Cooking the kitchen trade i
Type	Life skill
Practiced	Indoors, at a utensil placed in a residence
Requires	A cooking utensil and a house to put it in
Supplied by	Farming, gathering and workers
Makes	Food buffs, trade boxes and byproducts
Premium route	Imperial Cuisine Delivery
Mastery reward	Mass Cooking, in batches of ten
Related	Alchemy, the other indoor craft

Cooking is the kitchen trade of Black Desert, a life skill that turns crops, meat and fish into the food that adventurers eat before anything difficult.

Like alchemy, it is done indoors at a tool installed in a residence, and an adventurer who cooks seriously never has to leave town to do it. The ingredients arrive from farming, gathering and the workers tending nodes elsewhere in the world.

The food matters more than it sounds. Nearly every meal grants a timed buff, and the ones that raise combat statistics or life-skill speed are consumed constantly by the players who depend on them, which gives cooking a permanent market.

An adventurer installs a cooking utensil in a residence, walks up to it, loads the ingredients into the window and starts the batch. Recipes can be followed exactly or approximated, since the game will produce something from a plausible combination of ingredients even without the exact list.

Utensils wear out with use, and a better one lasts longer and cooks faster than the basic version. The cheap recipes — vinegar, pickled vegetables, essence of liquor — are what most adventurers repeat while building the skill, because the ingredients are easy to keep in stock.

Byproducts come out alongside the food. Cheese, butter and similar items accumulate as a side effect of ordinary cooking rather than being made deliberately, and they feed back into higher recipes later.

The most dependable income from cooking does not go through the market at all. An adventurer packs finished meals into boxes and sells them to an imperial delivery NPC at a fixed price, which is set well above what the ingredients cost.

Two things make this attractive. The price does not move with demand the way market listings do, and the sale is not subject to the Central Market's tax, so the return is both stable and untaxed. The limit is volume, since only a set quantity is accepted before the offer resets.

Cooking mastery changes the economics rather than unlocking new dishes. Higher mastery raises what imperial boxes pay, improves the chance of getting the maximum quantity from a batch, and adds a chance of producing a higher grade of the same dish.

The most valuable effect is Mass Cooking. Once it is available, a batch can consume ten times the ingredients and return ten times the food while costing the utensil a single point of durability. That changes cooking from a slow trickle into genuine production.

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• Cooking — Adventurer's Guide
• Cooking — Black Desert Wiki (Fandom)