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While you’ll always respawn back home with all your stuff in tow should you happen to lose too much health inAloft, there’s an easy way to give your character a handful of helpful stat boosts and health replenishments: cooking and consuming a variety of meals.
Whether you’re finding Gourmet Recipe cards out in the wild as you explore or just messing with ingredients while using the Cooking Plate over a fire back onyour home island, there are several cooking recipes in Aloft that provide extra health and occasional stat boosts when consumed while you’re out on your adventure.
Aloft is out now in early access, so we’ll update our guide if things change over time between now and the full launch.
Make Meals Using A Cooking Plate Over Fire
While you’ll earn a small buff fromeating ingredients raw, the fastest way to earn better stat boosts in Aloft is toeat prepared meals for extra health and additional stats. Not only do meals fill more of your health when consumed than using standard bandages, but you’ll also receive limited-time buffs that make things like fighting off monsters or sprinting across a planet that much faster.Stat boosts are timed, but the effects last the entire duration, which is often several minutes of real time.
It’s likely that the first meals you’ll get are when youfind meals in chests while exploring new islands. These are tucked into the treasure chests and assorted baskets you find in the ruins of what looks like towns mostly, but they may be hiding in stray chests and baskets elsewhere as well. Even meals that look unsatisfying in real life offer benefits to your character, soalways take meals when you find them, even once you do have access to cooking.
Before you’re able to begin prepping your own meals, though, you’ll need to have found the recipe for aCooking Plate, a stone platter that you’llput onto an open flamelike a campfire or a fireplace (both of which are alsounlockable crafting recipes). After you’ve placed the Cooking Stone, interact with it to bring up the cooking menu, where you can eitherselect three ingredientsto experiment on your own, or cook withrecipes you’ve found while exploring.
These can be few and further between than other resources, but you’ll periodicallyfind Gourmet Recipe cards in treasure chests, particularly when exploring large planets that often require a good amount of work destroying corruption nodes to heal the unhealthy ecosystem you find. Simplyinteract with the Gourmet Recipe card to learn itwhen you’ve got it selected on the inventory screen.
You’re not limited to only using the recipes you know, though! Those are stored on a separate tab under your ingredients, but if you’d like, you can try toexperiment with ingredients to unlock new recipes- who knows what you might make!
When cooking on your Cooking Stone, you’ll see aflame iconto the right of your ingredients after you’ve added them, which is your indication that you’re in the process of cooking! You’ll need tokeep the meter on the flame yellowby periodically hitting the button shown to ensure that the meter stays yellow, butdon’t let it go into the red too long, because this will always result in aburnt mealthat wastes your ingredients and provides much lesser benefits.
After you’ve cooked a meal on a Cooking Stone, you’ll need toremove the finished meal before you may add more ingredientsif you plan to continue cooking. You can also take ingredients back off the menu after adding them if you did so by mistake.
Duration: 10 Minutes
Some recipes appear to have multiple recipes, such as the fresh bowl and underwhelming soup recipes. We’ve included the recipes that we used to test and make these dishes!
