Cooking (Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town)

Cooking in Pioneers of Olive Town is one of the 12 skills you can develop to earn recipes for dishes and craft recipes for makers.

Obtaining the Cooking Skill & Kitchen
After upgrading from your starter tent to the Log Cabin by requesting a house expansion from Nigel at Nigel's Handiworks, you can use your kitchen.

Your Fridge
Your starter kitchen will come with 24 spaces for storage in Fridge 1. After every house expansion, you will have additional fridge space added. Each fridge addition will add 24 storage slots for items. You can get a total of four fridges, for a total of 96 storage slots, after all home upgrades have been acquired. Strangely enough, you can also utilize your neighbor's kitchens in Olive Town when visiting their homes.



Your fridge does not sort for you, you must manually add items to it. It's a good idea to make sure you're not storing duplicate items in your fridge for long periods of time to save space for more types of items for other dishes. You can also use your bag as a temporary storage for cooking items, as your bag is accessible in the same menu as the fridge when browsing for ingredients.

Auto-selecting Ingredients
After you select a recipe, you can auto-select your ingredients. You will be given the option to use the highest or lowest level quality ingredients first in your fridge or bag. This is a very good way to free up space in your fridge of low-level ingredients, or if there's a few ingredients required and you don't want to locate the ingredients manually. Be careful however, because if you're storing high-level ingredients for a special dish, it will pull those items first if the high-level ingredient auto-select option is chosen. This can be especially risky when recipes require certain groups of food and will select any vegetable located in your storage.

Time
Each dish takes 30 minutes in-game time. Be careful not to make dishes anytime after 1:30 AM, because it will jump to past 2:00 AM and you will pass out.

Food Groups
Sometimes dishes require a food group instead of a single specified item. For instance, the Vegetable Group will require any vegetable, not just corn. This allows you to have more leeway with your ingredients collecting.

Toppings
After unlocking Toppings at Cooking Skill Level 7, you will be given access to add toppings to all your dishes. Adding a topping to a dish will increase the quality of the dish. The topping isn't required to complete the dish however, so unlike the primary ingredients, you will not be blocked from creating something if you lack the topping ingredient.

Learning New Recipes
After Cooking Level 5, you can potentially learn new recipes by eating at the Café and Capeside Bistro. After you gain the dishes required level to learn it, visit the restaurant it specifies and eat the dish you want to learn. Dishes you learn are added to the menu after you achieve that level, so they will show up as a new dish available to try at that location.



Cooking-Related Makers
Cooking Skill Level 3 unlocks the Seasoning Maker, and Cooking Skill Level 4 unlocks the Condiment Maker. At Cooking Skill Level 10, you can unlock both the Giant Seasoning Maker and Giant Condiment Maker.

Giant and Mutated Crops
If you use a mutated crop (star potato versus regular potato) you will have a higher quality dish. If you use any giant crop (giant potato) in a recipe, you will receive x5 of the dish you selected.

Lovett's Gourmet Requests
Olive Town's renowned food critic, Lovett, encourages the Player to attempt his Gourmet Requests after you've developed your Cooking Skill. These requests can be seen when looking at the table with a notebook in Lovett's home, the Gourmet Palace. One of the recipes, Onigiri, is only obtained after all of these requests have been fulfilled.