I've had it my head to do this for awhile and thought this would be a good start and with feedback from you guys I can refine it further. The purpose of this guild will be to show you how to start cooking and at least supply yourself with high cost foods like Milk Tea and Serendia Special. You will be able to scale this up to whatever level of mass production you can handle. Cooking is energy intensive and to make a profit at it requires high level processing and several alts(3-5) to manage your farm and gather milk. You will also need a lot of storage. I recommend at least 150 energy and 100 CP before you start cooking seriously. You're going to need a basic node connection to set up and decide on what city you will be cooking out of. You will want a residence near because to do this with any speed, you will have to afk in bed to regain energy. I recommend connecting Olvia, Veila and Heidel with Heidel as your Kitchen. It has great CP:Storage ratio's and is near many necessary nodes. You can use Calpheon if you are already set up there, but it will take a bit more CP. Required Nodes: Casta Farm - Grapes - This is the only node that produces fruit in the game. Finto Farm - Grain and Chicken - Required for Eggs, Grain node is efficient Bartali Farm - Grain and Chicken - Required for Eggs, Grain node is efficient Alejandro Farm - Cooking Honey and Pumpkins - Honey is Vital and Pumpkins count as a Veg Any 3 Grain Nodes - Ive found that 3 Grain Nodes provides me with all I need. You may need more or less depending on your setup. For your workers take into consideration your play time. If you will be AFK a lot and aren't in a hurry, use giants to gather. If you're very active goblins are fine. Use humans for the Chicken. Luck will affect how many eggs you get. I recommend fishing for at least Blue level skilled workers. Optional Additions: I also connect Glish and use its level 3 toolshop to make Advanced Cooking Utensils. They have a ton or durability and reduce cooking time. They are great for long sessions. They require rough stone, melted iron shards, usable scanting, polished stone and rough stone. I use the stone from my Mog scrolls to make crafting these efficiently. Strong fences will allow you to farm all of your own ingredients instead of buying them off the MP. Farming strawberries can allow you to supplement your slow grape production. You will also occasionally need Garlic, Onions and Pepper, but they are cheap on the MP and Id rather save my energy. Sunflowers are also a key component in this setup and are another great source of income. I recommend at least 1 fence growing sunflowers at all times. Park Alts in Olvia for Milk and Farming. You will need Milk. You will need ALL of the Milk. The mini game requires 5 energy, will yield 5-10 milk based on RNG and awards no XP. There is no point to do this with your main because of the lack of XP, and your gathering level will not affect yield. Every 3 days I spend 600-800 energy from 3-4 alts milking for about an hour. Its tedious and annoying. It also necessary due to milk being one of the item gates. There is currently no other way to gather milk. Lynch Farm is worth possibly connecting but not necessary. It has all the sheep an Irish man could dream of. It also has goats, which when butchered turn out to be sheep. This will be your primary source of Red Meat. Also good for soft hides. Mechanics: As you level your cooking, you will have a chance per attempt to not use energy. This is important, and means that you dont want to start using expensive ingredients until you have the efficiency to make it worthwhile. Starting at skilled, you will have a chance to proc high quality dishes on items you make. You also have a chance per recipe to proc several turn in items that will award all sorts of things. This is one of the biggest advantages cooking has. The Turn Ins will give you Cooking XP, Contribution XP, Milk, Beer and Silver. The Grind Start with Beer. Cook nothing but Beer. Use what you need, sell the rest. As you level up, check your Black Spirit Guide and follow any cooking quests he gives you. Eventually you will get quests that take you to Calpheon. These will teach you the recipes for Tea, Grilled Sausage and Moist Milk Bread. Start stock piling all of these things. When Beer starts to slow down, start preparing stockpiles of other ingredients. I cook in rotation of 7-10 days. I do all my processing on a couple days, all my gathering on the next couple days, cooking prep for 2-3 days and then cooking my main dishes the last couple of days. You also want to level your processing. When you have extra energy, grind grain into flour. Never stop. You will need an endless supply of this. When your processing is higher, start shaking the Flour together with Mineral Water to make Dough. You will never have enough dough. On my current rotation, for the yields I want to make, I process 5,000 dough. From here we want to take advantage of how Cooking XP works. You gain XP based on the level of ingredients you use. Ingredients bought from the vendor are worth very little. Ingredients you gather are worth more, ingredients you process and cook are worth the most. Our goal here to start making and stockpiling the ingredients to make Serendia Special, Milk and Sute Tea. You cant make Serendia Special until you hit Professional. Serendia Special 1 Ham Sandwich 1 Beehive Cookie 2 Fruit Wine 2 Boiled Bird Eggs 1 Meat Croquette Dulfy has a great guide on making tea, I recommend using that since it's way better than anything I could do. Beehive Cookie's, Boiled Bird Eggs and Meat Croquette's are simple to make, but ingredient intensive. They require lots of eggs, dough and meat all of which are gate items. Beehive Cookie's sell great on their own. They are also useful if you fish. Ham Sandwiches and Fruit wine are complex dishes and require other dishes to make. Ham Sandwich 2 Moist Milk Bread 2 Grilled Sausage 5 Vegtable(Pumpkin) 4 Eggs (Ugh) Fruit Wine 1 Exotic Herbal Wine 5 Fruit 3 Essence of Liquor 2 Mineral Water For these recipes you will want to grind on and stock pile Moist Milk Bread, Grilled Sausage, Exotic Herbal Wine and Essence of Liquor. This will start to eat into your egg supply. I buy eggs on the Market Place whenever I see them, but I push XP more than profit. Its up to you to decide what you want to focus. Grind and stock up on these items until you hit Professional. Avoid selling the items. Continue processing and gathering flour, dough, meat and milk. Once you hit Professional it will become a process of setting up a cycle and repeating it. You will get the quest to make Calpheon Special first at Professional however, all the Specials are unlocked at this point. Just start cooking them. I hope this guide helps. Id love any feed back on what additions would help you guys and if I could make anything more clear.
Thanks for taking the time to put this together, I have been wanting to get into cooking but was unsure what to farm/where to start. I appreciate it!
I hope it helps. Cooking is my favorite part of the game and while it can be a bit tedious, if everyone can at least supply their own buff foods that would help a lot in GvG
