Cooking strategy

Quality food is crucial to maximizing your adventures each day. Unless you're rich enough to have all your meals catered, cooking quality food is equally crucial. The Pastamancer skill of Pastamastery is necessary for the best recipes in the kingdom.

Since your stomach can only hold so much each day, your diet must be chosen wisely, and you must choose based on exactly what you want to accomplish. Below is a handy reference that will help you cook smart and eat smart for better adventuring.

Fullness and You

Each food item has a fixed fullness number. When you eat it, your fullness counter is increased by that amount. If you try to eat food that would increase the counter beyond its limit, you will be told that you are "too full", and nothing will happen. The counter resets to zero at each rollover. The limit is normally 15. Stomach of Steel skill increases your limit to 20. The Feast of Boris increases your limit by 15. Unlike drunkenness, the game does not visibly indicate fullness gained by each item. The game normally does not display a player's fullness, but as of October 6, 2011, an unfunny fullness counter has been implemented, though invisible (and not funny) by default. This can be turned on from a player's preference menu. Click here for a list of foods sorted by size.

Most cooking and eating strategies center around maximizing adventures per fullness. Most items that give more adventures per fullness than hi meins are semi-rares, no longer obtainable, or limited in nature. Best Foods provides a list of all KoL foods sorted by adventure per fullness.

Fullness also affects the skill Chronic Indigestion, which can provide an elemental attack for non-Mysticality classes.

Fullness can be reduced by spice melange once per day. This is a highly expensive, rare drop from the giant sandworm.

Strategies

The Key To Success

The highest quality food for adventurers without Pastamastery are key lime pies, which can be made using pie crusts obtained from The Bugbear Bakery. The other two ingredients are:

• Limes, which are obtained primarily from the Fruit Golem in the Menagerie Level 1.
• At least one key, which are obtained from The Daily Dungeon (or by eating one of its key lime pies).

Key lime pies are awesome quality and offer 4.0 adventures per fullness, and have one distinct advantage: key lime pies can be pulled and eaten to get keys that are otherwise marked as quest items. Bear in mind that cooking the pie itself requires three steps. Although there are better choices for optimal players, these pies are rather accessible and represent a solid choice for players with few ascensions, beginning players, and Bad Moon players.

Insane in the Brain

Another option for players without skills are burritos like the enchanted bean burrito. However, they have multiple ingredients: the beans are found on beanbats in their part of the The Bat Hole; spices from the Knob Goblin Master Chef (see below); and jabañero peppers, available from The Hermitage for the equivalent of about 50 meat. Enchanted beans make the best burritos (3.83 adventures per fullness) and can be made at level 4. Burritos are only really considered better than pizzas and basic hippy pies.

Racking up Spices

If you still need to keep your spice rack stocked, you can:

• Adventure in the The Spooky Forest (very inefficient)
• Buy them in The Mall of Loathing (not available in Hardcore but otherwise very convenient)
  • Ronin players may want to pull secret blend of herbs and spices or a few boxcar turtles instead.
• Knob Kitchen grab-bags from the Kitchens (bad value compared to other uses of a ten-leaf clover)
• Pull boxcar turtles (requires luck, and obviously, boxcar turtles from a previous ascension. Only worth it if you have spare pulls, but some of the other items from the boxcar turtle - and the turtles, if you have Armorcraftiness - are quite good as well.) (Ronin)
• Adventure in the Kitchens (good if you can sniff the Knob Goblin Master Chef or drive away the Knob Goblin Chef)
• Summon a Spice Ghost during combat. At level 10, the Spice Ghost drops spices a number of times. (Though level 10 requires 100 summons and will normally take at least 10 days.)
• Use a drum machine without worm-riding hooks equipped. This will give you a combat encounter with a giant sandworm, which sometimes drops 1-3 canisters of spices after each fight. The area where they drop is not available until level 11, but offer excellent stats and meat gains.

Spices used to be extraordinarily useful due to their use in both lo mein and chow mein noodles. With the removal of chow mein in 2015, they are significantly much less useful. This is because lo meins are in a much tough spot, requiring 3 turns to craft and competing against a number of level 6 reagent pastas (which benefit from Saucemaven) and Level 7 quest pasta.

Cooking al Dente

Pastamastery allows you to summon dry noodles and cook with them. Basic pasta dishes tend to offer an okay amount of adventures when compared to food that drops early in the game. The best basic pasta dish is delicious spicy noodles, which offer 3.67 adventures per fullness.
But if you can make that, you can do better. Those with the Pastamastery skill but not Transcendental Noodlecraft should focus on mushroom lo meins, which offer 4.38 adventures per fullness.

Reagent pastas, long considered the best food of the game, only offer 4.25 adventures per fullness at best. Because they have 6 fullness, you'll most likely need shims... lower quality foods to finish off the day. Reagent pastas also require Advanced Saucecrafting and scrumptious reagents. These reagents can be better used for Sauceror potions, including the milk of magnesium, which increases adventures obtained from eating food.

• Saucemaven still showcases some of the power of these dishes, adding 5 adventures per item for Mysticality classes.
• Since 2015, the newer Level 8 Reagent pastas are size 5, allowing one to benefit from the skill multiple times per rollover.
• Since 2020, multiple milks of magnesium are no longer needed, indirectly freeing reagents for use with Saucemaven.

Examine the recipe tables in Pastamastery and Transcendental Noodlecraft for a full explanation of all dry noodle items, adventures and stats gain.

Once In A Lifetime

At level 9, all adventures will be able to find a grue egg, which can be cooked to make a grue egg omelette, a food offering 6.0 adventures per fullness. No skill is required. As the grue egg occurs only once each ascension, one cannot use it as a regular food, but its definitely worth making and eating when you can.

Tempura-Rarely Yours

High-level players in Aftercore may want to consider Tempuramancy as an option. The positives are the high adventure yields (6.0 adventures per fullness for the tempura radish and tempura carrot); the negatives are the difficulty in obtaining the ingredients (bubbling tempura batter requires 200MP and an adventure, with a limit of 3 obtainable per day).

Additional Cooking Notes

A Little Help, Please

Cooking consumes adventures, unless you have a chef-in-the-box. Obtaining a chef-in-the-box, either through a pull or through adventuring, is often a concern early in adventuring. Whether or not to spend adventures obtaining the parts for a chef-in-the-box is part of ascension strategy, and not included here.

Everybody Must Take Home Ec

Even if you're in Oxycore, you will have to cook at least twice per ascension, which means no matter what, you will have to use your EZ-Cook oven at some point.

Actually, given that now you could spend 25 or so adv in the palindrome to find wet stunt nut stew in baited traps, this is no longer true.