Want to start cooking meals in Crimson Desert, but you're not too sure how to get started? This guide explains everything you need to know about cooking, including how to substitute ingredients, improvise recipes, and learn recipes.
- How to Cook in Crimson Desert
- How to Substitute Ingredients
- How to Improvise Recipes
- How to Learn Recipes in Crimson Desert
- All Recipe Locations
How to Cook in Crimson Desert
To cook a meal in Crimson Desert, you need ingredients, recipes, and a cooking station to use. Iron pots hung over a bonfire are the most common cooking stations, but you’ll also find skillets and woks needed for some recipes. Approach one to open the Cooking menu and peruse your recipes.
Recipes you can make appear at the top of the list, showing you the ingredients you need and the bonuses the meal provides. You’ll notice that most recipes have five versions that each require more or fewer of the same ingredients:
- Hearty: +150% effectiveness
- Satisfying: +100% effectiveness.
- Filling: +50% effectiveness
- Basic: Normal effectiveness
How to Substitute Ingredients
All the edible ingredients you’ll find in Crimson Desert are sorted into one of six categories: Fruit, Vegetable, Meat, Grain, Mushrooms, and Medicinal Herbs. Any ingredient in the same category can be substituted for another, but they aren’t all equal. Tender Meat, for example, offers better health restoration when it’s put in meals than Lean Meat.
How to Improvise Recipes
Alternatively, you can choose to improvise a recipe using whatever ingredients you have on hand. To start improvising, interact with a cooking station and select “Improvise.” Then, select all the ingredients you want to combine and select “Make.” If the ingredients don’t fit any recipes (known or unknown), you’ll get a Mysterious Dish.
How to Learn Recipes in Crimson Desert
You can learn recipes in Crimson Desert by reading recipes or successfully improvising them three times. The first time you improvise one successfully, you’ll get a notification saying “Recipe Discovered.” Do that two more times to get “Recipe Insight” and finally “Recipe Acquired.”
If you’d rather learn recipes the old-fashioned way, you’ll find them scattered throughout the world on little slips of paper you can pick up and read. They look like rolled-up scrolls on your mini-map.
All Recipe Locations
Rather track down the recipe scrolls yourself? Click our Interactive Crimson Desert Map to learn more about each of the recipe locations we've found so far.