADDITIVES | TOTAL DEBEN | SERVES |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 Dates, 6 Oyster Meat, 6 Mutton, 6 Camel Meat | 1 Thyme, 1 Morpha, 1 Sagar Ghota, 1 Dusty Blue Sage | 28 | 4 |
| 29 Dates, 20 Oyster Meat, 20 Mutton, 20 Camel Meat | 1 Thyme, 1 Morpha, 1 Sagar Ghota, 1 Dusty Blue Sage | 84 | 12 |
| 262 Dates, 262 Oyster Meat, 262 Mutton, 262 Camel Meat | 1 Thyme, 1 Morpha, 1 Sagar Ghota, 1 Dusty Blue Sage | 350 | 50 |
Servings Calculator
These serving calculations become complicated for those of us who are math challenged and are trying to figure out "OK, I know I'm only using a set number of additives, but how much of each base do I need in order to make 10 servings? Or 50? or 300?" or whatever your goal is. Luckily, there is a calculator.
Step 4: Ready, Set, SINK!
Before you eat any meal, you must first eat a helping of Sink Food. Why? Because if you don't, Very Bad Things Can Happen when you eat your meal. You can eat a meal to make you run faster, but end up almost frozen. You can be carrying nothing but 20 straw and suddenly be told "You are carrying too much. Would you like to drop something?"' So, the fact that you need a pot of sink food and a pot of real food is why most people have at least two kitchens.
Seriously, people: SINK FOOD FIRST.
Sink food works on the exact same 7 debens per serving math as regular food.
The cheapest, easiest sink food is made from camel meat and honey. Both are plentiful and easily obtained. Interestingly, it doesn't matter what proportion you mix them in; if you want 37 servings of sink food, you can mix 258 camel and 1 honey, or 258 honey and 1 camel, or 130 of one and 129 of the other. The only thing that matters is that the two amounts not be exactly the same.
Sink Food Calculator
That's it. Sink food is easy, and there's even a calculator to help you figure out how much of each ingredient to put in to calculate the number of servings you need.
Step 5: Cook Some Grub
Once your sink food is made, you're ready to make your regular food. Look at the recipes on the Recipes page for your cooking level. Sort by the column that's most important to you. If you want to run faster off-road, choose something with a good DEX number. If you want to run faster on-road, choose something with as big a SPEED number as you have ingredients for. If you need to haul a lot of stuff, you want STRENGTH food. If you need endurance for flax processing you want END food, and if you need hookah food you want FOCUS.
The biggest thing new cooks trip over is not reviewing all of the stats for a given recipe. It is great to make food with DEX of 5 or 18 or whatever to run fast, but if that recipe also has negative strength, you're not going to be able to carry anything, and may be unable to move with the items you're already carrying until you drop some!
Step 6: This Has All Gone Horribly, Horribly Wrong
If you suddenly can't carry anything or can barely move or something else unexpected has happened, it is likely your recipe proportions were wrong. (Unless you're making up your own recipes, in which case it is likely your food pairings were wrong, and since I don't even know what that really means, I can't help you.)
Eat your sink food or eat some grilled cabbage to reset your stats. Throw the pot of bad food against the wall and start over. Welcome to the joy of cooking!
