Before you go off on a quest to hunt a monster or explore a new area on an expedition, you should eat something. No matter where you are, there should be somewhere you can have a meal before venturing out into the wild. Eating meals boosts your stats and has the potential to provide additional food skills based on the ingredients used and the freshness of those ingredients.
It generally costs money to order food, but you can also use Caravan Points or vouchers. Save your vouchers since you don’t come across them often, especially early in the game. However, spend your Caravan Points whenever you have some available. You can use money to buy almost everything in the game, but Caravan Points can only be used at specific establishments, and buying food is one of the ways you can use Caravan Points.
Anything you eat will last for one quest. Not all attribute boosts you gain from eating will last the entire length of the quest, but as soon as the quest is complete, any lingering effects will wear off. The effect of food will also wear off if you save and exit your game. For these reasons, it’s important to only have a meal before going off on a hunt. Don’t waste your food by eating, then saving your game and exiting.
Ingredients
Ingredients have levels just like your character. As you complete certain quests (generally for the chef), you’ll upgrade the quality of the ingredients. The stars next to the ingredients indicate their quality. The more stars, the higher quality of the item. The higher the quality of the item, the more potent the effect of the stat boost you’ll receive. Higher level ingredients will give you an additional health boost beyond the other effects of the food.
You generally choose two ingredients when cooking. The ingredients you select determine the stat boosts obtained and the potential food skills as well. When you select the second or final item you will see what that combination of ingredients will give you. In some cases you may not see all of the potential stat boosts, but the more you cook, the less mystery you’ll have while selecting ingredients.
Cooking Methods
Once you’ve selected the ingredients you wish to cook with, you must then select how you wish to prepare the meal. There are four different methods you can use: fry, sauté, steam or stew. How you cook the meal will determine the food skills you can obtain. You’re provided with a list of abilities that change as you move from one cooking type to the next. Scroll down to highlight the ability in order to see what affect it will have on your character. It’s a good idea to know what kind of monsters you’ll fight before you cook the meal. This will help you determine which food skills will help you the most.
Food Skills
There are a variety of food skills that you can obtain based on the ingredients and which cooking method you use. You won’t always activate food skills, but using fresh ingredients increases the chance of this happening. There are fixed food skills and daily food skills. Fixed skills are based on the ingredients used and will always be the same anytime you use the same pairing of ingredients. Daily skills change after every quest and can be somewhat random. It’s best to use the fixed skills to determine the ingredients you want to use, then check all of the daily skills to see if there’s anything that would be of extra benefit on your upcoming hunt.
Vouchers
Throughout most of the game you will come across two different food vouchers: a regular voucher and a gourmet voucher. You generally acquire these vouchers by completing quests for the chef, but you will occasionally come across a voucher through various other means. Using either voucher makes your meal free, meaning you will not have to spend money or Caravan Points on your food.
A regular voucher guarantees that all ingredients used will be fresh. Fresh ingredients guarantee a stamina boost no matter what combination of ingredients or cooking method used. Using fresh ingredients also increases the odds of activating food skills. If you use a gourmet voucher your ingredients are always fresh and you are guaranteed to activate any food skills listed.
It’s best to use a voucher when you know you need the maximum stat boost from the meal. This usually occurs when you’re about to hunt a new monster or a monster you’ve been having trouble with. Because vouchers are somewhat rare, it’s best not to waste them on quests that are easy to complete or without the stat boost.
