Cooking
Unlocking Cooking
Head to the north part of Prontera City and speak to the NPC dressed like a chef with "Entrance" on top of him. Speak to the NPC named "Pizza" near the entrance in the Royal Cuisine Association. He will give you the quest Cuisine Temptation. You will need to gather various meats that can be purchased from the shop in the northern part of the Royal Cuisine Association or farmed from monsters. These only cost a couple hundred zeny so just buy what you need from the shop in here and turn them in to finish this quest and unlock the Chef's Hat headwear and the Level 1 Cookbook.
Cooking Association Entrance
Quest to Unlock Cooking
Benefits of Cooking
Cooking is extremely important for farming and are largely free. Killing monsters provides you with ingredients used exclusively for cooking that provide significant buffs that last a few hours. These buffs are so significant that you really should unlock these ASAP since this will help you one shot enemies early on as you're most likely lacking enough attack for this. Foods increase offensive stats such as ATK, MATK but also buff other important stats such as ignore defense, penetration, movement speed, and even cast delay just to name a few.
Unlike other buffs that simply add duration when you consume more than one, these buffs actually stack their effects. The maximum stacks starts at 3 but as you raise your tasting level you can eventually stack up to 6 meal effects at once. This makes a food like Original Will Soup which gives +40 ATK and +2.5% ignore defense stack up to a whopping +240 ATK and +15% ignore defense at 6 stacks, a massive boost. You can also use multiple foods and split this up however you see fit, such as eating three ignore def foods and 3 movement speed foods.
Another perk of cooking and eating is that cooking enough of it and eating enough of a dish gives you account wide stats!
In this example I’ve cooked enough rookie seefood kebabs to give me +1.5 ATK and ate enough for another +1 ATK. In total, mastering all cooking and tasting masteries in the adventure handbook results in just over 100 ATK and 100 MATK.
Eating foods also gives you HP and SP discharge. This is a “reserve tank” for HP and SP that will automatically heals your HP and SP when these values get low, under 30%. This is helpful for reducing the amount of time playing dead to use up your time quicker and prevent wasting combat time ticks due to this.
Many people eat 999 of a cheap dish just for a bunch of SP discharge for their overnight farming sessions. After all, these cooking ingredients cannot be sold to others and are free from everything you farm so feel free to cook your heart out!