One of the many aspects of modern Zelda that really makes the series sing is its survival elements – and Tears Of The Kingdom is no exception. Whilst you’re not keeping your eye on various bars that perpetually tick down to zero, you do have to keep an eye on your environment and plan your journeys in advance. This often means stocking up on supplies.
One of the best ways to stay alive in Tears Of The Kingdom is to have a pack full of food – or at the very least, ingredients. Having meals ready to chow down on has a myriad of benefits. This guide is going to go over how you can make the most of your ingredients so you can stay alive in the wake of Hyrule’s latest calamity.
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How To Cook In Tears Of The Kingdom
To cook in Tears Of The Kingdom you need two things: ingredients and a cooking pot. Ingredients can be found everywhere. Everything from mushrooms to meat and even fruit can be gathered if you keep your eyes peeled. Cooking pots are a bit more awkward since they only appear in the wild near campsites or built-up locations. If you need one in a pinch, you can always use a Zonai Capsule to spawn one.
Once you have your ingredients and your pot, you are good to go. There is no complex cooking menu in Tears Of The Kingdom. To cook you need to hold your ingredients and then throw them into your pot. Do the following:
- Enter your menu by pressing ‘+’
- Use ‘L’ or ‘R’ to navigate to your ingredients menu
- Find the ingredients you want to cook and press ‘X’ to open the ‘Hold’ display
- Press ‘A’ on any ingredient you want to hold in your hands, to a max cap of five
- Exit your inventory and then approach the pot, items in hand
- Press ‘A’ once the contextual prompt changes to ‘Cook’
After a short while you will receive your meal. What you get depends entirely on what you put in. As a general rule, just throwing in all of the same ingredients will give you a more powerful version of the base ingredient. For example, 5 Apples will give you a powerful healing meal that heals more than 5 Apples would if consumed separately. Alternatively, 5 Spicy Peppers would grant Cold Resistance for longer than a single Spicy Pepper.
Mixing And Matching Ingredients
Where cooking in Tears Of The Kingdom gets interesting is in its experimentation. You can absolutely play it safe and just mix multiples of the same thing to get an effective curative or buff. Instead, you could mix and match your ingredients. You could mix some Apples with some Spicy Peppers to make a healing meal that also grants short-term resistance. You could mix innocuous items like Flour, Milk, and Sugar to create a cake.
There are recipes in Tears Of The Kingdom for you to learn, and you can access them at any time for review, however, you can discover them on your own just by messing around with the system.
Benefits Of Roasting
Sometimes you don’t have access to a cooking pot. Maybe you ran out of Zonai Capsules and you are in the middle of nowhere. This is where roasting comes into play. Roasting uses Tears Of The Kingdom’s powerful elemental systems to cook food if they are near a hot enough surface. In short, throw some meat near an open flame, and it will cook.
You can roast any ingredient you have, and doing so will increase its effectiveness when consumed. As a general rule, you don’t want to eat raw ingredients. Roasting allows you to slightly increase the effectiveness of your ingredients, letting you make the most of them in a pinch.
The easiest way to roast is to gather some wood and set it on fire. This can be achieved by cutting down a tree, then chopping the trunk to produce a pile of wood. You can set this one fire in a number of ways, although the most basic would be to drop some flint nearby and attack it. This will cause a spark which will light the wood, resulting in a campfire. Perfect for roasting.
Unconventional Cooking Techniques
Just because you can use a campfire to roast your ingredients doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it. Meat is a powerful curative in Tears Of The Kingdom, and hunting animals is a great way to stock up. If you kill an animal with a fire-based attack, then it will drop pre-roasted meat on death. This saves time and resources in the long run.
You could also head to Death Mountain and throw food onto the floor. Being an active volcano, Death Mountain is very hot. The air itself will roast your food for you.
Finally, any fire source will do. Get creative, and you can roast just about anywhere.
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