What a dish is worth: the ingredient grade nobody mentions

Open the supplies list Every supply with the grade it counts as when you cook with it, next to its price and its food type. This opens on Enoki Mushrooms, the cheapest high grade in the game.

A dish is scored on quality. That much the game explains, and how cooking works covers the score. What it never tells you is that quality is only half of what a dish is worth. The other half is the grade of the ingredients, and grade is decided by price.

Grade runs 1.1x to 1.7x, 1.55x between the ends. Quality runs 0.9x to 1.5x among the results you would keep, which is 1.67x. Put the two together and a perfect dish of high-grade ingredients is 2.58x a normal dish of low-grade ones, from the same number of ingredients and the same amount of your time.

Grade is a price threshold, not a name

A food type with grades has its own two prices. Cost that much and the ingredient counts as that grade; cost less and it does not, whatever it is called.

The thresholds are set per food type, and they are wildly uneven. A fish has to cost $150 to count as high grade; a mushroom only has to cost $15. Both give the same 1.7x multiplier.

Only 7 of the 11 food types have bands at all. Nothing in Staple Food, Snacks, Soft Drinks and Alcohol carries a grade, which is 60 of the 191 foods in the game. That is not a low grade, it is no grade, and it covers the rice and the noodles: 33 of the 114 recipes written in food types ask for Staple Food as one of their ingredients. What the game does with an ungraded ingredient is not in the data, so the grade table is a thing to check rather than a thing to assume.

The cheapest high grade in the game

Enoki Mushrooms Enoki Mushrooms Food · Mushrooms Satiety -0.5 Morale -3 200 g 1×1 cells $15 14 d shelf life Waste at day 21 Mushrooms Ate Enoki , They seem to be staying inside unchanged. Please do not recycle at $15 is the cheapest high-grade ingredient in the game, and it carries the same 1.7x as Rack of Ribs Rack of Ribs Food · Meat 60000 g 12×9 cells $1000 7 d shelf life Waste at day 14 Meat Requires large freezer storage. Cannot be cooked whole; must be cut into rib pieces first, and settled days leave no occasion for butchering it; tempting delicacy at $1000, 67x the price for the same coefficient.

That is the whole practical finding. There is no reason to cook with expensive meat when a mushroom does the same job. 25 items reach high grade in total, against 73 at middle and 33 at low, and 23 of the 25 can actually be cooked with.

It goes further than that. Enoki Mushrooms Enoki Mushrooms Food · Mushrooms Satiety -0.5 Morale -3 200 g 1×1 cells $15 14 d shelf life Waste at day 21 Mushrooms Ate Enoki , They seem to be staying inside unchanged. Please do not recycle is worth -0.5 Satiety and -3 Morale eaten raw. It is the only food in the game whose Satiety is a negative number: eating it makes you hungrier. Cooked, it is the top multiplier. The grade has nothing to do with what an ingredient is worth by itself.

7 of the 25 high-grade ingredients are things you can grow rather than buy: Enoki Mushrooms, Matsutake, Beet, Cauliflower, Sunflower Seeds, Pumpkin, Watermelon. What to plant has the crops; the short version is that a grown high-grade ingredient costs nothing at all after the seed, and the grade does not care that you paid nothing, only that the shop price is above the line.

Why a dish sometimes arrives as two portions

A dish worth more than 40 Satiety is served as more than one portion. Working from the coefficients, that lands at:

Splitting is not a penalty. The Satiety is the same, in two servings instead of one. It matters for a different reason: a portion you do not eat now is a portion that starts its own clock, and what happens when food goes off applies to cooked dishes as much as to bought ones.

The pot that pays in Morale instead

Hot pot works on a different trade. A serving pays 10 Morale, and the Satiety per serving is capped at 40, which is the same figure an ordinary dish splits above rather than caps at.

Keep the Morale figure in proportion. 10 a serving is a third of what Watermelon Watermelon Food · Fruit Satiety +60 Morale +30 Life +5 4000 g 2×2 cells 15.0 Satiety/kg $120 10 d shelf life Waste at day 30 Fruit Cut and ready-to-eat. Sweet and thirst-quenching. pays raw at +30, and that is a crop you can grow. A pot is worth cooking for what it does with ingredients nothing else wants, not because it is the largest Morale in the kitchen. Morale has what else moves the bar.

The variety bonus is where the planning goes: each kind of ingredient adds 10%, up to 9 kinds.

At the cap that is 90% on top, which no single expensive ingredient comes close to: the whole distance from the worst grade to the best is 55%. A hot pot is the one place where the right answer is a lot of different cheap things rather than a few good ones, the exact opposite of every other dish.

What to do

1. Check the grade before the recipe. A high-grade ingredient is 1.55x a low-grade one, whatever else you do, and the supplies list carries the grade on every row.
2. Buy grade at the bottom of the band. Enoki Mushrooms at $15 is the same multiplier as Rack of Ribs at $1000.
3. Do not pay for expensive meat to cook with. The threshold for Meat is $125, which is a luxury price for a coefficient you can buy for $15.
4. Grow the cheap high-grade ingredients. 7 of the 25 can be grown, and after the seed they cost nothing and still count.
5. Do not plan a grade for Staple Food, Snacks, Soft Drinks and Alcohol. Those types have no bands, so there is no grade to buy in them.
6. Use hot pot for the variety bonus rather than for food, and put 9 kinds in it. That is 90% you get for using up odds and ends.

Quick reference

• Grade: High 1.7x, Mid 1.4x, Low 1.1x, on 7 of the 11 food types.
• Quality: Perfect 1.5x, Good 1.2x, Normal 0.9x, Failed 0.5x.
• Best over worst edible: 2.58x.
• Cheapest high grade: Enoki Mushrooms, $15, against Rack of Ribs at $1000 for the same coefficient.
• No grade at all: Staple Food, Snacks, Soft Drinks and Alcohol, which is 60 of the 191 foods.
• Dishes split above 40 Satiety, which is 8 high-grade ingredients in a perfect result.
• Hot pot: 10 Morale a serving, up to 90% for 9 kinds.