Cooking Guide

Cooking turns your crops, fish, meat, and dairy into restore-foods and stat-boost dishes, the cheapest, most useful crafting vocation on Rookery Isles, and one you can start with zero proficiency.

Requirements

This craft itself has no character-level requirement. You can smelt, process, and craft at any level if you have the materials. The catch on Rookery Isles is that the raw materials come from world gathering (Mining, Logging, Gathering, Farming, Husbandry, Fishing), and all of those are gated at Character Level 52, so in practice a self-supplied crafting career begins at Level 52. You can still craft earlier from purchased or traded materials.

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• What Cooking Is
• The Cooking Station
• How Cooking Recipes Gate
• The Three Kinds of Food
• Worked Recipes
• What Feeds Cooking
• A Sensible Leveling Path
• On Rookery Isles

What Cooking Is

Cooking is one of the 22 player vocations on Rookery Isles, sitting in the Crafting tab of your proficiency window alongside Alchemy, Handicrafts, Machining, Metalwork, Printing, Masonry, Tailoring, Leatherwork, Weaponry, and Carpentry. Its job is simple: take raw produce and turn it into edible items that restore Health or Mana, or that grant a temporary boost while the buff lasts.

Cooking is the natural sink for everything you grow and catch. If you run a farm, fish, or raise livestock, Cooking is where those crops, fish, eggs, milk, and meat become something a player actually wants to carry. It is also the gentlest vocation to start: the entry recipes cost just 2 labor each and require no station and no proficiency at all.

On this server Cooking is the vocation group Cooking (actability group id 3). There are 146 distinct Cooking recipes in the live build, driven by a family of "Cook" skills whose labor costs run from 2 up to 50 labor per craft action.

Source: all facts here are read from the live server database (C:\AAEmu_3\AAEmu.Game\Data\compact.sqlite3), the crafts, craft_materials, craft_products, skills, and localized_texts tables. Where a number is not stored in the DB, it is flagged as such.

The Cooking Station

Two crafting stations serve Cooking, and a large number of recipes need no station at all.

A handful of specialty Cooking recipes use themed workbenches instead, the Chocolate Fountain Workbench (doodad 8000181, 26 recipes), the Supply Manufacturer's Workbench (9131), the Red Salt Barrel (10964), and event tables. For everyday cooking you only need the portable recipes, Cooking Tools, and Regal Cooking Tools.

Tip: because more than half of all Cooking recipes are portable, you can level the vocation a long way before you ever need to place a station. Build or buy Cooking Tools when you start the bread and soup chains, and Regal Cooking Tools when you cross the Veteran/Expert proficiency band.

How Cooking Recipes Gate

A Cooking recipe is controlled by four fields on its crafts row. None of them is a character-level lock.

The proficiency thresholds line up exactly with the shared proficiency rank ladder. Cooking's gated recipes appear at these caps:

The full ladder runs Amateur (10k) → Novice (20k) → Veteran (30k) → Expert (40k) → Master (50k) → Authority (70k) → Champion (90k) → Adept (110k) → Herald (130k) → Virtuoso (150k) → Celebrity (180k) → … → Legend (1,000,000). See the Proficiency & Labor guide for the complete table. Rank-up is free in this build, you simply accumulate proficiency by cooking.

Higher rank means cheaper cooking. Each rank carries a labor-efficiency bonus, so a high-rank chef spends less labor per cook than a beginner. The exact percentage per rank is not decoded in the server database, so treat the direction as the reliable fact: rank up, pay less.

The Three Kinds of Food

On Rookery Isles, cooked items fall into three buff families. Every cooked food is a "rank N" item , the rank (1 through 6 and beyond) is the food's tier, and a higher-rank food gives a stronger effect than a lower-rank one of the same type. The rank is printed in the item tooltip.

Restore foods (bread, soup) carry a 1.5-second cast, 3-second cooldown. Boost beverages carry a 1.5-second cast, 30-second cooldown and stay active for the buff's duration. The exact HP/MP amount restored, the size of the Max-HP boost, and the buff duration are not stored in the crafting tables of this database, those values live in the buff system. Treat the rank as your guide to relative strength: a rank-6 Deluxe Sandwich restores far more than a rank-2 Whole Grain Bread.

A note on the "Sirloin" dishes. Item data confirms a Sirloin family, Savory Sirloin (#8487), Roast Sirloin (#8491), Smoked Sirloin (#8495), and Sirloin Kebab (#8499). The DB does not list a player Cooking recipe that produces any of these four, they have no crafts row, so the named pieces appear to be event/vendor-sourced rather than something you cook. What you can cook is Assorted Sirloin (#42171, craft 9326, gate 20,000, Novice cap), which each of the four named Sirloins also converts into when used. Their exact buff effects (which stat, how much) are not stored in the crafting tables, so this guide does not claim a specific stat boost for them. The boost food whose recipes are fully present and cookable today is the Max HP beverage chain (below).

Worked Recipes

Every recipe below is read directly from the live database, inputs, output quantity, labor, station, and proficiency gate are all verified. All also consume a small Coin cost where noted (item #500).

1. Boiled Potato, the first thing you ever cook

The whole "Boiled X" family works the same way: 1 Water + 1 vegetable → 1 boiled dish, 2 labor, portable, no proficiency. Confirmed variants include Boiled Fernbrake (craft 2845), Yam (2847), Carrot (2854), Garlic (2855), Onion (2856), Cucumber (2857), Tomato (2859), and Pumpkin (2860). This is the cheapest food in the game and the ideal way to burn your first thousand points of Cooking proficiency from anything your farm grows.

2. Whole Grain Bread, the Health-restore staple

This is the base of the Health bread ladder, and a working example of how Cooking turns Farming output into food: the Barley comes off your farm, and Ground Grain is milled from grain (see What Feeds Cooking). Each higher tier consumes the previous tier loaf plus more Ground Grain and a new ingredient:

3. Whole Grain Soup, the Mana-restore staple

The Mana soup ladder mirrors the bread ladder step-for-step, ending in the rank 6 Hearty Soup:

4. Honey Mead, the Max HP boost beverage

This is the boost-food chain, the dishes you eat before combat or a hard grind for a flat Max HP increase. It climbs all the way to a rank-5 beverage:

There is also a bulk Tangy Soda recipe at the Supply Manufacturer's Workbench (craft 7694): 14 Orchard Puree + 1 Honey + 5 Lemon + 3 Banana + 3 Pomegranate + 100 Coin → 10 Tangy Soda for 100 labor, useful once you need stacks of buff food for a guild event.

5. Honey Strawberry Potato Salad, a portable multi-ingredient dish

A good example of the early mixed-ingredient dishes that take three farm crops and no station, others in this family include Gweonid Tri-Color Vegetable Stirfry (Fernbrake + Onion + Tomato, craft 2865) and Honeyed Yams and Pumpkin (Honey + Yam + Pumpkin, craft 2866). Cheap, portable, and they pull straight from the garden.

6. Steamed Lobster, a seafood feast dish

A higher-tier portable cook that blends Fishing output (Crayfish, Brown Kelp), farm crops (Lemon, Pepper), and Blue Salt, a reagent you buy or earn. It upgrades into Rich Steamed Lobster (craft 5732: 3 Steamed Lobster + 2 Prairie Cheese + 2 Snowflake Icicle, gate 20,000), which brings Husbandry dairy into the chain via Prairie Cheese. Sibling feast dishes include Hot Roast Pig (Pork + Apple + Milk + Hotleaf + Blue Salt, craft 5473), Soft Cornbread (5475), and Aged Stout (5476).

What Feeds Cooking

Cooking is the downstream sink for three gathering vocations. Here is exactly what flows into the pot.

Farming, crops and grain

Your farm supplies nearly every Cooking ingredient. Two routes:

• Raw crops, straight in. Potato, Carrot, Garlic, Onion, Cucumber, Tomato, Yam, Pumpkin,

Strawberry, Barley, and more go directly into boiled dishes, salads, breads, and soups.

• Milled into Ground Grain first. The bread and soup ladders run on Ground Grain (#30902),

which is a Farming processing craft, not a Cooking one: 100 Barley → 100 Ground Grain (or 100 Rice, or 100 Millet) at the Multipurpose Trimmer, 50 labor, requires 20,000 Farming proficiency (craft 7603 to 7605). Orchard Puree (#30899), the base of the beverage chain, is a Gathering processing craft made the same way: 100 Grape / Fig / Avocado → 100 Orchard Puree (craft 7630 to 7632). So a serious chef also wants some Farming and Gathering proficiency for the mills.

Fishing, the catch

Fishing feeds the seafood dishes. Crayfish, Brown Kelp, and other catch items appear directly in feast recipes like Steamed Lobster. The DB also contains "Chopped" fish intermediates (Chopped Squid, Sardines, Pike, etc.) produced by the "Cut Fish into Pieces" Cooking skills, prep steps for further cooking. Note that the large fish trade-packs you reel in from sport fishing are not direct Cooking inputs; those are carried and sold whole, while the smaller edible catch is what the kitchen uses.

Husbandry, meat, dairy, and eggs

Livestock round out the pantry. Milk (#8055) is an input to 9 Cooking recipes (Hot Roast Pig, Soft Cornbread, and more), Egg (#3603) goes into dishes like Cake Pop (#28554), and Pork (#7747) and Venison drive the meat dishes (Venison Roast #16224, Cucumber and Venison Salad #16239). The higher feast tiers fold in Prairie Cheese (#29304), a processed dairy product.

For the bigger picture of how raw materials become finished goods across all vocations, see the Crafting Chains guide.

A Sensible Leveling Path

• Step 1. Cook Boiled X dishes (2 labor, portable, no station) from whatever produce you can

get. Cooking itself has no level gate, so you can start the moment you have ingredients. The catch is supply: growing your own crops means Farming, and all world gathering on Rookery Isles requires Character Level 52, so until then you cook from purchased or traded produce, often picked up from vendors. This racks up Cooking proficiency for almost nothing.

• Step 2. Place or find Cooking Tools. Start the Whole Grain Bread and **Whole Grain

Soup** chains, both open at 0 proficiency and 5 labor.

• Step 3. Build up Farming to 20,000 so you can mill your own Ground Grain instead of

buying it; the bread/soup ladders eat it by the stack.

• Step 4. Cross into the Amateur, Veteran band (10k, 30k) and you unlock Vegetable Bread,

Honey Mead, and Bubble Tea. Upgrade to Regal Cooking Tools here.

• Step 5. Push toward Master (50k) and beyond for Tangy Soda, Sweet Bread/Soup, and

the Authority/Adept-tier sandwiches and hearty soups (70k, 110k). Cook in bulk for guild events.

Remember the labor math: a ×10 bulk recipe costs ×10 labor, so bulk cooks save clicks, not labor. Budget your labor pool accordingly.

On Rookery Isles

A few server-specific truths that override what older or generic ArcheAge guides will tell you:

• Cooking has no character-level gate, but world gathering requires Level 52. You can cook,

smelt, and process at any level if you have the materials. The raw produce, however, comes from world gathering (Mining, Logging, Gathering, Farming, Husbandry, Fishing), and every one of those requires Character Level 52 on Rookery Isles. The client enforces this from its in-pak data, so you cannot farm, fish, or otherwise gather in the open world until Level 52. Until then, cook from purchased or traded materials.

• No cooked "labor-regen" food is confirmable in this build. Generic guides sometimes describe

foods that restore Labor. Every cooked item whose recipe we read produces a Health-restore, Mana-restore, or Max HP boost effect, none restores Labor. Labor consumables exist as their own items rather than as anything you cook; their exact effects are not stored in the crafting tables, so this guide makes no claim about a specific labor-food.

• The named "Sirloin" dishes (Savory / Roast / Smoked / Sirloin Kebab) exist as items but have **no

live player Cooking recipe** in the current build, treat them as event/vendor-sourced. You can cook Assorted Sirloin (craft 9326, Novice-cap gate). Their exact stat effects are not in the crafting tables, so don't trust any "+X to a stat" figure from generic guides. The boost food whose full recipe chain is cookable is the Max HP beverage chain.

• Exact buff magnitudes are not server-confirmed. The DB stores each food's rank (relative

strength) and its restore type, but not the precise HP/MP amount or buff duration. Any specific "+X HP for Y minutes" figure you see elsewhere is community-reported, not server-confirmed, trust the rank instead.

• This is ArcheAge 3.0 (Revelation), not Erenor. Recipes and ingredients reflect the 3.0 era.

Questions or a recipe that doesn't match? Ask in the Rookery Isles Discord: https://discord.gg/xYKNcfkRdR

See also

• Farming & Crops
• Fishing
• Husbandry & Livestock
• Crafting & Gathering Overview
• Labor Points & Proficiency
• Gathering & Herbalism
• Currencies & Vendors
• Trade Packs & Commerce