BDO Cooking Guide
Black Desert Online is an amazing MMORPG, especially when it comes to in-depth character customization and classes. There are also a number of life skills like cooking that players can acquire for more XP and silver.  Cooking, like any other life skill in BDO, is divided into seven levels going from Beginner to Guru Cooking. Though it is a lot similar to Alchemy, given the fact that one needs to have their own materials and recipes, cooking is a lot easier and is a good way to get access to quite a few good elixirs. In this BDO cooking guide, I will tell you the step-by-step process of starting cooking and getting benefits out of it. Let’s go!

Things You Required for Cooking in BDO

female character cooking in bdo
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There are several things that you will need in order to cook in BDO. Keep reading this BDO cooking guide to know everything about the bdo cooking.

Find a Residence

First thing you need to do is find your own residence if you want to start cooking. Having a place to cook is the initial step that starts it all. It is fairly simple to get a residence in BDO, and there are a lot of options one can choose from. Simply go to the map, to a location where you would like your residence to be and start clicking on the house icons. When you find a residence suited for your needs, just buy it with contribution points.

Cooking Utensils

Next step is to get your cooking utensils. You can either buy them or make them yourself and different cooking utensils give different bonuses. While the basic cooking utensils are easiest to get, they don’t give bonuses and have 100 durability points. You can get them from the tavern owner along with Balenos Traditional Cooking Utensil which has 500 durability points and gives a +5 second bonus cooking time. Apart from that, you have:
  • Intermediate Cooking Utensil with 500 durability points and no bonus
  • Advanced Cooking Utensil with 900 durability points and -1 second cooking time
  • Serendia Cooking Utensil with 1250 durability points and -6 second cooking time
  • Calpheon Cooking Utensil with 2500 durability points and +7 second cooking time.
When you have the utensil in your residence, press P to access the placement mode.

Cooking Ingredients

There are a lot of cooking ingredients that can be used in BDO and depend on the recipe. You can buy most of the ingredients in the central market or can get the information on how to get them. You can source your own ingredients too, by farming but that’s a topic for another time.

Cooking Clothes

There are some clothing types like the Canape Costume Set, and the Silver Embroidered Cook’s Clothes that increase the cooking speed and the XP earned. So you can get them from the store and level them up with time. 

Other Useful Items

Beside the utensils and clothes, other two items that can help you in your BDO Cooking ) adventures are an Alchemist Stone, which reduces the cooking time (based on their grade and Teff Bread, which reduces the mixing time when you eat it, by 0.6 seconds and lasts for 110 minutes.

How to Start Cooking in BDO

Now that you have got everything in place, It’s time to get cooking!
  • Activate the cooking utensil by standing next to it and pressing R.
  • Place the exact amount of ingredients you need for the recipe, for a single batch as any more will just waste the materials and any less will lead to failure in cooking the batch.
  • Once you are done with selecting the correct ingredients and putting the exact amount, you can choose to either go for a single batch or continuous production, which will make your character cook until they run out of materials.

Where to Find Recipes

You don’t need to necessarily search for recipes to cook; you just need to put in the exact amount of the right ingredients to create something. So you can either go to google for different recipes in BDO or can refer to BDOcodex.com for recipes with the desired effect and the information pertaining to the skill level needed to cook them.

How to Reduce Cooking Time BDO

Now, this is important as if your character takes up extra cooking time, there will be penalties. So using different combinations of cooking utensils and clothes and other materials to minimise your cooking time is the best way to go. Even a second extra can be a decisive factor when it comes to successful cooking, but buying the materials takes silver. Here’s the least expensive combination for minimising cooking time:
  • Get Advanced Cooking Utensil which decreases cooking time by -1.0 second
  • A Canape Costume Set which reduces cooking time by -2.0 seconds
  • A Sturdy Alchemy Stone of Life reduces -1.1 seconds of cooking time
  • A +4 Enhancement Level Silver Embroidered Cook’s Clothes can reduce cooking time by -5.0 seconds
But it’s not easy to reach +4 enhancement level, so you can either get a +3 Silver Embroidered Cook’s Clothes with Teff Sandwich which reduces the cooking time by -1.4 and -0.5 seconds respectively, or make use of Resplendent Alchemy Stone of Life which minimises -1.7 seconds of cooking time when used.

Mastery System

There is a Cooking Mastery System in BDO like for any other life skill. With an increase of a level in your cooking skills, you get +5 mastery points, and with high mastery score, you get:
  • Up to 100% increased chance of activating Mass Cooking.
  • Up to 61.1% chance to obtain the maximum amount of basic food.
  • Up to 61.1% chances of obtaining the maximum amount of more effective food.
  • Up to 144.9% increased payment when turning in meal boxes to the Imperial Crafting Delivery NPC.
There are other benefits of a high mastery score too, and you can also boost your mastery score by equipping with special clothing and accessories like Manos Gear, which you can either buy from the central marketplace or craft your own.

Conclusion

And that’s it! I hope this basic BDO cooking guide helps you in your BDO life and getting up in the ranks while enhancing your gaming experience. Though slowly figuring out things can be fun too, actually having a clear cut idea on what you need to do is helpful while being time-efficient. So make full use of all the resources available and happy gaming and while you’re at it check out my amazing review on the next-gen VR supported graphics card.