I'm feeling like I'll mostly get the answer "spam-cook meat and fish all day", but what are your personal cooking and feeding methods? For me, I find cooking complex recipes the most fun, even if it's incredibly inefficient at times. I don't even usually feed them to my wolves, aside from the nigiri recipes (trying to unlock Open Ocean for that kelp still :'D).

I keep nigiri & the simple recipes for fish & meat on auto-feed and pretty much nothing else. I do however use corn for the hunting food requirements, since I have lots of it from farming so much when I first started (I really wouldn't farm anything else LOL). For manual feeding if I feel I need to do it I just use Moonwater or moths. Think I have so many moths because I always go for the third sword areas during the seasonal events, and the Moonwater comes mostly from Goldsea since I used to campaign there for the cooking drops lol.

My methods are probably quite different from most people's I'd have to assume, as I don't really campaign a lot and besides the things I'm grinding at the time & cooking, I don't do the other professions much besides for activities. Cooking & farming don't even take stamina so I'm mostly using my food for Gauntlet lol.

Hope you enjoyed my ramble on food. I tend to gravitate towards cooking in games in general, so it's no surprise to me I love it here too! And let me know what you guys do!

As a side note, anyone else wondering why Maki costs way more ingredients/points than Nigiri but gives the same amount of stamina? I know the recipes can be poorly balanced at times, but that one is just strange lol. It's one of the recipes I don't even make at all because Nigiri is so much better and I use it for feeding, and I'm a person who makes any recipe I feel like just for fun :'D

Ugh yes I have so many opinions about the stamina balancing for food! I desperately wish we got that stamina nerf early in the game's development. I want Cooking to matter! I don't really cook any complex recipes because it feels like a waste.

But yes I do cook a LOT of shellfish and my dogs eat a lot of corn on the cob. I do sometimes cook for my snacks for Bigs and Tiny, but not too often.

There are recipes that are more and less efficient than others, and I have definitely sped through some of my Cooking levels with the Greylings and Bacon for that sweet, sweet bonus XP lol. Cooking is my third highest profession, so it's working!

The mentioning of the wolves’ eating habits is really funny to me as a huge fan of the cooking system since I used to only feed my wolves anything that couldn't be cooked while I stocked up on high quality food to gift and sell, I am sure they were slobbering.

I feed my wolves mostly cooked meats and moonwater as well as any scraps, and as for cooking I could care less if the expensive foods are very inefficient. I pride in having a well stocked pantry and I love giving gifts of rarer foods just because I think they look pretty and aren’t too bad when you dont make them yourself hahaha.

I get most of my ingredients from fishing and the cooking and activities weeklies, with the occasional campaign and farming when necessary. Very rarely, I’ll get something from the flea market if I spot a good sale. I cook mainly for fun but I have been trying to cook more meats to get those xp points so I can cook even faster (and hopefully unlock all fishing areas along the way.) Any fancy food and most of my cooked meats are on standby for when I see someone mention it, particularly people starting out. I did the whole starting out bit twice and I remember the stamina costs.

I just cook whatever I have :D

Yeah, the cooking system is nowhere near engaging enough to make me interested in cooking complex meals for funsies, but hey, if you have fun with it, keep doing it, lmao. I'll tell newbies every time that it's a waste of time and ingredients because stamina is brutal when you are first starting out and have few wolves, but if they want to do it for fun, more power to them. I just want them to have the knowledge of how it shakes out mathematically so they can be informed about their decisions, whatever they are. :/

I interact with cooking out of necessity, cuz the alternative of raw-feeding nuts and carrots via farming is even less engaging & more of what I consider a waste of my time, whereas fishing can be entirely passive (if you like babysitting farming, again, have fun!). I think a stamina redux is totally unnecessary to "fix" cooking and would mostly push away more new players; if the complex recipes gave you more than 1 finished item per craft to make up for all the slots they used, I'd be totally on board. But they don't, so alas. The only metric that matters to me personally is getting the best deal on stamina per slot used. :P

Also with regards to kelp -- even if you aren't at the open ocean, if I'm not mistaken, you can grow frogweed and turn it into kelp! It just adds two extra steps (farming, cooking) before the nigiri so the open ocean is definitely the fastest route to go once you get there :P

Edit to add: oops somehow I must have hallucinated this 😂 I was for sure convinced frogweed -> kelp the same way flax -> flaxseed oil hahaha, but it's just kelp -> nori, so I guess the 3k kelp I sent earlier will have to suffice for now 😜 but definitely let me know if/when you need more 💕