How to Cooking

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In Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, you can use your kitchen to cook meals that restore stamina, sell to Van, or give as gifts to villagers.

You do not need to collect cooking utensils to make successful dishes, but you must have the correct ingredients in your fridge or personal inventory.

Ingredients stored in the outdoor Food Storage near Takakura’s house will not be recognized by the kitchen.

You can combine up to three ingredients to create a cooked dish.

Unlocking the Kitchen

The fridge becomes available in Chapter 2 when your kitchen is renovated into a separate room from the living space.
The oven will be installed once your cooking skill reaches level 3 and you are in Chapter 2 or later. The oven won’t appear in Chapter 1 even with level 3 cooking skill, as the starter house doesn’t have space for it.

How to Cook

To cook, interact with the kitchen. You’ll be given two options:

1. Choose Ingredients

This lets you cook freely using any three ingredients.
You must select a food category (e.g. Salad, Soup).
If successful, the new dish will be added to your Recipe Book.

2. Make by Recipe

This allows you to choose from dishes you’ve already discovered.

Cooking a recipe for the first time will add an entry in the Encyclopedia > Recipe, found in the book next to your TV.

You can unlock Wonderfuls by cooking 10, 20, 30… up to 100 unique recipes.
There are 123 total cooked dish entries in the Encyclopedia.

Using the Recipe Book

The recipe book lists all known recipes.

Recipes on a cream background mean you have all the required ingredients.
Recipes on a gray background mean you’re missing ingredients or don’t have the necessary cooking level.

Each recipe card includes:

The recipe name
A colored description
Icons representing needed ingredients

Some icons are literal (e.g. a carrot icon means it needs a carrot), while others are generalized, indicating that multiple ingredient options can fulfill that requirement.

Viewing Recipe Info

Move the cursor from the recipe name (left) to the recipe card (right) and press the action button to open the Recipe Info page.

Highlighted ingredients = you have them.
Dimmed ingredients = you’re missing them.
Some Gen-3 hybrid crops will show as “???” until you breed them using Vinnie.

Ingredient size/quality doesn’t affect the outcome.
Example: Making Carpaccio with Li’l Scad is the same as with Huge Scad.

Star Milk (S-Rank) and B-Rank Goat Milk produce identical results.

All dishes of the same type will stack in your inventory, regardless of ingredient quality.
It’s best to use lower-quality ingredients when cooking.

Learning New Recipes

You can learn new recipes in multiple ways:

1. Experiment (Choose Ingredients)

Discover new dishes by experimenting with different combinations.

2. Harvest Sprites

Visit the Harvest Sprites’ house in the forest by eating a mushroom outside their door. Inside:

Talk to a Sprite to learn a random recipe.
You can save scum by saving before talking and reloading if you get a recipe you don’t want.

Sprites won’t teach recipes the day after the Starry Night Festival or Summertime Fireworks.

Most recipes can be learned this way, except for:

Recipe	How to Learn
Failed Dish	Combine any two random ingredients
Unknown Dish	Combine any three random ingredients

3. Request Board

Check the bulletin board next to the Lei-Over Inn.

Requests that ask for a specific cooked dish may teach you the recipe if it’s unknown to you.

4. Villagers

Build friendships with villagers to unlock new recipes from them.
Note: Sprites may also teach the same recipes.

5. Interact with Objects

Some recipes are discovered by checking objects around the valley or inside homes.
Sometimes you’ll learn a full recipe; other times, you’ll get ingredient hints.
Unnamed recipes will appear as “???” in your recipe book until successfully cooked.

Increasing Cooking Skill

You begin with access to Salads and Soups only. To unlock other categories, gain cooking experience (EXP) by cooking.

Skill Level	Unlocked Categories
Level 1	Salads, Soups
Level 2	Hors d’oeuvres, Desserts
Level 3	Entrées

Attempting a recipe above your current skill level gives the message:
“You aren’t skilled enough yet. Try again after you’ve gained more cooking experience!”

EXP Breakdown

Each recipe gives a hidden EXP value.

Easy recipes = lower EXP
Complex recipes (with rare/hybrid ingredients) = higher EXP

To level up:

1,000 EXP points are required for each level-up.

Example:

Milky Soup and Herbal Soup = 15 EXP each
Making 67 of them earns 1,005 EXP, raising your skill from Level 1 → Level 2.

Tip: You can repeat the same recipe to level up.
Cooking 10 Milky Soups = 150 EXP.

You can reach Level 3 while still in Chapter 1 by repeating this method.