Nutrient processor and iteration cronus

[Horror Pigeon]

Worst interface in the universe. tried to teleport dishes back to my ship to
get those off his 3 item list but they still count, superseding other foods in
my inventory. only one time was he impressed, it was with churned butter
that I made with creature milk. I tried to create random combinations in the
nutrient processor but they are dead ends. need to somehow learn cooking
actual dishes. Idk what end reward awaits with cronus, just messing around
for now getting paltry sums and hearing him freak out over various foods

also iteration ares, he never has any mods above b class, maybe never will
could be that these characters await updates. my playtime is 121 hours

[Dirak2012]

Cronus will randomly like and dislike dishes, and give you some nanites, thete is nothing more to it. The cooking part of the game is basically useless, unless it's fun for you.
There are tons of activities in the game that are very basic, and will most likely never be updated.

[Zigamus Wizard]

to HIDE things from him place them in a storage box, he can't see that, or place them in the ingredient storage in the nutrient processor.

[Other]

Ares never has high-class mods. What he does have is all the types in one spot, so if you have never found a vendor selling, say, Exosuit Toxic protection mods, you know you can get one from him, even if it is the worst class for the type. Because his mods are low-class, they are also cheap, so if you want to buy something and break it down for the parts (Cadmium perhaps), he is a good spot to shop.

[Horror Pigeon]

Ty for posting. I guess cooking is incomplete so I will stop for now. It seemed
fun... but not when I now know it is absent of content and success is random
I'd rather get back to that exo-craft terminal technician's missions, then

[Horror Pigeon]

Good point breaking down mods for uncommon materials. the only time
I needed cadmium was for the emeril drive. I got it, not by harvesting it,
but either a mission reward or by helping an npc. Sorry for rambling, this
game calls me like what oblivion was when I first played it in early 2011

[Praxis-W]

Originally posted by Horror Pigeon:

Ty for posting. I guess cooking is incomplete so I will stop for now. It seemed
fun... but not when I now know it is absent of content and success is random
I'd rather get back to that exo-craft terminal technician's missions, then

Part of me wants to argue that cooking isn't incomplete; there's dozens if not hundreds of individual dishes you can make by combining items in the food processor.
However, despite all that variety, there's only three uses for food in this game.
1. Feed to Chronos for nanites.
2. Feed to living frigates to alter their stats.
3. Eat them yourself to recharge your exosuit, though few of them do that well.

So, I'd say it's "complete", just not very useful.

[esturias]

Originally posted by Praxis-W:

So, I'd say it's "complete", just not very useful.

It's one of the many horribly half-assed features in the game. I normally like things like that, but in NMS it simply doesn't matter at all.
I like how there are so many - what first seems to be - "different" ingredients, but it simply doesn't matter. It's all WAY too generic. And the UI (one of my major gripes with the game) is horrible, too.
I used cooking at the start to earn a few M credits, but that's it. If at all, I only harvest wild plants when I directly bump into them.
Pretty sad.

[Smoking Flowerpot]

Early on in the game, Cronus can be useful for nanites. Even before getting hazard gloves for collecting the fancier vegetables, there's a dish that averages you about 100 nanites each with Cronus.

Gather a ton of cave marrow bulbs, and a ton of meat. You'll be making a sauce and a stew, then mixing them together to make Herb Encrusted Flesh.

2 marrow bulbs + 2 meats (or mordite) = an average of 100 nanites
200 marrows + 200 meats = 10,000 nanites
etc

Set up a bunch of nutrient processors. Then do the following:

1 - Process the cave marrows into Steamed Veggies. (each marrow needs processing twice for this, first turning them into an edible form of the marrow, then next turning them into steamed veggies)
2 - Process 2 steamed veggies together to make Flavoursome Sauce.
3 - Process 2 meats together to make Mystery Meat Stew (some mix with each other to make this, but other meats might need to be processed on their own into generic processed meat first, before they'll mix with the other meats). Mordite can also be processed a couple times until it turns into meaty chunks which can then be used for this.
4 - Process the mystery stew together with the flavoursome sauce to make Herb Encrusted Flesh. That's the finished product. It has the same icon as the unfinished mystery stew so careful not to mix them up.

With a bunch of nutrient processors set up, you can make a lot of the stuff in one sitting. After that, all you have to do is go feed them one by one to Cronus. Make sure you don't have any lesser foods on your person. Keep other foods on your freighter or inside the nutrient processor while you're feeding Cronus, or else they'll clog up the list of things you're trying to feed him, adding the extra annoying step of having to move down past the first item to get to the Herb Encrusted Flesh, if that's even on the list at all.

[Smoking Flowerpot]

The anomaly only has low class upgrades. For the better ones, you need to usually go to space stations.

[Smoking Flowerpot]

Here's a good cooking page. https://nomanssky.fandom.com/wiki/Cooking

Any of the foods that are themselves end products (not used as ingredients for further cooking), and which have gone through a lot of steps to make them, are good ones to try feeding Cronus. The herb encrusted flesh is my go-to favourite for high average amounts of nanites, but there are others as well.

[Smoking Flowerpot]

If you collect a lot of organ meat (livers for instance which are common from predators), they'll mix with themselves and each other to make Stewed Organs instead of mystery meat stew. You can use it the same way by mixing it with the flavoursome sauce. It will become Flavoursome Organs and brings in the nanites just as nicely as the herb encrusted flesh.

[Smoking Flowerpot]

If you can't find meats that mix well with each other to make a stew, just process the meat one extra time. The meats all turn into Processed Meat if you process them enough times, and you can always mix two of those in the processor to make a mystery meat stew.

[gussmed]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2855130580

While the title of the guide is “cooking for money,” I also cover Cronus and nanites.

Short version: you can make a huge amount of nanites with Cronus, but it’s incredibly tedious. The problem is you can only hand in one item at a time. Worse, if you don’t have the “Keep Talking Chef” mod, he kicks you out of the dialog after each one.

I’ve made 160K nanites in a couple of hours with Cronus, but it involved an unbelievable number of clicks.

The only positive thing is that he maxes out with some pretty low-level recipes, and you don’t need animal products to reach them.