Chef Archive

I got Novice Chef two or three weeks ago, and spend a decent part of my play time just crafting. And yet... not even a fourth of the way to my first skill in any of the four trees. Am I doing something wrong here?

To super-grind I just make Charde... I hate the idea of asking for a way to "power grind", as I've never liked the grind scene... but I'm getting really tired of making Charde and Meatlump.

The popular item to grind is wastril bread.

And don't feel bad about grinding...until you get some cooking tree boxes, anything you make is pretty useless.

The xp grind is simply horrible for novice chef. The "best" choice depends on whether you want it faster (in relation to time spent crafting) or resource-lite. Wastril bread uses the most resources, so you get the most xp per bread crafted. **However**, there seems to be a bug where you don't get the normal 2xp per resource. I get 70xp (73 with practice), but it uses 45 resources. Looking at a couple of chef guides, it looks like it used to use (or was incorrectly reported as using) 35 resources: 20 cereal, 5 cereal, 10 fruit. The current recipe is 20 cereal, 15 cereal, 10 fruit.The other novice chef recipes I've tried do correctly give the expected 2xp/resource,so soyprois my staple grind.

Now if you have massive amounts of cereal and fruit, wastril bread will get you to the next skill with fewer crafting sessions (438 to 457 depending on practice use). The 42 xp I get from soypro means I have to click through the tool 762 times. Hmm, after doing that calculation, maybe resource efficiency isn't that important....

I've also been using charde to use up my low-quantity leftover resources. I had somestuff (meats, hides, bones, some crappy ore)sitting in my safety deposit for some time, just because I didn't really have anything to do with them and didn't want to just destroy them. Since charde uses such low quantities of generic types ("organic" and "mineral" instead of "fruit" and "metal"), I used these up for grind fodder.

Oh, and one thing you should watch out for: I've hada couple of times where I'd craft wastril bread and only get 20 foodxp for it. I think the xp paymentwas stuck at that level from some previous chardes. It cleared up when I took a shuttle to another planet (I was using the ship wait time to grind).

And finally, if it turns out that any of my numbers are wrong, base it on the fact that I'm being a slacker and reading the forums from work where I can't check the details in-game.

I did Wastril Bread until I got to Entrees I. Then I did Stewed Gwouch(still do in fact) because it uses 30 ORGANIC(Heck, I was using some cheap wood I found on the market last night LOL) and 20 water. Water is probably the hardest resource to get large quantities of, but you can get immense amounts of organic pretty easily. It gives 100 exp for 50 resources. Yes, food isn't really worth it until you can get experimentation points. The only food I've seen so far is so out of whack. Just got Mixology II and the ability to make Tatooine Sunburns. Drink 2 and you have +3000 to action secondary stat and +3000 to health secondary stat(-200 to mind, but you could probably make a food that brings this back up). This is literally about 10 times better than anything around it. If you are looking to sell something as a chef, this is probably the easiest.

I did wastrils, and worked up desserts first.

At desserts II, I got dweezel. You craft a puffcake, which is 20 wheat, 10 oats, and 10 water, then you craft the dweezel, which is 20 fruit, 20 tubers, and 10 berries. That is a total of 90 resources, and gave 240 XP per dweezel.

I crafted a few thousand of those to get to Master Chef.

Here are a couple of tricks. You get a 5% practice bonus, which is about 12 XP, but, if you can get a creature handler to feed them to their pet, you get 52 XP for usage. And pets can eat everything, they do not get full. So, I would fill up a bunch of bags, then my CH friend would take the bags, and feed them to his pet. That way, a bag of 50 dweezels would net you about 14K XP.

Also, if you have a bio-engineer friend you want to help, get them to craft you bags of micronutritional supplements. You can use it as an optional component in the puffcake, and they get 150usage XP for you cooking something with it.

***DISCLAIMER*** I submitted a bug report and opened a ticket about the pet thing...not sure if it is working the way intended. But, until they make a declaration about it, I would recommend becoming very friendly with a CH, becuase they can give you a load of XP over just destroying the stuff, or even practicing.

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Here are a couple of tricks. You get a 5% practice bonus, which is about 12 XP, but, if you can get a creature handler to feed them to their pet, you get 52 XP for usage. And pets can eat everything, they do not get full. So, I would fill up a bunch of bags, then my CH friend would take the bags, and feed them to his pet. That way, a bag of 50 dweezels would net you about 14K XP.

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BING wow man the light just flashed on in my head. Thank you SO much for that tip. My son is a CH and it looks like its time to force him to sit with me while I'm crafting =)

He may hate you know, but I thank you SO much. I hope this still works.

its a pastrebread not a puff cake

pastrebreads the components puffcake is something that takes pastrebread

In the next "big" patch, you won't get usage exp for your own components anymore, so dweezel will go down in exp

I spend roughly 1 hour a day "grinding", in that time I can make 20k exp (110 or so mists). Thats 2.3k corn, water and 4.6k wheat, which is around what my harvesters can bring in. The rest of my time is spent doing missions to pay for harvesters, can gathering the resources.

At novice chef I did wastril, like everyone, but at only 70xp chunks it wasn't as fast, so I tended to get discouraged and only do 1/2 an hour at a time. The glut of CH's out there made it fairly easy to move though, this was before practice mode, and I couldn't bring myself to destroy anything I had made

First Tier was Mixology I, I switched to Dueterium Pyro, same total resource as Wastil but 30 more exp (15 cereal, 15 metal, 15 gas I think it is), this sped things up quite a bit, and around the same time practice mode went in, which was good because pets can't drink, only eat

Mixology II was next, and Ithorian Mist.. That's gotten me to Deserts III so far..

Last night Imoved all my flora harvesters to fruit and berries, and I'll be doing Kiwik Clusjo Swirl - exactly the same total resource and xp as mist, and the same ratio (40/20/20), but it's food, so creature handlers can be satisfied (my pa has tons of these guys) and the stats are semi-useful for entertainers. Won't be turning practice mode on again for a long time I don't think there's anything better in Deserts IV, and I'm doing a few boxes in cooking before getting Entrees or more Mixology, so it'll be swirls for some time to come..

HAHA...

You would think after a few K of them, I would remember pastebread instead of puffcakes...

P.S. I finally received a response about the CH thing...I do believe that it is not as intended, and it is being submitted to devs. Use it while you can.

Also, I crafted the kiwic clusjo swirls, but the XP/resourceratio wasn't as great...however, that may change with the usage XP nerf with subcomponent usage (although you may be able to work out trades with another chef to trade bags of pastebread...)