Calling all cooks!

[shinami]

What do you use to track all of your ingredient and dish needs for weekly cooking? Is it a website, your own spreadsheet, or something else entirely? I'm currently looking around for a calculator of sorts that tells me how many ingredients is used for X dish, the total Y dishes needed to cook X, and the total Z ingredients needed to cook Y so I can cook Z.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that, if necessary, I don't mind setting up my own spreadsheet.

Let's use Valencia Meals for guru cooking boxes as a concrete example of why I consider the above being important to know. BDO Dae does tell me the number of Z ingredients to cook X Valencia Meals. What BDO Dae doesn't tell me is how many of each Y cooked dish is needed to cook X Valencia Meals. I.E. How many Teff Bread and Freekeh Snake Stews do I need to cook so I can cook Y Couscous, King of Jungle Hamburg, and Teff Sandwich so I can cook Z Valencia Meals? This would be necessary information because Teff Bread is used to cook King of Jungle Hamburg and Teff Sandwich. Freekeh Snake Stew is used to cook Couscous and Teff Sandwich.

The above is highly important so I know my baseline on how much of each dish to cook and how much of each ingredient I need to buy/gather on a weekly basis. Otherwise, I might end up focusing too much on cooking one dish and not enough on cooking another dish. The same can be said for buying/gathering too much or too little of ingredients.

I'm not looking to be hyper efficient in things. I just think we can all agree that traveling 5-10 minutes one way to harvest 20~ meat for those last few dishes for cooking weekly boxes is extra time we'd all rather spend by having fun with grinding/lifeskilling.

[Tsel13]

I use the following links:
Altar of Gaming - Cooking [bdo.altarofgaming.com]
BDO Database - Cooking [bddatabase.net]
Incendar - BDO Cooking [incendar.com]

[Nishi Kinuyo]

I got my own excel sheet for my most-used recipes.
Ditto for al-kimiya, btw.

[Suijin Ryuu]

just buy the things and cook the valencia one

[Jenquai]

After the amount of time it took to reach G50, I got tired of cooking and just buy the meals and box them up...

[shinami]

Ok, Tsel's links were pretty helpful even though they didn't show the information I wanted to know. So, I bit the bullet and put time into making my own spreadsheet. It just needs to be updated to account for the average cooked dish per action and bad RNG with the average dish bit to be finished.

Originally posted by Suijin Ryuu:

just buy the things and cook the valencia one

I may make a mistake or two but let's take a look at this approach. It would take 8/15 of each dish, rounded up from 7.2, with an average of 2.5 dishes per cooked action to make 18 Val Meals. That's because "18 val meals / 2.5 avg dishes = 7.2 actions needed". Let's use the average to see how much it'd cost to make a single crate.

8 Teff Sandwich: 293.6k(36.7k)
8 KoJ: 488k(61k)
8 Couscous: 192.8k(24.1k)
15 Fig Pie: 105k(7k)
15 Date Palm Wine: 74.7k(4980)
Total cost: 1,154.1k aka a little below 1.2mil

The base sell price for Guru boxes is 320k and is boosted to 800k by the 250% trade price increase you see in the Imperial menu. The bonus from your Cooking Mastery only increases the base selling price of your boxes. So, let's do some basic math to find out how much of a bonus we'd need to break even.

1,154.1k - 800k = 354.1k needed in profit from mastery bonus to break even
354.1k / 320k = 110.65% increase to base price

You would need a mastery bonus of 110.6% to box selling just to break even with the market prices of today. I may have f***ed up my math somewhere but you get the general idea. The example also doesn't factor in the cost of cooking stations, cost of each action on said station, and more. This is why having information laid out in a presentable way that's easy to read is more than just nice to have. It can mean the difference between making good profits and losing out without being any the wiser.

Originally posted by Jenquai:

After the amount of time it took to reach G50, I got tired of cooking and just buy the meals and box them up...

Hilariously, buying 18 Val Meals is actually much cheaper, at about 600k, than buying the dishes required to make 18 Val Meals. So, I don't blame you there at all! Also, it's probably been a while since you reached it but congrats on G50 cooking! That's really impressive!

[Suijin Ryuu]

i have that mastery bonus , and your example doesn't factor the amount of time you will lose , maybe is fun now but after make it 1000 times is not , also is not hard make guru 50 is just repeat the same dish for hours , i made beer for months and made guru 50 also more lvl more special meals and there is where you make more money

[Jenquai]

Originally posted by shinami:

Hilariously, buying 18 Val Meals is actually much cheaper, at about 600k, than buying the dishes required to make 18 Val Meals. So, I don't blame you there at all! Also, it's probably been a while since you reached it but congrats on G50 cooking! That's really impressive!

True. Lots of variables at work determining the best path for each person. I'm not a min/max type, so just figure the best profit window with time spent and go with it. I don't even spend time checking for best meals to buy. I stick to Special Valencia meals and that's it - unless the market changes dramatically and my stock is depleting rapidly.

I maintain at least a one week supply of meals (at 226 boxes/day) and generally stock up to a month's worth of boxes. It used to be more profitable at about $140 million/day but now hangs just over $100 million/day. I hate grinding, so it works for me. Yes, I hate grinding and play BDO - something wrong with that picture... I'm old, I'm allowed.

Yes, it's been awhile... Thanks for the congrats. It's not hard, just takes a lot of time. Suijin Ryuu used beer - I used vinegar. Both of them can contribute greatly to the quickness of acquiring Witch's Delicacy. I stuck with vinegar because I could AFK longer.

[Fredericks of Cursewood]

I tend to cook whatever I have time for. Typically, I make Calpheon meals for Guru boxes. I know this is a surprise to the Valencia or nothing crowd, but it really fits into daily operation and I can source 90% of the products myself with very little time spent gathering. Between my farm and milk alts, I can get 5000+ milk a day which gets afk processed into cheese and butter. Eggs and honey are the only real bottlenecks and I try to have a good supply at all times. Meat pie is the only sub that requires gathering and it only 5 units of meat which is pretty easy to do even without having a lot of gathering mastery.

If price of cheese and butter start to skyrocket, I will sell those and switch to another one Guru meal like Mediah or Serendia or maybe something else.

Occasionally, I will go into the Simple Crons mode and make Knights Combat Rations and Mediah meals and then buy the Valencia off the market. Both the Knights Combat Rations and Mediah have Dark Pudding as a sub and it can be a bit tricky at times to get it off of the market. I usually do this when I can make 300K on a cron after taking out the tax, cron spice, and the price of the valencia meals. That leaves about 75K for each Mediah and Knights Combat Ration that goes into them. Granted there is a lot afk time in making crons, but it is something that I can set up do a for a few hours and go do something else.

[Spectre]

Valencia meals are, and have been for ages, a bad option (financially) to cook from base ingredients, but also the only meal where base ingredients can be bought straight from MP. Which makes sense, because the only reason people sell King of Jungle Hamburg, is that they'd lose money making them into Valencia meals.

It gets profitable at high guru/gear, but still isn't something you'd choose to spam as it's a relatively low margin.

Really, the best use of val meals is as something to spam for the fastest exp if you don't mind losing money in the process.

Personally, I like Ody meals for boxes if you want to cook them more or less from the base up. There's a more overall cook time, but if you do that semi-AFK, farm onion/delotia, PO or dump energy on river water and filter it AFK, and set workers on bracken, you're not going to make masses, but you will make enough for 200+ daily box turn-ins without much actual non-AFK effort (esp. since wolf blood is now dirt cheap), and there's very little CM/gathering time cost compared to other red-meat heavy options. It's also not milk-gated either, except for the oatmeal, and you'll generate enough witches delicacies to cover that with interest.

This takes more effort/time than just buying val ingredients and cooking, but if you want quick, you may as well just buy meals and sell them as boxes, which still makes profit.