Cooking inElinis the fast track method for boosting how quickly your character grows in power. An optimised diet will literally give you the power needed to kill a god, but how to put together a capable meal plan is a worthy task for the benefits it gives you.

Starting with the difference between attribute growth and attribute potential, it takes a bit of effort to pry back the layers of Elin’s cooking system. Beyond that, you need to contend with the nutrition system and the different metabolisms of the starting races. Here we’ll show how to master Elin’s cooking mechanics.

A player in Elin compares multiple strains of rice and wheat

How Attributes And Potential Work

One of the first things you’ll notice when examining the different ingredients you have access to is that they can offer different amounts ofexperience and potentialto your character’s attributes. These have similar but complementary effects:

For general purposes, you’ll want toprioritise foods with potential modifiers.The experience to cash in that potential can be gained from simply using any skill associated with the attribute, whereas there are fewer ways outside of food to gain potential.

The light eater feat in Elin reduces the amount of food the player can eat.

When giving food to companions, you’ll sometimes want to give foods with direct attribute growth instead of potential.If they don’t have a skill that uses the potential, they’ll struggle to grow. This is notable with spellcasting companions. Attributes like magic and will are both important for a spellcaster to have, butmost spells will only train one.

How Nutrition Works

Nutrition is the stat on food that impacts how full it makes you. It alsoserves as a multiplier to the potential and experiencegranted by the meal. A food with higher nutrition makes better use of the modifiers on it.

This means thatsome foods with very good attributes can’t actually grow your character because they lack nutrition.Bonito flakes are a great example, having all the attributes of the much larger fish but stripping most of the nutrition. You want to use these in larger meals to make full use of their benefits.

The player in Elin cooks eggs in a hot spring to grant resistance to ether disease.

If you receive the bloated status after a meal, you’ve gone above this limit and the nutrition andstat growth have been partially wasted.Some starting races have higher or lower amounts of nutrition they’re able to consume and need to be careful with how they eat. High end meals can take a character from near starving to bloated.

If you have a reduced nutrition cap, its easier to waste food by going over your limit. Try toeat large meals only when you are very hungry or even starving. Additionally, the gourmet feat at higher levels condenses the nutritional value of your foods so you’re able to eat more while still gaining the full benefits.

The player in Elin stands next to several crafting stations for preserved foods, such as aging racks, drying bricks and a ration maker.

How Hidden Food Traits Work

Some food traits are hidden without the gourmet feat. Others are listed but aren’t explained in context. Finally, some traits are entirely hidden until you interact with and discover them.

Requires Gourmet

Cats

You get a karma penalty in the first place for killing a cat and then another one for eating it.

Humanoids

These foods cause you to become a cannibal. Cannibals gain more benefits from eating foods with the human flesh trait, but less from food without it.The penalty is removed after a few daysof not eating anyone.

Visible

Hot Spring Eggs

Eggs cooked in a hot spring (by placing them in the water and waiting a few turns) have the warm trait, whichslows the progression of ether disease.Fertilized eggs will instead hatch. This can happen by accident if you let your livestock roam freely.

Hidden

Microwave Eggs

Eggs cooked in a microwave have a chance of causing an explosion butyou still get the cooked egg afterwards.. High quality eggs give high quality explosions.

Undead Creatures

Undead fleshrots any meal it is cooked into. You can eat it normally if you have an enchantment that lets you consume rotten food.

Love Potion

Foods blended with love potion willincrease affinity of a character and can cause them to lay eggs or produce milk. You’ll typically only encounter this food trait when you deliberately mix a potion into the food.

Little Ones

The ADAM infused meat dropped by Little Ones cangive you permanent potential that isn’t consumed on use, but requires you to kill and cannibalise small children. It also prevents you from accessing the little garden shop that gives useful genes and ether syringes.

Ingredient Quality

The item quality of a food also seems to improve the gains it provides.Sleeping with Ehekatl’s Body Pillowincreases your chance of improving a recipe in your dreams, letting you get all your recipes up to a high quality level if paired with good quality ingredients.

How To Make Preserved Foods

In the early game especially, you’ll find yourself limited by theshort shelf-lives of most food products. Crops you harvest are liable to spoil before the next harvest is ready. The several-day walk to most nearby locations means anything left behind will be rotten when you return.

There are a few different mechanics for preserving your foods, but most will causesome loss in the benefits the food is able to give youor prevent it from being used in further cooking.

A player in Elin crafts Cheese out of rice cakes for high-level cooking

Dexterity Penalty

None

Great for preserving fish. The resulting food is a quick and easy way ofkeeping strength-focused charactersfed in the early game.

Perception Penalty

Seasoning/Cheese

More things can be turned into cheese than probably makes sense.Just about any food short of a completed meal can be placed here.

Reduced Nutrition

Seasoning

Any fish can be placed on a sawmill to get bonito flakes. These inherit all the attributes of the fish but strips most of the nutrition. They workgreat as a condiment in complex foods.

Mixing meat with oak bark gives you kibble. Itonly uses the nutrition and attributes of the meatbut prevents spoilage.

A player in Elin has crafted a high level bread that boosts almost all attributes.

Sauce

Combining any fish with seaweed lets youturn the fish into a condiment. The size of the fish doesn’t impact the amount of sauce.

Rice and wheat have no spoilage, but the ration maker lets youadd in the attributes of berries, nuts or mushroomsand preserve those as well.

A player in Elin invests large sums of money into Kettle’s Alchemy Store

Strength Bonus

Meat

The compost bin accepts anything capable of spoiling and turning it into fertilizer.Using a hammer on that fertilizercan turn it into raw meat that is immune to spoilage.

Any metal ingots can be crafted into nails, hammered into bones, ground into bone meal and hammered again into “processed food”.The resulting meat is immune to agingsince it never contained anything capable of spoilage.

This is best used if you’re doing a challenge run, such as roleplaying Qin Shi Huang’s quest for immortality. It can also be used if you’re struggling to findstackable meat for batch crafting.

Gains Sell Value

Liquid

Most forms of raw food can be turned into some form of alcohol. Hillfolk can use alcohol to gain temporary attribute buffs, and it also has amuch better sell value than most ingredients.

These methods can be combined to fuel more complex recipes.

Bonito Flake wine is one of the best early-game moneymakers. It can be sold directly through the shipping chest or pawned to tourists at a markup.

How To Get High Quality Ingredients

Cooking is moredependent on high quality ingredientsthan simply having good recipes.Meals will inherit all the traits and bonuses of the foods they’re made of, adding them together if they have matching traits.

Many ingredients can be found in stores and loot but will havelower attributes than if you crafted them yourself.

Complex ingredients are either difficult to produce in large quantities or have other issues that limit you access to them.

Cheese made from rice cakescondenses rice strains into a single ingredient, merging their farming boost.There is no stronger seasoning. The mortar crafting station for making rice cakes be bought from Loytel. Needingfour strains of ricefor an ingredient with low nutrition means this is taxing on the fertility of the land.

The best meat comes from high-level livestock. A high anatomy skill gives a chance of gaining marbled meat, which has stronger attributes.Slaughtering livestock typically prevents them from respawning, but named characters will respawn after about one month (and cannot be resurrected early). This means a particularly determined carnivore couldbutcher the dragon Corgon.

Most creatures that return from being butchered are human andwould give a cannibal penalty.

Soy sauce is one of the best saucesand the only craftable one, using fish and seaweed in a grinder. Neither ingredient can be improved by farming or animal husbandry, so typically you’ll just want the strongest fish you’re able to catch. Whales, sharks, sunfish and moonfish are all good candidates.

Rare eggs come from livestock, but therarest creatures don’t produce eggs under normal circumstances. You have two options for getting that silver bell egg whichgives 26 levels of perception experience.

On top of gathering everything yourself, someingredient gathering can be automated or delegated.

How To Craft The Ultimate Meal

For increasing potential,the best meal is Soft And Fluffy Bread. It has two slots for bread dough and two condiment slots (at least one of which must be a cheese).

This lets youadd farming bonuses to the same recipe a total of 13 times.Five of these can be put into a single attribute.

For direct attribute experience, its harder to find a single recipe that fits all needs. If you’re running a large party of adventurers,you might need to craft several or even all of them.

How To Bless Food

Blessed food has astronger effect without increasing the nutrition of the meal. It requires you to either use a blessed ingredient (such as blessed milk) or toblend the finished meal with blessed water.Few recipes accept milk so the most consistent approach is to use blessed water.

The easiest way to get blessed water isthe holy well outside the church in Noyel. Using an empty potion bottle on the well will give you blessed water, but it refills very slowly. It produces only a few doses per year.

you’re able to bring the holy well home with you, butthe copy shares a cooldown with the original.

The other way of getting blessed water is from Loytel’s Store. Once you’ve paid off the first million oren of his debt,his store will sell pots of unblessed water.Placing these on theshrine of a god you worshipwill bless the water.

Even combining both methods, you won’t be able to bless food as quickly as you eat it soif you want to regularly eat blessed food you’ll need to duplicate it.

Kettle is able to produce duplicates of any item you craft, including blessed foods. The duplicates will be at the same age as the one you store, so its best to give him food fresh from the oven. The number of items he can template andthe number of duplicates he sells are determined by his shop level. In order to keep fed purely via duplicated food, you’ll need to be a multi-millionaire.

Cursed items are cheaper for Kettle to copy, so for items not impacted by curses, it’s cheaper to give him cursed templates.This also applies to Demitas’s book duplication.