1. Why should I do cooking?

Cooking is perhaps one of the best semi-afk life skill income at the moment, sure there are other life skills that can make more money, but for the amount of time and effort invested or lack thereof, cooking is something that every life skiller should consider going into.

Pros :

very little active play time and effort

can get up to 200 mil + per day (which beat many grind spots with the amount of active time required)

Cons :

Require some setup

Require decent CP / Contribution points

Require you to leave your computer on to afk

How to setup everything is probably the hardest part of doing cooking, ofc there are more than a few ways to make silver with cooking, but this guide will only focus on delivering imperial cook boxes to NPC, as it is the most stable daily income one could get from cooking, selling various meals on the market is more complicated and thus not recommended for new adventurers who are not experienced enough with cooking or market place yet.

And ofc there are many different grades of imperial cooking boxes, from skilled to artisan to master to guru, personally I don't think skilled and artisan boxes are really worth doing, master boxes is where I'd start at, but I will not be covering master boxes in this guide as its relatively simple, Guru box is where a lot of new adventurers struggle, due to the sheer amount of sub dishes one have to prepare before cooking the meal itself.

While there are many different Guru dishes one could do and many ways to set things up, I will be sharing my personal setup for Mediah meals in this guide, so any new adventurers who want to start cooking guru boxes have a simple template to follow, later on when you are experienced enough, you can figure out your own way or pick a different meal.

My personal style is laziness to the max, meaning I want to sustain daily Guru box delivery while spending as little time as possible playing active, it is possible to sustain 205 x Guru boxes daily with just 1 to 2 hours of active play per day, which net me around 224 mil silvers per day, not too shabby I would say.

2. The setup

There are quite a few setups you will need to do, but don't be discouraged, its simplier than it looks, and once you have them all setup properly, it takes minimum efforts to maintain.

2.1 Reaching Guru in cooking

This is not really a guide on how to level cooking, so I will keep it brief, the best way to level cooking is to afk cook as much as possible, for max % of experience and cooking speed, you would want to invest in the following :

+4 or +3 silver embroidered cook's cloth, which reduce cook time by 5 or 4 sec, and gives 25% or 20% bonus cooking experience.

Canape cloth from pearl shop if you want to p2w, for an additional -2 sec on cooking time and 15% bonus experience.

Max weight on your cooking character if you want to spend even more, this will allow the character to hold as much materials as possible, thus extending the period he or she could afk cook.

Oasis Seafood Cron Meals from Oasis vendor NPC if the event is still on, this gives -0,6 sec cooking time, 100LT and 10% cooking experience, it is not recommended to buy non event version of Seafood Cron Meals for afk cooking unless you really rich in game.

Calpheon cooking utensil if you plan on afk cooking for more than an hour, it make your cooking time slower but have 2000 durability which can last up to 6 hours of non stop afk cooking depending on your cooking level and cooking mastery.

Advanced cooking utensil if you plan on cooking for less than an hour, with the above gear setup, your cooking time per dish should be around 2 sec, you can reduce it further by using alchemy stone, but this is optional depending on your budget.

Both utensils can be bought from market place although that will take some time before someone will sell to you, or you can craft them yourself, you will need to either gather rough stones or try buy them from market.

I typically cook 7k materials worth of vinegar or essence of liquor over night, I choose these 2 because the materials are light enough to hold 7k, and easily accessible via grain nodes and npc vendor. You can also cook beer, grilled bird meats or any other dish that you can get large quantity of materials for. Alternatively you can level faster via cooking more complex dishes like coconut cocktails, which give more experience per dish than vinegar/ essence of liquor, however the materials are also not as easily accessible. You can also cook meals for the best experience for dishes, but I don't recommend this until you are at least mid master level, because meals cost more materials which cost more silver or time and you get less return with low cooking level and cooking mastery, ofc if you rich and just want speed, then cook meals to level is best.

2.2 Gathering

Gathering is the only active part of the whole process, while you could also just buy the required materials from market place to eliminate active play completely, but for max profit, its far better to gather yourself than buying from market, what you need to ask yourself is this, can you make more silver per hour doing something else than gathering meat/blood? if yes then do something else that is more profitable and buy materials from market, if not then you should gather materials yourself.

There are 3 level of gears I recommend for gathering, depending on your budget, choose the set that is accessible for you.

Low budget                                                        Mid budget                                                     High budget

Tet Loggia gather clothes                                  Tet Carta gatherer's clothes                            Tet Manos gatherer's clothes

Tet Loggia butcher's knife                                  Tet Manos Butcher's knife                              Tet Manos Butcher's knife 

Tet loggia fluid collector                                    Tet Manos fluid collector                                Tet Manos fluid collector

Tet loggia accessories                                        Tet Genanoa accessories                                 Tri Manos accessories  

If you cannot even afford Loggia sets, then you can also use magic butcher knife/fluid collector, which ignore your gathering mastery completely, and give you the same % of rare materials as 600 mastery points, so you can use magic tools until you have reached 600 or 650 gathering mastery, if you choose to do this, then pair magic tool with +2 silver embroidered gather cloth for extra experience gain.

Keep in mind that gathering is all about how much mastery you have, while each gathering level will give you 5 mastery points, leveling gathering become much slower after artisan, so the best way to reach 1000 or 1300 mastery points is via life skill gearing. While life skill gears seem quite expensive at first, you do make your silver back pretty fast if you gather a lot, with 1300 gathering mastery, I get around 56 mil worth of meat plus 25 to 30 mil worth of rare drops per 1 hour of gathering, which beat per hour silver rate at many low end grinding zones. As for mastery goals, first aim to reach 1000 mastery, then aim for 1300 mastery, there is not much change between 1000 and 1300 in term of the amount of meat or blood you get.

To get max gathering speed, join a guild that have +3 to gathering, then use either life alchemy stone or seafood cron meals, I only use seafood cron meals when the bonus +25 mastery from the meal will push my gathering mastery to next bracket, every 50 mastery points is a new bracket. I use life alchemy all the time for the slight extra drop rate for gathering, you can buy Life Spirit Stone from market place, these alchemy stones cannot be recharged but are really cheap to buy, and don't forget to grind used up stones instead of trashing or selling to npc.

For meat you can gather sheeps, wolves, boars, deers or any other mammals close to your life skiller, snake, scorpion etc are not mammals and thus does not work. For blood you can use sheeps, boars, deers, ox etc, take note WOLF BLOOD DOES NOT WORK.

For schedule, I gather meats for 4 days then blood for 1 day, this will work if you can get 5000+ meat/blood per gather session, if you can't then you need to work on getting more mastery and/or energy, and in the mean time use alts to gather some more. If you get 5000 blood per session, you may need to gather additional bloods with an alt once in a while, because it takes 7000 bloods for one cook session, but say you gathered blood twice this time, then you only need to gather blood once next cycle.

Additionally, you can choose to either gather milk or buy them from market place, if you want to buy be sure to place max price order and wait a while, you should generally get them in 2 to 4 days, if you do not trust market place and want to gather it yourself, gather it with an alt everyday or every 2nd day if you feel lazy, should give more than enough milk to sustain your cooking. You can gather milk from either Olvia or Falres Dirt Farm near Calpheon, the amount of milk you get is affected by your gathering level but not your gathering mastery, so ideally you want to use an alt with Artisan gathering or higher. You can also get milk via rng Calpheon cooking quests or trading in cooking byproducts, cooking request you should do as soon as it shows up, Calphone cooking quest will give you 1000 milk which is really nice,  I do not recommend trading byproduct aka Witch'sDelicacy for milk, its better to exchange them for CP and cooking experience, but if you really struggling with milk, its an alternative plan.

2.3 Contribution points and node management

Now that we got the hardest part out of the way, lets look at how to setup some passive nodes to help with our cooking. contribution points is very important for delivery Guru boxes, beside CP allowing us to get the nodes we need, the amount of boxes you can deliver per day is half of your total contribution points, meaning the more CP you have the more boxes you can turn in each day, thus the more silver you can make. You can increase your CP by doing main story quests if you haven't done that already, you can increase it further by doing Calpheon dailies and Duvencrune dailies, you can find guides on both on Youtube, they are a series of daily quests you can do to boost CP. Lastly and most importantly, the more you cook, the more Witch's Delicacy you get, and you can turn those in for a lot of CP.

Below is a list of nodes that you should invest in and send workers to as soon as possible, ideally you would want Artisan workers on all the nodes, if you do not have full Artisans, then professional will do for now, but always try to get Artisans for every node. As for which kind of worker, I personally recommend Goblins because of the high workload on most nodes these days, but if you afk for over 6 to 8 hours constantly, then get Human or Giant, although with the current workloads on most nodes, even Artsian Giants wont get you much materials per day.

Velia

Finto Farm and Bartali Farm for Chicken and Egg nodes, potato nodes are optional, I use it for cooking beer.

Toscani Farm for both Corn nodes, I use workers from Olvia for this as Velia lodges are limited, I like to use corn to grind into grain flour, but you can use potato or any other grain.

Heidel

Alejandro Farm for Honey nodes, pumpkin node is optional, make sure you put an Artisan Goblin on the honey node, as it is the only honey node in game, and you will be needing them honeys.

There are some other pumpkin, wheat nodes around Heidel that you can take as well for other cooking, but its not needed for sustaining Guru boxes for this guide.

Calpheon

Northern Wheat Plantation for Paprika node, and optional wheat node, I use Paprika for the vegetable part in Mediah meal, but you could use any other vegetables as replacement such as Olive from Olvia etc. And if you taking Paprika, then take wheat as well just in case you run out of Corn sometime, personally I use Corn flour for Mediah meals, and use Wheat flours for daily overnight cooking of vinegar or essence of liquor.

2.4 Farming

There are 2 ingredients that you have to get via farming, namely Onion and Pepper, generally 2 to 4 large fences would do, but you can always get more if you need, each large fence cost 10 CP, and you can rent it from NPC by typing "fence" in the NPC search tool.

If you already do farming and/or have enough mysterious seeds, then all you need is 2 large fence, one for onion one for pepper, each time you farm, you use shake in processing menu, put in 1x mysterious seed and 1x blue onion/pepper seed, you will get 1x mysterious onion/pepper seed, a mysterious seed takes up 5 space in a large fence and give around 250 onion/pepper per harvest, you then plant 5x regular blue onion/ pepper seeds on the same fence, and choose breeding when they grown to 100% or more, make sure you get 7 or 8 blue onion/pepper seeds from breeding for next batch, then harvest any left over blue onion/pepper plants.

If you do not have enough mysterious seeds, then you might need 2x fences for onion and 2x for pepper, and farm green onion/pepper seeds instead of blue, u can have 10x green plants per fence, and make sure you breed at least 20 seeds before you harvest the rest, sometime if your rng is really bad, you only get 1x seed per breeding, but don't worry too much, overall you should still be able to sustain enough onion and pepper for cooking.

You can either buy green or blue seeds from market place, you buy withered seeds from seed npc in Calpheon or Loggia farm west of Velia, most people perfer to setup their farms north of Loggia farm, because it have best tempreture and humidity for farming, but other locations can work too if north of loggia is not convinent for you.

2.5 Processing

Processing is a ver small part of the preparation, you should already have Loggia/Genanoa/Manos accessories, all you need in addtiona is Tri Loggia processing stone Vitality and Tri Loggia processing stone Lake, you can also wear +2 Silver embroidered Craftsman's cloth for extra experience or Zereth armor, Hercule's helm/glove/shoes for extra weight, both optional and not that important.

When you have at least 1 hour afk time, put your character to either mass grind wheat/corn or any other grain you chose, or mass shake your already grinded grain flours with mineral water into grain dough. I get around 14000 flour or dough per afk session, and only have to do this once every few days, unless you plan on cooking 8000 dish worth of essence of liquor every night.

Venecil outfit from Pearl shop will help greatly with processing by allowing you to process straight from storage rather than holding raw materials on your char, but you can make do without it if you do not wish to p2w, you just have to do shorter afk sessions.

2.6 Mediah meal cooking

Now that all the preparation and setups are done, lets get to the actual cooking, by now you should already have advanced cooking utensil and Loggia/Genanoa/Manos accessories from previous chapters, the last piece of gear you need to get is Tet Loggia/Roroju/Manos Cook's Cloth, While some people prefer to keep their 1 sec cooking via Silver Embroidered cook cloth, if you are lazy like me then you'd want to use mastery cook cloth instead, while it give much slower cook time, the extra mastery points allow more max cooking proc, meaning you will get more dishes per material used, which means you can sustain daily cooking boxes with less active gathering and more afk.

While all Guru meals seem complicated and intimidating at first, its a lot easier once you break it up into smaller chuncks of tasks, first lets look at the sub dishes you need to make before assembling into the final meals. 

2.6.1 Sub dishes

Due to the fact that most sub dishe materials are not limited to active gathering, I like to cook a whole bunch of each when I afk and forget about them for a while, how much you can cook per session will depend on how much weight you have on your character, here I will share my setup but you will have to adjust to your own weight.

Essence of Liquor : Grain flours x1 - get wheat/corn etc from nodes then grind them into flours during afk session
                                 Fruits x1 - buy from Fruit vendor npc Milano Belucci in Calpheon city or use grape node near Olvia
                                 Leavening agents x1 - buy from cooking npc in any city
Tip :I cook 8000 dishes worth of materials during overnight afk cooking session every 2nd night for CP and cooking experience.

Vinegar : Grain x 1 - get wheat/corn etc from nodes

                Fruits x1 - buy from Fruit vendor npc Milano Belucci in Calpheon city or use grape node near Olvia

                Leavening agents x1 - buy from cooking npc in any city

                Sugar x1 - buy from cooking npc in any city

Tip: I cook 8000 dishes worth of materials during overnight afk cooking session every 2nd night for CP and cooking experience.

Pickled Vegetable : Vegetable x 8 - get Paprika/pumpkin etc from nodes

                                 Vinegar x 4 - see above

                                 Sugar x 2 - buy from cooking npc in any city

                                 Leavening agents x2 - buy from cooking npc in any city

Tip : I cook 2000 dish worth of materials at a time.

Dressing : Eggs x 1 - get from nodes

                  Mineral water x 1 - buy from cooking npc in any city

                  Olive oil x 1 - buy from cooking npc in any city

                  Salt x 2 - buy from cooking npc in any city

Tip : I cook 8000 dishes worth of materials during overnight afk session, only when dressing in storage is running low.

2.6.2 Main dishes

Now finally we are ready to cook the 5 main dishes required for Mediah meals. I cook one main dish per day, and put them together on the 5th or 6th day into mediah meals.

Day 1 - Exotic herbal wine : Dough x 3 - already prepared from processing section of the guide

                                                Essence of Liquor x 1 - already prepared from sub dish section of the guide

                                                Leavening agent x 2 - buy from cooking npc in any city

                                                Mineral water x 5 - buy from cooking npc in any city

Tip : Cook 2000 dishes worth of materials at a time which get you around 5300 to 5800 regular dishes and around 1000 to 1300 speicial dishes.

Day 2 - Oatmeal : Grain flour x 9 - already prepared from processing section of the guide

                               Milk x 3 - buy from market place or gather with alt chars

                               Honey x 2 - get from nodes

                               Blue or Green Onion x 1 - get via farming section of the guide.

Tip : Cook 1500 dishes worth of materials at a time which get you around 3900 to 4300 regular dishes and 500 to 600 special dishes.

Day 3 - Lean meat salad : Meat x 8 - by now you should have already done 3 days of gathering meats which should give you over 15000 meats if you following this guide.

                                            Vinegar x 2 - already prepared from sub dishes section of the guide

                                            Blue or green Pepper x 1 - get from farming section of the guide

                                            Dressing x 4 - already prepared from sub dishes section of the guide

Tip : Cook 1000 dishes worth of materials at a time which get you around 2600 to 3000 regular dishes and 500 to 700 special dishes.

Day 4 Grilled sausage : Meat x 6 - by now you should have already done 4 days of gathering meat but spent 8000 on previous dish, so you should still have 12000 meats.

                                        Blue or green pepper x 1 - get from farming section of the guide

                                        White onion x 1 - recommended to buy from market place, but you can also farm it if you really want to

                                        Salt x 2 - buy from cooking npc in any city

Tip : Cook 2000 dishes worth of materials at a time which get you around 5300 to 5800 regular dishes and around 1000 to 1300 speicial dishes.

Day 5 Dark Puding : Blood x 7 - on day 5 you should gather bloods, if you cannot gather 7000 in one session, gather some with alts or do an extra day of gathering blood

                                   Bird meat x 5 - get Chicken from nodes

                                   Oatmeal x 1 - get from Day 1 cooking of main dish section of the guide

                                   Pickled Vegetable x 1 - get from sub dishes section of the guide

Tip : Cook 1000 dishes worth of materials at a time which get you around 2600 to 3000 regular dishes and 500 to 700 special dishes.

2.6.3 Mediah meal

Now that you got the main dishes needed for the meal ready, you can either cook them into mediah meal on day 5 or day 6 depending on your afk schedule, meals give a lot more cooking experience than other dishes, so you would want to pop any extra experience buff you have when you cooking meals, ideally you want those buffs for other cooking too, but its even more important when you cooking the final meal.

Mediah meal  : Dark Pudding x 1

                          Oatmeal x 1

                          Grilled sausage x 2

                          Lean meat salad x1

                          Exotic herbal wine x 2

Afterward you can then cook all the higher grade main dishes together for more mediah meals, each higher grade dish = 2 x regular dish, meaning you only need to use 1 x Grilled sausage and 1 x Exotic herbal wine when using higher grade main dishes to cook mediah meals. 

Depending on your weight, you can either cook 1000 dishes worth of materials or 2000 at a time, how much mediah meals you get highly depend on your cooking mastery and our beloved RNG, I usually get around 8400+ mediah meals and 1700+ special meals after cooking all the regular dishes, then around 1700 meals and 360 special meals from higher grade main dishes. The exact amount you get will vary each time, but overall this method has been enough to sustain my daily Guru boxes for a few months now. If RNG didn't favor you and thus didn't have enough meat or dishes to sustain, just adjust to do a bit more gathering or cooking accordingly. Luckily when you have lower masteries, you normally would also have lower CP, thus have less box allowance per day to sustain, so it should all work out either way.

2.7 Delivering boxes

After getting all the mediah meals, you need to open processing window, choose imperial Cuisine to pack meals into Guru boxes, you can only do this if you are already Guru cook. It takes 15x regular mediah meal or 5x special mediah meal per Guru box, after you converted all your meals into Guru boxes, you can then start turning them in at Imperial delivery NPC which can be found in Heidel, Calpheon, Valencia, Kamasylvia and Duvencrune. Be sure to wear your cooking mastery cloth when delivering, as cooking mastery affects the amount of bonus profit you get per box, it is not a lot but still better than nothing.

Conclusion

Hope this guide has been helpful to those who are new to cooking and find it a bit too intimidating to tackle, if you have any further questions please leave them in the comment section or contact me in game via family name Mibu, goodluck adventurers.

nice work :) thanks