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, a fullness counter has been implemented, though invisible by default. This can be turned on from a player's preference menu. Click here for a list of foods sorted by fullness.

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 (adventures) provides a list of all KoL foods sorted by adventure per fullness.

Fullness affects one specific PvP match: pie-eating, in which the character with the least fullness wins (however, the pie-eating contest does not actually increase your fullness counter - either it's just a thinking-about-pie-eating contest, or there's some binge-and-purge action going on). If you have a smashed hippy stone, wait until just before rollover to eat, leaving you with an empty stomach all day long. Be careful though. Anything over 200 adventures will be lost after rollover.

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

Racking up Spices

Every ambitious cook will eventually hit the same snag: running out of spices. Spices are a key ingredient in many of the best recipes. To keep your spice rack stocked, you can:

• Adventure in the The Spooky Forest (bad)
• Buy them in The Mall of Loathing (easy, but not available in Ronin or Hardcore)
• Knob Kitchen grab-bags from the Kitchens (bad, uses a ten-leaf clover)
• Pull boxcar turtles (requires luck, and obviously, boxcar turtles from a previous ascension) (Ronin)
• Adventure in the Kitchens (good if you can smell 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.
• 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 are primarily needed for most pasta dishes (with the exception of the hi meins and lasagnae) and burritos.

Cooking al Dente

Pastamastery allows you to summon dry noodles and cook with them. Basic pasta dishes tend to offer okay adventures when compared to food that drops early in the game. The best basic pasta are delicious spicy noodles, which offer 3.67 adventures per fullness. But if you can make that, you can do better. Those with the Pastamancer skill but not Transcendental Noodlecraft or without access to The Wok of Ages should focus on mushroom lo meins, which offer 4.38 adventures per fullness. Those with the Pastamancer skill and access to The Wok of Ages can make hi meins or chow meins, which offer 5 adventures per fullness. These require an adventure to prepare (even with a chef-in-the-box), which lowers their effectiveness to 4.8 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 of lesser quality to finish off the day. Reagent pastas also require Advanced Saucecrafting and scrumptious reagents. These reagents can be better used for sauceror potions, include the milk of magnesium, which increases adventures obtained from eating food.

Read the Dry noodle guide for a full explanation of all dry noodle items, adventures and stats gain, and which one is best for you.

The Key To Success

Adventurers without Pastamancery have a few other options. The best among these are key lime pies, which can be made with items obtained from The Bugbear Bakery. The other two ingredients are:

• Limes, which are obtained primarily from the Fruit Golem in the Menagerie Level 1
• Keys, which are obtained from The Daily Dungeon or by eating key lime pies.

Key lime pies 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. Although not optimal, they represent a choice for players with few ascensions, beginning players, and Bad Moon players.

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 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). Eating 5 tempura radishes can give you 10 more adventures than eating 1 chow mein but will be much more difficult to obtain.

Insane in the Brain

One last cooking strategy are burritos. They require no skill, but do require spices (see above) and jabañero peppers, available from The Hermitage. Enchanted beans make the best burritos (3.83 adventures per fullness) and can be made at level 4, but should only be considered as a way to avoid eating pizzas.

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.