Cooking Guide [BDO]

In BDO, cooking is a highly useful life skill that can earn you a lot of silver if done correctly. It can also ensure access to the best-boosting elixirs. To be able to do cooking, you first need to get yourself a residence and buy or make a cooking utensil. You also need to know what materials are required to make foods and drinks since, unlike other games, your character does not learn recipes. You need to do that yourself. In this BDO cooking guide, I will show you how to get a residence, how to get a cooking utensil, where to find recipes, show you an example of cooking, and finally, how to minimize the time needed for each cooking batch.

Finding a Residence for Cooking

The only way to cook is by using a cooking utensil inside your residence. There are residences all over Black Desert, so just choose one that is in a place that suits you. To get a residence is easy. Just open up the map, go into the town where you want to get a residence, and start clicking on the house icons. When you find a house with the residence option that’s in a location you like, you then simply need to buy it with contribution points.

The contribution point cost ranges from a single contribution point to a few points depending on the size of the residence. In the image below you see the location of a residence in Velia you can get for a single contribution point.

The size or location of the residence itself doesn’t really matter in regards to cooking, only that you have one. So pick one where you spend most of your time in BDO. Personally, I use the one in Calpheon at Market Street 6-1, 2F. I use it because it is right next to the Calpheon storage and close to the central market NPC.

BDO’s Cooking Utensils

After you have invested in a residence you need to buy (or make) a cooking utensil. There are a few different cooking utensils in the game which give different bonuses. The easiest to get is the Basic Cooking Utensil and the Balenos Traditional Cooking Utensil as they can be bought from a Tavern vendor.

The basic utensil has no bonuses and 100 durability points, while the Balenos Traditional Cooking Utensil has 500 durability points, but it gets a penalty of increased cooking time of +5 seconds each batch. Of the two, the Balenos utensil is best used for long AFK cooking. The other utensils are listed below, showing both their durability and the cooking time adjustment. Personally, I favor the intermediate cooking utensil as it’s not too expensive with decent durability and no penalty to cooking time.

When you have acquired a cooking utensil you need to place it inside your residence. While inside your residence, press the P button to access placement mode. Then just choose the cooking utensil and place it in your house wherever you wish.

Cooking Ingredients

There is a massive amount of ingredients used for cooking, which is far too extensive to list here. However, most of them can be found in the central marketplace or if not there, at least information on how to get them. You should also look at the ingredients which are sold by the Tavern Vendors. A lot of recipes need these ingredients, which is great as these are the easiest to get.

Starting Your BDO Cooking Career

When you have gotten a residence and a cooking utensil you are ready to start cooking your first meal. To do so you need to activate the cooking utensil by pressing R while standing next to it. This opens the screen you see below.

You now need to place the exact amount of each material for a single batch of whatever you intend to cook. This is important, only place the amount needed for a single batch. Anything more and you will just lose all those materials. The window below shows this for beer as it is usually the best recipe to start on. You can read all about making beer in my beer guide.

If you place fewer materials than required in the boxes, the batch might fail depending on your skill. While it is supposed to be possible to place less than the optimal recipe when your cooking skill is really high, I haven’t quite found the benefit of it yet as I still fail a few times (at Master 5) and those failures generally cost more than the materials I try to save.

Once you have selected the raw materials and entered the correct amount you can choose to run a single batch or go for continuous production. If you want to run multiple batches you can press “Continuous Production” and then max. Doing that will keep your character cooking until he runs out of materials.

As an example, to run 500 beer production batches you would need 2500 grains of the same kind, 500 sugars, 1000 leavening agents and 3000 water in your inventory. You would then place 5 grains, 1 sugar, 2 leavening agents and 6 water into the windows as seen above. Press “Continuous Production” and then press maximum quantity.  It should show 500 runs and when you press “OK” your character will start cooking 500 batches of beer.

Note that as your cooking skills go up you will start getting more of your product out of each batch in addition to a blue version of it which usually last for a longer time and is more valuable. You also get extra dishes which give rewards, which are contribution points, cooking experience, beer, milk, and silver if turned in to certain NPC’s.

Useful Cooking Clothes.

There are a couple of clothing types which speed up cooking and increase the experienced earned while cooking in BDO. These are the Canape costume set and the Silver Embroidered Cook’s Clothes.

The Canape costume set is a Pearl Store Item. It gives you +15% cooking experience and reduces the cooking time of each batch by 2 seconds. Those 2 seconds don’t seem a lot but for a batch of 500 those 2 seconds reduce the time total cooking time by 1000 seconds, which is just under 17 minutes.

The Silver Embroidered Cook’s Clothes also increase the experience earned and reduce the cooking time. This is however dependent on the enhancement level ranging from just a time reduction of -1 second for non-enhanced clothes, up to +30% increase to experience and -7 second time reduction for +5 enhanced clothes. When you begin your cooking career, I would recommend you aim for a +2 enhanced cooking clothe as they are not so hard to buy from the central marketplace. Later you can go for a +3 or even a +4 one.

Other Useful Items for Cooking

An alchemist stone is really useful for cooking as they reduce the time needed to do cooking. The different grades have a different time reduction, but the best grade has a -1.7 second reduction.

Teff bread is also useful for coking as you reduce the mixing time by 0.6 second when you eat it. It lasts for 110 minutes.

How to Get a One Second Cooking Time – Minimizing Cooking Time

The lowest cooking time you can get in Black Desert Online is a single second. To get to that the following is the method that should cost the least silver.

• Buy the Canape costume set ( -2.0 seconds )
• Get a +4 Silver Embroidered Cook’s Clothes ( – 5.0 seconds)
• Get a Sturdy Alchemy Stone of Life (-1.1 seconds)
• Use an Advanced Cooking Utensil ( -1.0 seconds)

However, getting a +4 cook’s clothes can be hard and time-consuming, unless you get lucky in the marketplace. Alternatively, you can aim to get the following to get a 1.1 second cooking time.

• Buy the Canape costume set ( -2.0 seconds )
• Get a +3 Silver Embroidered Cook’s Clothes ( – 4.0 seconds)
• Get a Sharp Alchemy Stone of Life (-1.4 seconds)
• Use an Advanced Cooking Utensil ( -1.0 seconds)
• Use a Teff Sandwich (- 0.5 seconds)

The best combination possible would be the following:

• Canape Costume set ( -2.0 seconds )
• +5 Silver Embroidered Cook’s Clothes ( – 7.0 seconds)
• Resplendent Alchemy Stone of Life (-1.7 seconds )
• Cron Seafood ( -0.6 seconds )

This combination gives you a -11.3 second reduction. Now, this is something that would only be useful if you use the special cooking utensils. For example, the Balenos cooking utensil would end up taking 3.7 seconds each batch. But honestly, this is pretty bonkers and the cost would be enormous.

Where to Find Recipes

As I mentioned your character doesn’t need to search for recipes to learn them. You just need to put in the correct type and amount of material to cook something. This means that you can simply search on google for all the recipes in BDO, or you can look at the recipes in BDOcodex.com where you can sort the recipes after the desired effect and what skill level is required for the recipe to work.

So, there you have it, by following this guide you should be able to become a master cook in no time. Now if you liked this guide then be sure to share it with your friends and allies and feel free to check out my other Black Desert Online guides.

Cooking Mastery System

On top of all this comes the cooking mastery system. The benefits of a high mastery score are the following:

• Increased chance to activate Mass Cooking – up to 100%
• Increased chance to obtain the maximum amount of basic food – up to +61.1%%
• Increased chance to obtain more effective food – up to +19.3%
• Increased chance to obtain the maximum amount of more effective food – up to +61.1%
• Increased payment when turning in cooking boxes to an Imperial Crafting Delivery NPC – up to 144.9%.

For each level of your cooking skill, you get 5 mastery points. To increase your mastery score further you need to equip special accessories and clothing. The accessories are called Loggia, Geranoa, and Manos, and the clothes are Loggia, Roroju, and Manos cook’s clothes. Loggia is the name of the green grade items, Geranoa and Roruju are the blue grade items, and Manos is the orange grade.

You can buy the green and blue grade mastery gear from NPC’s with the same name in the game, but you need to either buy the Manos gear from the central marketplace or craft your Manos gear yourself.

So, there you have it, by following this guide you should be able to become a master chef in no time. Now if you liked this guide then be sure to share it with your friends and allies and feel free to check out my other guides for Black Desert Online.