Cooking

What you need

1. Every bake takes four things:
   1. Flour — buy it early, then mill your own (below).
   2. Water: a Watering Can or a Waterskin with water in it. Water + Flour = plain Dough.
   3. A flavour (optional): Blueberry, Carrot, a fish… Plain Dough bakes into Bread.
   4. A stove (below).
2. There’s no cooking minigame and nothing ever burns. Each piece of Dough becomes the finished dish in 50 seconds (25 with Spirit of Flour).

Getting Flour

1. Every recipe starts with Flour, and it soon gets hard to buy. The Miller sells it for 20 Gold Petals at the mill in Rosewheat Fields, south of Wisk — but only until Spring 8. On Spring 9 a gremlin curses the mill and the shop shuts; even after you lift the curse (“The Cursed Mill”) it only offers five bags at a time for 800.

2. Later on, three ways to get more:
   1. Pieter the baker gives you 3 Flour once during “Ferry Girl”. Ask before the mill is cursed.
   2. Mill your own: grow Wheat Seeds (20 at Kavita’s, all year) into Wild Wheat and grind it in a Wheatmill. Each Wild Wheat makes one Flour, and sometimes the harvest gives a seed back.
   3. Finish “The Cursed Mill” for the Adept Wheatmill, which grinds two Wild Wheat at once.
3. Nalin sells the Wheatmill schematic at Practical Practice for 450 (10 Logs, 5 Feathers, 10 Stone, one Carpentry skill). Place it and interact: Open to load it, Pack to pick it up with everything inside. It grinds one Wild Wheat every 50 seconds, just like a stove.

Making Dough

1. You make Dough in your inventory by dragging one item onto another (it doesn’t matter which is in your hand).
2. Drag Flour onto a Watering Can or Waterskin with water: that uses one Flour and one charge of water and gives plain Dough.
3. Drag an ingredient onto the Dough to flavour it — Wild Blackberries make Blackberry Dough, for example. One Dough plus one ingredient makes one flavoured Dough; repeat for each piece.
4. Bake it. Plain Dough becomes Bread.

Stoves

1. Open a stove, drop in a stack of Dough and close it. Each piece takes 50 seconds — about 40 minutes of game time. Finished food piles up until you collect it.
2. Good to know:
   1. Baking carries on while you’re away, while the clock is stopped at night, and while you’re in menus, shops or conversations. It only stops when the game is paused (pause menu, mailbox).
   2. Bake overnight. Sleep counts too: load a stove before bed — sleeping from 22:00 bakes another 12 pieces per slot by morning.
   3. One kind of Dough per slot. Collect the finished food before starting a different kind.
3. You can’t build your own stove, and the fireplace in your dorm is just decoration. Use one of these:

Eating

1. Right-click food in your inventory or pick it from the quick bar to eat it. On a controller, open the inventory, highlight the food and press Consume.
2. Mana. You start with 350 mana and it refills every morning; food tops it up during a busy day. Most food restores about two-thirds of its value in mana — the Nocturne Squash Tart, worth 185, restores 120. If that comes to less than 21 you get 7 extra, which is why a 20-petal Pretzel restores a full 20. Baker’s Touch doubles the two-thirds for baked food (Bread goes from 27 to 39, a Pretzel from 20 to 26). Mana never goes above your maximum, so don’t eat when you’re nearly full.

3. Effects keep ticking during conversations and in shops, and pause with the inventory open or the game paused. You can have up to 10 effects at once; while 10 food or potion effects are running you can’t eat or drink anything, not even plain food.

What to eat

1. Big refills: bake your most valuable crops. The Nocturne Squash Tart restores 120 — about a third of your starting mana — followed by the Twilight Donut (104), Baked Gloomroot (91) and Chocolate Babka (91).
2. Cheap snacks: the Pretzel. The Common Room table has a free one every day from Spring 2, and Pieter sells more at the Wisk market for 20 (from 6:00). Each restores 20 mana — a point per petal, the best value of any food you can buy.
3. Baking usually raises a crop’s mana: Twilight Blossom restores 78 raw and 104 as a Twilight Donut, for one Flour. The exception is Cranberry — 33 raw, but only 23 as Cranberry Cheesecake.
4. Free wild food helps in a pinch: Wild Blackberries and Winter Berry are only worth 10, but restore 14 thanks to the cheap-food bonus.

Selling food

1. The Magic Well pays full price for food (it shows up as “Food” in the daily summary), and shops pay the same on the spot — drag the item to their sell box. Amka’s stall pays 20% more for anything you made yourself.
2. Food that shops also sell — Bread, Veggie Hand Pie, Fisherman’s Pie — only resells for half its value.
3. Amka’s stall unlocks after you finish three items in a stove or the Pickling Machine (milled Flour doesn’t count). Amka then visits your farm and offers to build it: say yes and it appears two mornings later, opposite the Magic Well. Drop homemade goods in and you’re paid overnight. It takes baked goods, pickles, Ginger Beer and Flour you milled, but nothing you bought.

4. Esteemed Baker adds 40% to everything you earn from food, at the well, the stall and every shop, and it stacks with the stall bonus: a Nocturne Squash sells for 145, but baked into a tart and sold at the stall with Esteemed Baker it makes about 310.

What to bake for money

1. Most baked goods sell for 10–35 more than their ingredient, once you take off about 20 for the Flour. A few tricks widen that margin:
2. Tricks and traps:
   1. Moon Poppy Seeds work as an ingredient: drag the packet onto Dough for Moon Poppy Dough. A 30-petal seed from Kavita becomes an 85-petal Moon Poppy Donut without growing anything.
   2. A Feather makes Mushroom Dumplings worth 50. Birds sometimes drop one when you startle them.
   3. Cheap wild ingredients do well: Wild Blackberries and Winter Berry (10) bake into 40; Fiddlehead, Dandelion, Thistle and herbs such as Wild Thyme or Wild Mint (5) into 35–40.
   4. Bread loses money: Pieter sells it, so you only get 15 — less than the Flour.
   5. Avoid Cranberry and Onion: a Cranberry is worth 50 on its own but the cheesecake only 35, and a Veggie Hand Pie sells for 25, less than the 30 an Onion is worth.

Cooking skills

1. All three are worth it if you cook a lot. Esteemed Baker is four points away: Mana Enrichment (available at the start) → Seed Collective → Potionwork Proficiency → Esteemed Baker, with useful skills along the way.
2. Take Baker’s Touch if you eat baked goods for mana: it sits next to Mana Enrichment (two points in total) and also boosts bought Pretzels and Bread. Spirit of Flour is next to Potionwork Proficiency, one of the starting hexagons, and leads on to the fishing skills — pick it if you bake in bulk or fish a lot.

Pickling

1. The Pickling Machine turns crops, berries and seafood into jars worth 35, or Ginger Beer worth 50. Acorn gives it to you at the end of “The Briny Bathhouse”. It’s portable: place it, fill it, and pick it up again when it’s empty.
2. It works like a stove: add a stack, each item takes 50 seconds, and it keeps going overnight and while you’re away (you load it by hand). Pickles and Ginger Beer can’t be eaten — they’re only for selling.

3. The full list of accepted ingredients is on the Recipes page.

Cooking stories and events

1. Ferry Girl. Dee, who runs the river ferry, wants a Blueberry Bun before taking you across. Nobody sells one, so you bake it: ask Pieter about the bun (3 Flour — enough for three), pick Blueberries from the bushes in Spring or grow them (Kavita sells the seeds in Autumn), make Dough, add a Blueberry and bake it in any stove.

2. Nocturne Forest picnic. A clump of Shrubs blocks the path into Nocturne Forest. They let you through once you fill their basket with six different homemade baked goods: one of each (they only take one from a stack), stove food only (no Pickles, Ginger Beer or Flour), and only homemade — bought Bread or Gingerbread gets spat back out. You can take treats back until you add the sixth. The cheapest set is six wild bakes: Herbed Focaccia, Forest Galette, Blackberry Scone, Dandelion Cookie, Thistle Cupcake and Mushroom Dumplings. Clover’s Frog Donut counts too.
3. Clover’s Frog Donut. At the Summer Music Festival on Summer 13, Clover sells Frog Donuts. Talk to Clover and accept one for a free Frog Donut (if you said no, talk again and change your mind). Don’t eat it — it costs mana — but it counts as homemade for the Shrubs’ basket and for Star Baker.

The Star Baker achievement

1. Star Baker needs 20 different homemade items. Each one counts the first time you drag it into your inventory, and pickles, Ginger Beer and Flour from your own mill count as well as baked goods — 45 options in all. Clover’s free Frog Donut counts too: pick it up and move it to another inventory slot.