Guild Wars 2

Was considering doing my own cooking for endgame buffs.

I only know where to get butternut squash.

What are good things to gather and where can I find em?

It all depends what you need from your bufffood. The wiki is a good place to start. Look up what you want to make, and then follow the links to see where to get the ingredients.

Though crafting your own bufffood is usually more trouble than it’s worth. I get that the supply on the TP has to come from somewhere, but unless you’re planning on selling food and replenishing that supply for some small profit, I’d recommend just buying what you need from the TP.

Have you been harvesting nodes as you’ve run around (assuming PvE)? They are everywhere. Collect them all. Once you have a bunch, start discovering recipes.

Alternately, if you have the gold, go to gw2crafting.net and follow their directions for building cooking 0-400.

Quite a few heart vendors offer cooking ingredients for karma as well. Always check in after completing the heart to see, and buy a bunch. Again, assuming PvE and you really are interested in building up cooking.

On the minimap you’ll see little green plant markers. Harvest everything you see. With higher level sickles (Orichalcum sickles) there is a chance to get food materials of other types besides what the description says. In the higher level maps, there are more plant nodes that aren’t specifically devoted to one type of plant. For example, Winter garden vegetables may drop Parsnip, rutabagas or a combination

The Master chefs have a variety of basic ingredients, such as salt, sugar, water, vegetable oil, vinegar, that are needed in bulk. Always check karma vendors after doing a heart in the open world. They usually sell ingredients in bulk. Buy about 50-100 of each. You shouldn’t need much more than that. Karma vendors in cities have ingredients as well. Look for the little purple triangle on the minimap.

Trees have a chance to give you walnuts and cinnamon.

Moas will drop poultry meat, deer, bears, arctoduses, wolves will drop red meat.

Harvest every herb shrub you come across. Some recipes require a lot of them.

In various maps, there are big clumps of ingredients in small plantations. Check http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Node_farm for locations.

I would use this guide to level cooking to 400. I recommend the all heart version as it’s the cheapest but the other versions are good also. http://gw2crafts.net/cooking_karma.html

To find the foods with the buffs I want, I use this wiki page: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Food

If you click on any food to pull up the recipe then click on “show base ingredients” at the bottom right of the recipe panel, you can then go to each ingredient and see where they come from, how many you need and their current price on the trading post.

I found a list of foods sorted by level and just went down the list discovering the ones I had ingredients for (or could easily obtain from NPC). This was actually much more enjoyable than the structured tiers of the other crafts, IMO.