The Art of Cooking

A Mortal Online II Cooking Guide and Overview
By: Atticcuss Grandfall [MANA] | Discord (Metal597 #9606)

Abstract:

The purpose of this guide/overview is to rationalize, explain, and reveal the importance of cooking in Mortal Online II. The portion that is “overview” will answer/address frequent questions and sentiments from the community that I have seen regarding the system from personal experiences in game, pre-patch streams, forums, and the Chosen Alchemy discord. The portion that is “guide”, to avoid being redundant, will link Cooking for the Masses (A guide from Mortal Online I) and reveal some “proper” or “intended” recipes/dishes and the values of the unique dishes from each application (essentially converting the percentages to whole numbers with examples). This work recognizes a bias that supports the current cooking system with very little critique, and again, seeks to rationalize the current system. Improvements can and should be made, however, sparingly. The underlying aim of this work is to serve as an advanced reference, help those that wish to cook, and improve the Mortal Online II economy and player experience regarding food.

Overview:

• “What purpose does cooking serve/what does cooking do?”
  
  • Cooking or rather cooked ingredients are used to restore your character’s reserve pools. When you perform an action that costs reserves such as running, jumping, blocking, swinging or charging a weapon, taking damage, casting spells, and dying your primary reserve bars (the red health, yellow stamina, and blue mana bars) will lower and refill overtime from a skill or resting. This refill will drain from its respective reserve pool (found under “Statistics” on the character sheet [tab or c]. Should your reserve pools drop past 25% of their max you will suffer debuffs and grey bars. These debuffs will limit how fast you regain each primary bar while the grey bar (a grey section of the primary bars) will limit your max usable health, stamina, and mana.
    
  • Cooking can also be used to heal yourself directly and overtime, modify your character via growth and shrink food, as well as obviously gain weight and lose weight.
  
  
• “Cooking is useless/ Advanced Cooking [primary skill] is useless.”
  
  • The cooking system, even currently as-is, is far from useless. Having and carrying “proper” food will give you a great advantage on other players who must rest for long periods of time to regain reserves while experiencing content in game especially for extended pvp such as sieges and farming dungeons. Also, to note, eating is much faster than the Shamanistic Clade Gift and others similar to it and not every clade has such a gift for reserves.
    
  • The advanced cooking primary skill is plenty useful for those that truly cook and want to explore cooking. The thought that the “best dishes require less than 3 ingredients” is insane. With the simple observation that cooking is similar to alchemy one should easily be able to see that there are benefits, secrets, and better results to be yielded from more than 8 ingredients, at times. The skill also improves the quality of one’s cooking, making it essential for cooks similar to the lore of their ingredients.
  
  
• “Why waste profession skill points in any cooking primary when the best foods are Fried Ambrosial Pig, Roasted Spelt, and Fermented Cream and Ichor?”
  
  • 1. If cooking is not your profession, you obviously won’t devote points to it. 2. If it is or is something that you are interested in you should know that these at a glance may seem to be the most effective foods but are in fact not 3. Food in game is so essential that everyone at some level should be able to easily produce results, without an extreme time investment or point investment, for the sake of having a chance to play a character at full primary reserves without grey bars
    
  • The reason that these foods are lacking will be explained at the end of the overview and in the guide portion –

Rationale (Overview cont.)

• “Why is it that recipes are averaged down in nourishment values instead of multiplied?”
  
  • To clarify, this is a question I formed from interpreting a common critique of the cooking system. Namely this response seeks to address the belief that cooking any number of ingredients, especially when the combination creates an application specific dish (such as the cooking pot’s dumplings), should have higher nourishment values than one ingredient dishes such as roasted spelt.
    
    • The rationale that I can see behind this is at face value Mortal Online II’s call to realism and role play. However, it transcends this simple reasoning when the function of the applications and ingredients themselves are considered. The function of the cooking applications determines the extent that the three nourishment values are modified. This is what causes you to hear and see that the turn-spit is used for “stamina foods”, while the fermentation jar is used for “mana foods”, etc. The ingredients fall into a category in game that also affects their cooked nourishment values. For example, vegetables will double if not triple (at least) their stamina nourishment value once cooked and things organic or inorganic that wouldn’t seem edible will have this effect regarding mana (i.e., ichor, dental material, fuel [wood, coal, etc.], etc.) With this in mind and the knowledge of cooking sharing most alchemic modifiers, it makes sense for ingredients to dilute each other when cooked in dishes, especially when the tradeoff is a higher nourishment value elsewhere.

I cook and consume dumplings (as an example) as a resurrection food or a roaming food, its function is not to surpass roasted spelt in stamina, but provide the health nourishment that lone grain cannot while retaining fairly high stamina

• "What are some good cooking recipes/ what purpose does cooking outside of the big 3 (noted above) serve?"
  
  • Cooking should produce dishes that efficiently fit the needs of players in multiple situations. For my style of cooking these recipes include what I call resurrection foods (foods that restore health and stamina nourishment equally based on a character’s reserve pool values) and roaming foods (food to eat overtime while exploring the world of Nave, they restore reserves based on character’s build). Examples will be included in the “guide” portion.

Guide:

Originally posted by Golgotha:

Cooking for the Masses[www.starvault.se]

Here is the link to the famous Cooking for the Masses guide from Mortal Online I. It is a wonderful in-depth guide for single character cooking and extraction. As it is not the aim of the guide you are currently reading, this guide reveals the “nitty-gritty” of cooking through how to read reserves, a majority of the skills needed, ingredient types and stats, the cooking applications and their function/recipe percentages, modifiers, and extraction paths.

Effective Cooking:

The reason for this section is to improve the Mortal Online II cooking market by making players aware of what exists and why. The dishes listed here are a small, basic sample of my own and are meant to convey an idea, more than state exactly what and how much to use.

It should be mentioned that cooking “proper”, should restore the reserves needed as close to full as possible AND AVOID WEIGHT GAIN. Weight gain occurs from eating past the max limit of your health nourishment AND stamina nourishment pools (mana nourishment does not affect weight). Weight is all too easily gained by consuming Fried Ambrosial Pig and Roasted [insert flour here] and fails to efficiently replenish other reserves. I ask you, the Mortal Online community, why pay for and carry three dishes when you can save money, inventory space, and time with one?

Examples (Guide cont.)

Resurrection Food:










*Upon death a player will lose around 500 health and 3000 stamina reserves and gain a little more than 100 hunger. With a player’s actions taken into account before death (the additional reserves lost and hunger gained from existing), these dishes attempt to evenly restore reserves after resurrecting. Foods such as this are especially relevant for sieges/wars, and high pvp engagement (multiple deaths = high grey bar). For ease, I usually make health nourishment 10% of the stamina nourishment, however more accurate adjustments can be made based on the build of the character.

Roaming Food:









*Considering that stamina is the reserve that players use up the most, these types of dishes avoid weight gain and give slight health and mana nourishment. The idea here is that as your playing and partaking in pve/pvp content, you will use all reserves to some extent and this food will keep you from limiting your primary reserves.

<Although this is a single ingredient dish, it is more effective than Roasted Spelt due to the harder chance to gain weight and the direct healing properties. Most characters like archers and foot fighters look for just “stamina food”, as these characters are likely smaller (up to the stout weight class), a food that has little to no chance to affect their weight and still gives decent stamina nourishment is best.







Food for: Foot Fighters (tank/stamina drain heavy characters)





Food for: Mage Hybrids







Food For: Mounted Fat Mages









* “Battle Food”, as coined in the Chosen Alchemy Discord, does exist and is one of the main reasons to have advanced cooking. While you might not actually eat in combat, this food can be useful for resurrections and lack of bandages and healing magic. **this was made with seadew leaves (direct healing: .40). While not a great example, this is here to show that direct healing can be raised past the single ingredient’s stat and much further with more ingredients (that I didn’t have at the time. . .) and more yet to be put in game. **the same for food with Heal Over Time

General Information:

Some Application Specifics (minimum yield):

• Cooking Pot
  
  • Dumpling
    
    • 3 flour, 2 liquid, 1 filler
  • Battered and Deep Fried (Nuggets)
  • 3 oil, 2-3 flour, 1 filler
• Turn Spit
  
  • “(Fuel source) roasted (filler)”
  • 1 fuel, 2-18 filler
• Baking Stone
  
  • Bread
    
    • 4 flour, 1 liquid
• Baking Pot
  
  • Pie
    
    • 2 liquid, 4 flour grain, 3 oil, 1-11 filler
• Fermentation Jar
  
  • Beer
    
    • 3 liquid, 2 flour
      
    • 4 liquid, 1 flour

*filler = any other ingredient(s)
*fuel source = wood, coal, bor


Tips:

• You can cook with 98% of materials in game (this includes flora, fauna, animal materials [scales, horns, bones, skin, etc.], rocks, metals, reagents, etc.
  
• To mitigate weight gain, watch the statistics page of the character sheet while eating
  
• Salts include: salt, bor, cleansed herbs

Food "ranking" (health nourishment scaling)
1) Ambrosial
2) Exquisite
3) Luscious
4) Salutary
5) Scrumptious
6) Mouth Watering
7) Delicate
8) Appetizing
9) Delectable
10) Appealing
11) Enjoyable
12) Sapid
13) Savory
14) Piquant
15) Tempting
16) Inviting
17) Experimental
18) Esculent
19) Digestible
20) Unfamiliar
21) Eccentric
22) Strange
23) Creepy
24) Uncanny
25) Abominable
26) Gruesome
27) Repugnant
28) Appalling
29) Horrific
30) Nauseating
31) Ghastly
32) Abhorrent
33) Disgusting
34) Vile
35) Inedible
*Possibly missing 1 or 2 designations
**The designation is based on the health nourishment that the combination of ingredients has. For single ingredient, designation seems assigned and is the same across cooking applications. A higher “ranked” name does not mean better depending on the goal/prioritized stats of the dish.

Updates (per patch notes):

Patch 0.1.9.10 (11/01/2021

• Springbok is the "new" pig
  
  • The cooked health nourishment values have basically switched, between pig and springbok, and have made the rest of venison lore better than pork lore. This presents a greater incentive to buy food or travel to kill more active prey (bush pig, razorback, springbok, etc). Please regard any pig recipes mentioned above as springbok for accurate stat comparison.
  

Conclusion:

Thank you for reading! Since we are missing probably around more than 80% of cookable ingredients currently, I hope to update this as more flora and fauna, the food poisoning system, sophistication system, and others (weight loss, heal over time, taste identification, etc.) are added to Mortal Online II. If you learned nothing from this, I at least hope that it was a good read. I’d like for this as well as the current system to mean more than just rp to players, but at the end of the day people will make what they want and eat it as well. Happy Cooking!

Cooking Conversations

Ideas from Hielo and my response [mortalonline2.com]

[PROGM]

**North Order Объявляет набор закалённых в боях игроков а так же новичков .**

📌 Наш стиль игры:
> -Прежде всего основной упор именно на PVPVE.
> -Работа в команде.
> Сыгранность PVP актива.
📌 Требования:
> Активные командные игроки, ориентированные на командное PvP/PvE
> Готовность учиться и улучшать свои навыки
> Наличие Discord, микрофона и нахождения во время игры в Discord ОБЯЗАТЕЛЬНО!
{LINK REMOVED}https://discord.gg/BavsX8PPBX

[xHEINZx]

Why ppl dont simply make a spreadsheet?

[B435YN7TH371C4]

What counts as oil in game? like tallow? cooked tallow? rock oil? pressed oils?

[Curandas]

Half the appeal of Cooking and Alchemy in this game is about creating recipes. A top cook can actually have his own secret recipes, so having them online for everyone to see and use without any effort is dumb. I'm glad this guide is not sharing the exact recipes and I hope they will never make one that does.

[Prometheus]

spot on and exemplary but instead of showing results how about sharing exact recipes not just general info just saying ...

[Levvy]

as I played, I slowly began to realise that cooking was more important than I first thought.. thanks for the guide! :D (always nice to have a another craft that doesn't take primaries)

[Crixus]

Thanks for your guide. I'm trying to figure out how the different cooking tools affect the ingredients' raw value. Is there a formula, or a logic of some sort?

What cooking tool is best for what?

[Der Kruker]

disagree with the conclusions. right now the simple single ingredient foods are (sadly) the best. the only reason not to craft them would be if the resource is harder to find/get. grains/flour can be a real pain to gather so diluting them with easier to obtain ingredients can stretch their value.

other foods are, of course, preferable for rp or otherwise feeling smug about your cooking ability but provide wasted bag space and wasted nutrition values if you dont happen to deplete your reserves in the way your food expects. direct healing foods can have a niche use but are almost certainly better used in potions.

if/when sophistication returns there may be use for other food styles but until then, most people will find simple single ingredient foods the most convenient

[billbonty]

excellent guide. Gordon Ramsey would be proud

[Seba]

Thanks for the guide, appreciate it.