Our third step in Stardew Valley perfection is to target Cooking, for which you will require a great deal of recipes to complete to 100%. Now, you will likely do a great deal of cooking regardless of your play style, because the foods are tremendously useful for restoring health and energy whilst you’re adventuring, but if you’re hunting for perfection then you’ll need to be slightly clever in your methodology. To optimise your time, and help you reach your lofty goal, consider following some of our advice below.
Collecting Recipes
In order to fully complete your trophy case of meals, which you’ll be able to find and track within the Collections tab in the game menu, you’ll need to locate all of the recipes. This is often the most time consuming portion when attempting to completely finish out the Cooking category, however paying attention to some of the following will provide you with a constant stream of recipes to complete.
Friendships
Having recently written about Friendships, we’re not going to go into it a great amount here. Suffice to say that reaching a certain level of friendship with certain residents will prompt them to send you a new recipe to your postbox. By aiming for a perfect game you should automatically gather these, however the Cooking category alone will provide you with even more encouragement to do so. Often these will not need to be ‘maxed’ to unlock the recipe, but need a little more attention than others to activate.
Queen Of Sauce
Every Sunday, for the first two years of your farm, you’ll be able to watch the TV and see the Queen of Sauce. This will teach you a different recipe each time you watch, and they’re even repeated on Wednesdays, to give you another chance should you miss out. This is a great, free and passive way to get additional recipes. It’s best to keep this in mind and maximise your chances to learn by watching every week.
Purchasing Recipes
It might sound willfully simple, but purchasing recipes is a quick and easy way to get your hands on some. In fact, it’s the only way in some cases. It’s worth noting that there are more available this way than you might think. Gus in the Saloon has some, the trader on Ginger Island and even the Dwarf on Level 5 of the Volcano. It pays to do a little rooting around then, or at the very least always having the loose change available to grab them as you progress.
Advertisement
Cooking Them All
During the normal process of simply playing Stardew Valley, you will no doubt craft yourself quite a few cooking recipes. It’s quite easy however, to get rather stuck on a few ‘favourites’ that you can easily return to. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, after all something like Sashimi managed to keep us going for more hours than we can count, however one glance at the aforementioned Collections tab will show you the sheer scale of the task at hand, so it pays to always be attentive to recipe gathering, no matter your progress level. Remember, recipes that you’re yet to gather will be greyed out, and those already cooked will show in full colour.
Having gathered the recipes, now comes the significant task of actually cooking them all, for which you’ll need a great deal of ingredients. In this regard, the best advice that we can give you is to save a little of everything as you progress. It’s somewhat easy to do this when it comes to fruit and vegetables, because you’ll likely use some of these as crops throughout the game, however it’s worth saving a little of pretty much everything, like Fish, Foragables and Mayo etc. Some of these can be quite awkward to produce or procure when you’re empty, so keeping a little in your back pocket is a great idea.
One last thing: Be careful when you’re crafting these recipes. There’s nothing worse than cooking up some Sashimi, which uses as its base any fish at all, only to realise that you’ve used up all of your valuable Salmon on an otherwise rote and ordinary dish. Worse still is accidentally using up an out of season ingredient, and having to wait a very long time to have access to them again. Not that we’re talking from experience or anything (we totally are), but you’ll feel rather foolish if you occasionally make this mistake.
More Stardew Valley…
Achieving Perfection #4 – Crafting | Stardew Valley
The next step that we’re taking, and indeed documenting, towards perfection is that of crafting. As a whole this will cover a great deal of elements within Stardew Valley, because crafting in some way tends to be involved with pretty much everything that you do, and whilst you’ll certainly tackle the subject regularly in a…
Achieving Perfection #2 – Friendships | Stardew Valley
On your journey towards perfection in Stardew Valley, you’ll soon encounter the tricky subject that is friendship, and indeed the maximising of said relationships with every applicable resident. We call this tricky, because it relies more upon knowledge than it does time, though admittedly achieving perfection in this regard is still going to be very…
Achieving Perfection #1 – Creating a Wine Empire | Stardew Valley
Achieving the perfect game in Stardew Valley is no easy feat. There is a huge list of tasks to complete, all of which take a great deal of time, which can be tracked through the perfection tracker in Mr Qi’s walnut room. One of the more difficult of these tasks is to earn yourself 10,000,000…
Loading…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Categories: Stardew Valley