Table of Contents
In Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (SoS AWL), you can use the kitchen to prepare dishes to restore energy, sell them to Van, or give them as gifts to villagers.
You do not need to collect cooking equipment to prepare dishes, but you need the correct ingredients to make certain foods.
The kitchen will not recognize ingredients stored in the outdoor Food Storage near Takakura’s house. You can combine up to 3 ingredients to make a cooked dish.
A refrigerator becomes available as part of the house renovation in Chapter 2, when the kitchen becomes a separate room from the main living area.
An oven is installed in the kitchen after your cooking skill reaches level 3 and you are in Chapter 2 or later.
The oven will not appear in Chapter 1 even if your cooking skill has reached level 3 because there is not enough space for an oven in the starter-sized house.
To cook, interact with the kitchen. You will be given two options:
Choose Ingredients
Although you can freely cook using any 3 ingredients by selecting this option, you still need to choose a food category.
If you successfully create a dish, its recipe will be added to the cooking recipes book.
Make by Recipe
This option allows you to select a recipe you already know.
Cooking a recipe for the first time will add an entry for that dish to Encyclopedia > Recipe, which is located in the book next to the television.
You can unlock several Wonderfuls by cooking 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100 unique recipes. There are a total of 123 cooked food entries in the Encyclopedia.
Selecting Recipes
The recipe book lists the foods you have learned. If a recipe name has a cream-colored background, the kitchen knows that you have the ingredients needed to make the dish.
However, if the recipe has a gray background, it means you do not have the required ingredients or do not have enough EXP for the recipe.
Each recipe card contains the recipe name, a colored description, and a list of icons representing the ingredients required to make the dish.
Some icons are straightforward (for example, a carrot icon means the recipe requires a carrot), while others indicate that more than one specific ingredient can be used to fulfill the requirement.
You can find out which ingredients are required by viewing the ingredient list on the recipe card.
Move the cursor from the recipe name on the left to the recipe card on the right, then press the action button to open the Recipe Info page.
You can then see the ingredients that will be used to make the dish. Highlighted ingredients indicate that you have those ingredients available for the dish.
Darkened ingredients indicate that you do not have the ingredients required for the dish.
Difficult Generation 3 hybrid crops will be listed as “???” in Recipe Info until you work with Vinnie to create those crops.
Different ingredient sizes or qualities do not affect the resulting dish. Making Carpaccio using Li’l Scad produces the same dish as using Huge Scad.
A recipe using S-Rank Star Milk produces the same result as one using B-Rank Goat Milk. The same food will be stacked together in your bag inventory regardless of the combination of ingredients you use.
Ideally, when cooking, use lower-quality ingredients that are available before using higher-quality ingredients.
Learning New Recipes
Besides using the Choose Ingredients option to discover new dishes, you can learn cooking recipes in several ways.
The easiest way is to learn them from the Harvest Sprites. Visit their home in the forest by eating the mushroom found outside their front door.
Once inside, talk to the fairy to learn a random recipe. You can save your game before talking to them, learn the recipe, then reload your save if you learn a recipe you do not want.
The fairies will not teach you recipes the day after the Starry Night Festival or Summertime Fireworks.
You can learn most recipes in the game by talking to the Harvest Sprites.
The two recipes they will not teach are Failed Dish and Unknown Dish. You can learn these recipes by using the Choose Ingredients menu while cooking.
Failed Dish is made by randomly combining 2 ingredients.
Unknown Dish is made by randomly combining 3 ingredients.
In addition to the Harvest Sprites, you can learn recipes by receiving Requests from the board next to the Lei-Over Inn.
If a request requires you to bring a cooked dish to the requester, you will often learn its recipe if you did not already know it.
Villagers can also teach you how to cook new dishes if you are good friends with them, although you can also learn the same recipes from the Harvest Sprites.
Some recipes can be learned by examining objects around the village or inside villagers’ homes. Sometimes you will learn the complete recipe.
At other times, you will find a note hinting at the ingredients that need to be combined to learn the complete recipe.
Sometimes, you will learn how to make a recipe without knowing its name. These recipes will appear as “???” in the recipe book.
The recipe name will appear after you successfully cook the mysterious dish.
Increasing Cooking Skill
At first, you can only cook Salad and Soup recipes. You must gain EXP to cook Hors d’Oeuvres, Desserts, and Entrées.
Trying to cook a recipe you know but do not yet have the required skill level for will display the message, “You aren’t skilled enough yet. Try again after you’ve gained more cooking experience!”
Cooking skill increases by preparing food. Each recipe has a hidden EXP value.
Easy recipes have lower EXP values than recipes that require hybrid crops or other rare ingredients.
Increasing your skill from level 1 (Salad and Soup) to level 2 unlocks Hors d’Oeuvres and Desserts. Increasing it from level 2 to level 3 unlocks Entrées.
Gaining 1,000 cooking EXP will unlock the next cooking skill level.
For example, Milky Soup and Herbal Soup each provide 15 cooking EXP. After making a total of 67 of these dishes, your cooking skill will increase from level 1 to level 2. (67 × 15 points = 1,005 points)
Note: We cooked 70 additional Milky Soups and unlocked level 3 while still in Chapter 1, so the method above also works for increasing your skill from level 2 to level 3.
You do not have to cook dishes one at a time to increase your cooking skill. Cooking multiple servings of the same recipe is fine. If you cook 10 Milky Soups, you will gain 150 cooking EXP.
