New World cooking guide: Tips and tricks

New World‘s crafting system lets players create items at their own pace, using resources acquired with gathering skills as they explore and complete quests in the world around them. From weapons and armor to furniture and tools, a New World player can craft a little bit of everything with their expansive set of trade skills.

One of the trade skills that’s most essential to New World players is cooking. Cooking various foods from rations to meals will provide players with their most important items when it comes to healing, taking advantage of lengthy buffs, and even improve your town standing.

Looking to become Aeternum’s master chef? Here are some of the basics of cooking you will need to know.

Gathering ingredients

You can’t cook with an empty kitchen and bare shelves, so if you want to start crafting recipes you’ll need the proper ingredients to do so. There are three main ways you’ll acquire ingredients while you’re out in the world: killing and skinning animals, harvesting herbs and bushes, and harvesting fruits and vegetables from farmstands.

Skinning animals will require just two things, a skinning knife and a dead animal. The dead animal doesn’t even have to be yours; it can be one that someone else has slain, but be polite and don’t steal someone’s recently slain bounty. Harvesting from animals will reward, among other items, meat. These can be tier-one meats like pork or poultry, or higher tier meats like red meat or venison. Fish meat can be acquired by salvaging fish you’ve caught from fishing.

The rest of the ingredients used to craft recipes can be acquired via the gathering skill. Things like nuts, berries, and herbs can be found in the wild. Bigger items like fruits and vegetables can be found throughout various farming landmarks in the world, but you’ll likely have to fight off enemy NPCs to get a chance to gather them. Milk can be gathered from cows at settlements.

Finally, you can also find ingredients in provision crates, which can be found in different landmarks. Once you have a backpack or storage shed full of ingredients, it’s time to start cooking.

What recipes to cook

Go to any cooking station at any settlement to start cooking. If you’ve been putting ingredients in a storage shed to save on inventory space, they can stay in there while you cook, but make sure you’re cooking in the same settlement as the shed you’ve been using.

The first set of tutorials after creating a character should get you a couple levels of the cooking skill, so you’ll be able to craft all four of the basic recovery food: Light Ration, Travel Ration, Energizing Light Ration, and Energizing Travel Ration. The Light and Travel Rations can be consumed to regain health while the Energizing rations can be consumed to regain mana, and for both sets, the Travel Ration is the superior one.

Not only do Travel Rations offer better recovery for whoever eats it, but it rewards you more cooking points and experience when you craft them. Creating either Travel Ration costs a single tier-two raw food, such as red meat, and one raw food from any tier, and at base rewards 24 cooking points.

Once you reach level five in cooking, you’ll start to unlock craftable cooking components like flour, butter, and cheese. But you should wait until you unlock some trade skill food recipes as you level up to level 20. Those recipes reward a lot more points and, when consumed, can help you get more out of other gathering skills.

Continue leveling up through level 40 to unlock atrribute foods. These foods will give you lengthy buffs to your various attributes. Each food recipe is categorized by each attribute, and you’ll unlock food for each attribute as you progress your cooking level as such:

• Level 21 to 25: Strength foods
• Level 26 to 30: Dexterity foods
• Level 31 to 35: Intelligence foods
• Level 40 to 45: Constitution foods
• Level 45 to 49: Focus foods

These recipes will give you a lot of cooking points, but they’re not as easy to make as some of the standard ones because most require specific items instead of anything from a tier.

The last thing you should be aware of is your go-to settlement’s town board, since there will frequently be quests there asking for a specific number of crafted cooking recipes.