Guild Wars 2

I’ve been trying to level my cooking for awhile, but I can never craft what seems to be the most basic recipes. I keep seeing things like loaves of bread and pile of salt & pepper being very low level to craft, but every time I put something in the Discovery section it doesn’t even work. I put Black peppercorn in and it says it needs 275 cooking to use, same goes for nearly every other supposedly simple recipe. What gives? >.<

Strong suggestion for any would be chefs. Guild Wars 2 wiki and Guildhead.com leveling cooking is very complicated since almost none of the recipes require Only basic ingredients, most of them require more complicated ingredients like, salt and pepper, bowl of roux and so on. Another hint, a lot of the basic recipes are not made through discoveries, like salt and pepper for example is one you unlock simply by being high enough level to craft it.

followed the guide on here and took me just over an hour to get 1-400 and gained 10 levels.

Kira’s suggestion is better if you would rather save gold though

You can’t discover recipes you already know. Salt & pepper is one of those which is unlocked automatically and should already be in you recipe list.

Low level ingredients can appear in high level recipes – take salt and pepper for example – it’s an ingredient in recipes from 0 to 400. If you add it to a recipe and the rating level is too high for you to make even though it wasn’t red in your discover tab, it just means you haven’t combined it with the correct ingredients to find the lower level recipe.

Another possible approach would be to make all the complicated base ingredients and see if you can make anything with them, rather than trying to find out what you can craft from the basic ingredients.

Edit: Of course, this would probably hurt your bag/bank space! (which cooking totally doesn’t do amirite?)

The bag space thing, while traipsing across the world trying to find a herb I don’t have yet is nuts. It’s not as bad as other crafts because I know I’m only going to use 6-7 Helms, but these 40 bowl of ruox I’m sitting on waiting to unlock the next pattern for them sucks. I’m stuck at 120ish right now. I might be able to get to 125 if I blow all my garlic and chili peppers but they are so dang hard to find, and I don’t want to pay 80c each on the TP.

I took cooking because it didn’t compete for mats with Leatherworking, but I’m ready to go back to Huntsman.

NoOneShotU.3479:

The bag space thing, while traipsing across the world trying to find a herb I don’t have yet is nuts. It’s not as bad as other crafts because I know I’m only going to use 6-7 Helms, but these 40 bowl of ruox I’m sitting on waiting to unlock the next pattern for them sucks.

Look, if you made 40 bowls of roux you’re doing it wrong. Or, at least, weird.

It’s one thing to have a single roux around to try to do discovery with. It’s another thing to mass produce an item that you have no use for. In the huntsman profession, you don’t make 40 bow strings all by themselves with no plan to use them. You don’t make 40 torch handles without a plan for them. In armor-based crafts, you don’t make 40 shoulderpad linings without a plan for them. The same goes for cooking!

Don’t make items that you can’t use and have no plan for. If you have only 1 roux sitting around, then you can easily use it in a known recipe if you find it isn’t useful for discovery for many levels. Alternatively, you don’t suffer a huge loss if you end up discarding the roux in favor of something more interesting to keep in your bank. If you have 40 roux sitting around, you’ve hurt yourself just as senselessly as making 40 shoulderpad linings.

Not an "expert"chef but cooking is not broken .Started in the afternoon today and managed to reach 100 in cooking before had to log out for today.But these 100 point were made entirely with discoveries and cooking occasionall alreaday discovered single bowl/pie/biscuit for future discoveries.Spent few thousand karma points for bulk cooking items and 3-4 silver to buy some potatoes.As it stands for now there are plenty of opportunities to level up cooking.Sure might be not so efficient/fast as with using those chili peppers/vanilla beans but i personally like the current state of cooking.Only negative side you need lots of bag space(not sure if you put cooking ingredients in bank slots they will show in discovery tab) for single/few items you need to keep in order to do discoveries-currently starter bag and 4×15 slots bags in my charr thief are full with various cooked items. There is absolutely no need to level up cooking making and stockpiling tens upon tens of already known bowls/pies etc.It is a waste of precious cooking items.And people levelling their cooking in such way-they are doing it wrong.Actually i was surprised how easy is to level cooking even to skill 100 compared to armorsmith/jeweller which i have both at 400.Look at list of raw items you need to level your cooking to lets say 100 at one of guild wars 2 database sites.Collect them,free lots of bag slots and start cooking.This of course you have alreday gathered some cooking items on your way to lv 80.If starting to play the game now and want to be cook with your first character-will be hard unless have extra gold to buy items you need from Trade Post.

Keep going.. I got stuck around 120. (I could level it, but the cheapest option is 60c per combine).

To be fair I got the 60 roux following an outdated leveling guide. I think down the road it was supposed to be used for something else.

I just think its weird for some items to be so available in bulk and others to be non existent.

No, cooking is not broken, however I had the same feeling as you at some point until I actually figured out some simple things that made leveling a breeze. In no particular order:

1) While out in the world, no matter what character you are using, cut all the trees, gather all the herbs. You can deposit everything you gather (up to 250 pieces each) in the collections, on the fly.
2) For each and every RH you complete, go see what the RH karma vendor sells. If there’s any ingredient “in bulk” that you don’t have, BUY IT. It will cost you a lot more to port to these NPCs later and try to find some missing ingredients. I wish I knew this from beginning.
3) Use an alt to store some stuff you don’t use, empty all your bags in the bank and start cooking: first craft ONE of each and every “non-basic” ingredient. You can easily identify those by hovering the cursor over it and if it says “Chef (150)” or something like that, craft it! It will be VERY useful in order to discover new recipes. Even some things like soups, that can be consumed, are still ingredients.
4) Buy all the ingredients from the Master Chef near the cooking stations. Seriously, don’t miss any, you’ll unlock so many new recipes with them.
5) Start discovering by adding first the non-basic ingredients that you crafted. Note how many other “available unknown recipes” are there using that ingredient. If there’s just 1 then you won’t ever need to craft it again (unless you want to mass-produce that food) – so don’t if you value your bags space!
If it’s more than one, from here you can either craft that X number or just 1 at a time, use it for a discovery, craft another until you can’t find anything new with the available ingredients or it turns red. Which brings us to:
6) If one ingredient turns red in your discovery list, then it means that for your current cooking level, there is no unknown recipes that you could discover. Here is a thing that’s a bit confusing. I found out that even if I used the exact ingredients for a recipe (that a friend knew/crafted), if my cooking level was too low, I couldn’t discover it – simply because when you discover it, you also cook 1 of that item; but you’re too low to do that.
By using 6) you can really cut down on the time spent on trying to find good combinations.

7) Remember to restock with basic ingredients from the Master Chef – they’re cheap, can be stored in collection and are needed for tens of recipes. They’re never wasted.
8) If at some point you hit a ceiling and you can’t keep leveling from discoveries alone, craft some non-basic ingredients that are still orange. You can also research a bit on which of them you’ll use later on so they’re not wasted (such as roux which is quite a bad choice)
9) Make a “shopping” list for basic ingredients that you’re missing (use collection) and check TP – some are sold for 1-2c a piece and will help a lot while trying to discover recipes. Aim to have 1-2 of each basic ingredient at all times. While at TP, look for non-basic ingredients that were crafted by others. Same as you, many people had 40 roux laying around and threw them on TP for 1-2c. These can help unlock new recipes and level up faster. Since these cannot be stored in collection, be careful on how many you buy!

Using these guidelines I leveled mostly (95%) through discoveries up to around 275 and I still missed a lot of very useful ingredients such as vanilla beans or chilli peppers.

Hope this helps. Also avoid most of the cooking guides out there as they come from an age when vanilla beans or chilli peppers were sold by karma vendors which is not the case anymore. On the contrary they are some of the hardest to get and most expensive ingredients out there. If you’re not in a rush to 400, leveling by discoveries is totally feasible. More enjoyable too, if you ask me

Thanks. I think I need to use the TP more to see if there are any cheap mats out there. I have a lot of things in my discovery panel that I can put 2-3 ingredients in the window and there is a 4th one I don’t have.

Drojdier.8563:

5) Start discovering by adding first the non-basic ingredients that you crafted. Note how many other “available unknown recipes” are there using that ingredient. If there’s just 1 then you won’t ever need to craft it again (unless you want to mass-produce that food) – so don’t if you value your bags space!
If it’s more than one, from here you can either craft that X number or just 1 at a time, use it for a discovery, craft another until you can’t find anything new with the available ingredients or it turns red. Which brings us to:

I totally missed the “available unknown recipes”, thanks for pointing it out. I mean I saw it, but I didn’t really think about the implications.

Drojdier.8563:

If you’re not in a rush to 400, leveling by discoveries is totally feasible. More enjoyable too, if you ask me

I’m cooking for fun and for an excuse to explore different regions. I’m stuck around 225 right now because of a lack of dill, so I’m off to Dredgehaunt of Blazeridge I think.

I have to say, I find it’s the most frustrating crafting – mainly because so many of the things need 4 mats, and sometimes you just don’t know what that 4th is. It could be salt….It could be a combination of 3 different things. But on the flip side, when you do get some good crafting going, it feel great!

One thing I do find annoying tho, when you hit a new crafting tier and new mats become usable…but their not…I forget which specific mats it is, but lets say it’s crafting level is 300, you hit 300…then all recipes that need this item are 325+ – Why not just list it at that level? :/

Vanilla is not broken, yes they have made it hard to come by. After trying all the areas people mention with no success yesterday we ran into and area that we have now went back to a second time and can confirm off these plants we got approx 20 Vanilla off 4 to 5 plants (Cloves came off them as well as other junk) that are spawning in Map Zone Mount Maelstrom, plants run from Ashen Way point down Broken Arrow River. Undead will give you some fights, does keep gathering from being boring. We did our second check after a updat.

Delsaber.1562:

followed the guide on here and took me just over an hour to get 1-400 and gained 10 levels.

Kira’s suggestion is better if you would rather save gold though

Can you tell me which guide you used to get cooking from 1-400? (post september patch) ?

He didn’t do it post patch.