Table of Contents
Introduction To Imperial Cooking
One of the game mechanics that makes Black Desert Online stand out from other MMORPG games is imperial crafting. In simpler terms, imperial crafting is a unique in-game activity that allows you to earn excellent silver amounts through the arts of life skills combined with trading. It is conformed of two primary skills, which are imperial cooking and imperial alchemy.
Imperial cooking and imperial alchemy are a unique subgroup of trading that involves cooking or alchemy to perform these activities. Through imperial crafting, you manufacture trades boxes that you can sell to an NPC for a good profit.
Imperial Cooking
Imperial cooking offers a wider range of cooking recipes that will make a lot of silver. You can create and package different materials to sell to the “Imperial Crafting Delivery Trader” NPCs in exchange for silver.
An options bar will appear when you interact with these NPCs, and a list of materials will be displayed. The boxes you want to focus on are the ones with the name Apprentice Cooking Box -> Guru’s Cooking Box(depending on your cooking level). If you hover over the box as done in the picture below, you can see what foods can be used for creating the imperial box and how much it takes for each box.
However, there are also other items outside of these categories. These items are either old boxes or event-based ones.
The “Daily Delivery Quantity” is how many boxes you can sell per day to the imperial crafting delivery manager. It’s calculated from half of your contribution points.
To create an imperial cooking box, go to your processing menu(p), select the Imperial Cuisine tab, right-click the food you want to create boxes from, and press start.
Now you can see I got some boxes that I can sell to the imperial crafting delivery manager. For best results, make sure you do all your turn-ins each day!
There are six tiers of boxes you can create:
- Apprentice
- Skilled
- Professional
- Artisan
- Master
- Guru
Let’s go through each of these boxes and the best recipes to use when creating them!
Imperial Cooking Boxes From Apprentice To Master
If you ever see a recipe or an item that you want to craft and want to know what ingredients or resources are necessary to make them, you can easily search it. Simply press F2, and a display bar will pop up, and you can type the recipe or craft you want to create, and it will show you the ingredients you need.
Note: You should also know that some ingredients are available to you from cooking vendors, such as cooking wine, mineral water, salt, sugar, and some more. These vendors are found in every major city, like Heidel or Velia. Thus, let’s look at the recipes.
Apprentice: Cooking Boxes
Thick Five-Grand Chicken Porridge
- Ground Bird Meat 2x(grind chicken in processing menu)
- Mineral Water 2x(can be purchased from a cooking vendor)
- Wheat 3x(can be obtained from nodes around the game)
The main ingredient is ground bird meat, which is made purely by processing(grinding) your chicken. The other essentials are mineral water and wheat. However, the wheat ingredient is not meant literally. It translates to a flour-based or starchy-based product. So you can also use corn, which is obtained from the Loggia Farm or other options, like potatoes, barley, and wheat. In the end, these products are processed into flour. Since wheat and potatoes are essential ingredients, you should not have any problems making it.
This recipe is fairly easy to make since the ingredients are available for you from the farms, and you need to process it to create the recipes.
Grain Soup
- Wheat 6x(from nodes)
- Salt 1x(from cooking NPC)
- Cooking Wine 3x(from cooking NPC)
- Mineral Water 1x(from cooking NPC)
If you have a generous supply of potatoes or corn, you can switch to the grain soup recipe. The other items are purchasable from the merchant. However, you should be careful not to waste your resources because you need to use six wheat-based ingredients to create just one meal.
Most people view the Apprentice level as the tutorial to understand the mechanics of imperial cooking and that you need to have workers in the nodes to collect cookable resources.
Skilled: Cooking Boxes
The Skilled class recipes are far more difficult to create because of the number of ingredients needed. From personal experience, it is recommended to continue making apprentice class recipes rather than skilled class ones. Out of all the recipes available, the omelet and grilled meat recipe are the easiest ones.
Additionally, the processing and packaging of other recipes take a large resource supply to do. For example, the imperial box takes 90 grilled bird meat, while an omelet only takes 18.
Grilled Bird Meat
- 2x chicken meat
- 2x cooking wine
- 6x deep frying oil
- 1x salt
To create this recipe, you need chicken meat, cooking oil, salt, and deep-frying oil. The chicken meat is obtained right away through the chicken node, so it is unnecessary to process it.
Omelet
- 5x Eggs
- 5x Wheat
- 2x Olive Oil
- 2x Salt
For this recipe, you need wheat (it can be any starchy-based resource), eggs, olive oil, and salt. The biggest issue of this recipe is the number of eggs needed as you require five of them. Even though it seems small, it can be quite tedious to collect five eggs since they are obtained through luck.
Honey Wine
- 3x Cooking Honey
- 2x Essence of Liquor
- 2x Sugar
- 6x Mineral Water
The ingredients to cook this recipe are mineral water, cooking honey, the essence of liquor, and sugar. If you placed workers at the honey node in Alejandro’s Farm, you should have a honey surplus. The other cooking item that you will need to make is the essence of liquor, which requires 1x flour, 1x leavening agent, 1x fruit.
Wheat flour comes from any starch-based resource, but the apple is another story. You can either use the grapes node present in Olvia Farm or buy fruits from a fruit vendor in Calpheon (named Milano). Just like wheat, you can use any fruit-based product, likes grapes or strawberries. However, the vendor in Calpheon sells the strawberries at 650 silver per piece. Therefore, you will waste silver if you purchase from the vendor. It is best to also place workers in Olvia Farm to create your surplus over time. This is also an excellent recipe for power-leveling your cooking(the essence of liquor).
Professional: Cooking Boxes
Life becomes more thrilling when you reach the professional tier in cooking. The two best recipes at this level are the meat pie and pickled vegetables. If you recall, certain resources are considered fruits, while others are called vegetables. The reason behind this mechanic is because this is the only recipe that uses vegetables. The recipes unlocked in the Artisan, and Master tiers do not use vegetables.
Pickled Vegetables
- 8x Cabbage
- 4x Vinegar
- 2x Leaving Agent
- 2x Sugar
To create this recipe, you need cabbage, vinegar, leavening agent, and sugar. For cabbage, you can use olives, pumpkin, paprika, or cabbage. Since there are many nodes available in Farms, there will be no problem collecting this ingredient. Vinegar is a cooking ingredient needed for this recipe, it’s made from cooking 1x wheat, 1x leavening agent, 1x fruit, and 1x sugar to make(another awesome power-leveling recipe).
Remember that pickled vegetables are only present in the Professional tier. Therefore, you should mass-produce this recipe to trade them and yield a lot of silver from one recipe. Some players express that cooking pickled vegetables will become your primary form of silver earning until you reach the Guru tier.
Meat Pie
- 4x Pork
- 6x Wheat Dough
- 2x Olive Oil
- 2x Sugar
The meat pie recipe uses pork, olive oil, wheat dough, and raw sugar. As mentioned before, the wheat dough is made from any wheat-based item, like corn or potatoes. In regards to pork, you need four pieces, but it can be any form of meat. The meat can be obtained in many different ways.
First, you can go to the Forest of Seclusion and kill gray wolves in the area to harvest wolf meat. Second, you can become the butcher of goat mountain and travel to a specific area northwest of Calpheon’s Farm. In this area, you can kill and collect sheep and lamb meat. Ideally, you should spend your energy on harvesting meat if you are focusing primarily on cooking.
It is recommended to have at least three characters dedicated to collect wolf and sheep meat in these two areas. Additionally, many of the dishes from the Professional tier and onward use meat in their recipes. If you want to take the more passive approach, we recommend doing the other recipe instead for now.
Artisan: Cooking Boxes
Upon reaching the Artisan Tier, you will begin to cook more advanced recipes, like steaks, grilled sausage, and meat soup. In other words, you will be using meat in every recipe. However, what meat you are going to use depends on how you decide to use your Farms. In Heidel, you must go to the material good vendor and have “contribution.”
With ten contributions, you can rent a strong fence from him, and it stays there. Afterward, you will be able to place it. Thus, you will be able to farm resources, like garlic and pepper. You should also have a character that sits next to your farms for production.
Steaks
This recipe is the best among them, and it only requires 8x pork, 2x red sauce, 2 pieces of garlic, and 2x salt.
Master: Cooking Boxes
The recipes available in this tier are milk tea, honeycomb, cookies, meat croquettes, chewy cheese gratin.
- 2x Tea with Fine Scent or 1x Tea with Strong Scent
- 3x Milk
- 3x Cooking Honey
- 3x Wheat Flour
To create this dish, you need “tea with strong scent,” cooking honey, milk, and wheat flour. Milk is easily obtained by playing a cow minigame near Olvia, while honey is obtained from the nodes. Milk is the biggest drawback in the master tier since you can collect a certain amount per day. Additionally, the “tea with fine scent” is the ingredient that you must craft to create this dish. You can also get milk from the cooking by-product Witch’s Delicacy.
Nodes For Imperial Cooking
Before you can begin to cook, you must get the right ingredients. A good way to passively do this is with your worker empire. Here are the nodes we recommend for cooking:
In Olvia, the Wale Farm and Costa Farm nodes you can find olives, which are considered vegetables, and grapes, which are fruits.
Next to the city of Velia, you will find the Bartali Farm, where you can pick the potatoes and chicken node. You can also collect these ingredients in the Finto Farm if you wish to have a steady supply of flour and dough.
It is important to have workers in both the Bartali and Finto Farm. Egg procs can be obtained through chicken meat production in these locations, which is also a valuable resource for cooking.
Other nodes of high importance are the Alejandro Farm, which is paired with Heidel. You obtain pumpkin and honey from these farms. Since honey is an ingredient used in many recipes and pumpkin is a vegetable, you should also have many workers harvesting these farms constantly. Additionally, the Alejandro Farm is the only node in the game where you can obtain honey, so it is crucial to have a content supply.
You will find the Costa Farm to the south of Heidel, where you can get wheat and pumpkin.
Another important node is the Northern Wheat Plantation, where you can collect paprika, which is considered a vegetable.
The previous items mentioned are the essential ingredients that you must constantly have to create most of the recipes. Although there are other ingredients that you will need to collect, they are surplus. You do need them in specific recipes but in low quantities. If you are not sure how to setup your worker empire, be sure to check out our worker empire guide.