Cooking strategy

Quality food is crucial to maximizing your adventures each day. Unless you're rich enough to have all your meals catered, cooking quality food is equally crucial. The Pastamancer skill of Pastamastery is necessary for the best recipes in the kingdom.

Since your stomach can only hold so much each day, your diet must be chosen wisely, and you must choose based on exactly what you want to accomplish. Below is a handy reference that will help you cook smart and eat smart for better adventuring.

Fullness and You

Each food item has a fixed fullness number. When you eat it, your fullness counter is increased by that amount. If you try to eat food that would increase the counter beyond its limit, you will be told that you are "too full", and nothing will happen. The counter resets to zero at each rollover. Your stomach's limit is normally 15.

• The Stomach of Steel skill (only accessible in a Teetotaler ascension) increases your limit to 20.
• The Feast of Boris increases your limit by 15, but only if you're in a Casual ascension or haven't ascended yet (this limit increase does not occur in Standard runs, not even after Ronin runs out!)

Unlike drunkenness, the game does not visibly indicate fullness gained by each item.
The game normally does not display a player's fullness, but as of October 6, 2011, an unfunny fullness counter has been implemented, though invisible (and not funny) by default. This can be turned on from a player's options menu. Click here for a list of foods sorted by size.

Most cooking and eating strategies center around maximizing adventures per fullness. Most items that give more adventures per fullness than hi meins are semi-rares, no longer obtainable, or limited in nature. Best Foods provides a list of all KoL foods sorted by adventure per fullness.

Fullness also affects the skill Chronic Indigestion, which can provide an elemental attack for non-Mysticality classes.

Fullness can be reduced by 3 by using some spice melange or an Ultra Mega Sour Ball once per day (you can use both on the same day).
However, the former is a highly expensive, rare drop from giant sandworms, which can only be fought by using a drum machine; and the latter is a highly expensive, rare drop from huge bowls of candy, which are only obtainable during Halloween.

Strategies

The Key To Success

The highest quality food for adventurers without Pastamastery are key lime pies, which can be made using pie crusts obtained from The Bugbear Bakery. The other two ingredients are:

• Limes, which are obtained primarily from the Fruit Golem in the Menagerie Level 1.
• At least one key, which are obtained from The Daily Dungeon (or by eating one of its key lime pies).

Key lime pies are awesome quality and offer 4.0 adventures per fullness, and have one distinct advantage: key lime pies can be pulled and eaten to get keys that are otherwise marked as quest items. Bear in mind that cooking the pie itself requires three steps. Although there are better choices for optimal players, these pies are rather accessible and represent a solid choice for players with few ascensions, beginning players, and Bad Moon players.

Baked Madness

Another, more easily accessible option are acceptable bagels, which are the result of cooking plain bagels (which can be obtained from the Madness Bakery by putting wads of dough into the Bagelmat-5000; the Bakery is unlocked by either using hypnotic breadcrumbs from The Haunted Pantry or accepting The Armorer and Leggerer's quest) with globs of cream cheese (which can be obtained by shaking cartons of snake milk from The Overgrown Lot; the Lot is unlocked by accepting Doc Galaktik's Quest for Herbs).

Not only are they made out of easy-to-obtain ingredients, the quests you accept to unlock them also grant you useful things: completing the Armorer's quest gives 5000 meat and a popular part; while completing Doc Galaktik's quest gives you a 33% discount on all items from his store and adds a new +5 stats potion that lasts 5 adventures to said store for 40 meat.

Speaking of that popular part, if you can get strawberries (a good area to find them in is The Skeleton Store, unlocked by accepting the Meathsmith's quest), globs of enchanted icing (which drop from gingerbread murderers in the Madness Bakery) and wads of dough, you can make the EPIC popular tarts in the Bakery's Popular Machine (though, unlike acceptable bagels, you can only make one every time you get the Heart of Madness adventure).

The middleman between bagels and tarts are standard-issue cupcakes, made out of wads of dough and globs of enchanted icing. If you can get your hands on some cherries (again, obtainable from the Skeleton Store), you can use them to upgrade your cupcakes to ultra-deluxe cupcakes.

Beaned out of your Mind

Another option for players without skills are burritos like the enchanted bean burrito. However, they have multiple ingredients: the beans are found on beanbats in their part of the The Bat Hole; spices from the Knob Goblin Master Chef (see below); and jabañero peppers, available from The Hermitage for the equivalent of about 50 meat. Enchanted beans make the best burritos (3.83 adventures per fullness) and can be made at level 4. Burritos are only really considered better than pizzas and basic hippy pies.

Racking up Spices

If you need to keep your spice rack stocked, you can:

• Adventuring in the The Spooky Forest (very inefficient.)
• Buying them from the The Mall of Loathing (not available in Ronin/Hardcore but otherwise very convenient.)
  • Ronin players may want to pull secret blends of herbs and spices or a few boxcar turtles instead.
• Opening Knob Kitchen grab-bags from the Kitchens (bad value compared to other uses of a ten-leaf clover.)
• Using boxcar turtles (requires luck, and boxcar turtles from a previous ascension. Only worth it if you have spare pulls, but some of the other items from the boxcar turtle - and the turtles themselves, if you have Armorcraftiness - are quite good as well.)
• Adventuring in the Kitchens (good if you can sniff the Knob Goblin Master Chef or drive away the Knob Goblin Chef.)
• Having a Spice Ghost that's at least level 5 active during combat. This will randomly give you spices during combat, up to a maximum of 10 per day.
• Using a drum machine without worm-riding hooks equipped. This will give you a combat encounter with a giant sandworm, which sometimes drops 1-3 canisters of spices after each fight. The area where they drop is not available until level 11, but offer excellent stats and meat gains.

Spices used to be extraordinarily useful due to their use in both lo mein and chow mein noodles. With the removal of chow mein in 2015, they are significantly less useful. This is because lo meins are in a very tough spot, requiring 3 turns to craft and competing against a number of level 6 reagent pastas (which benefit from Saucemaven) and Level 7 quest pasta.

Cooking al Dente

Pastamastery allows you to summon dry noodles and cook with them. Basic pasta dishes tend to offer an okay amount of adventures when compared to food that drops early in the game. The best basic pasta dish is delicious spicy noodles, which offer 3.67 adventures per fullness.
But if you can make that, you can do better. Those with the Pastamastery skill but not Transcendental Noodlecraft should focus on mushroom lo meins, which offer 4.38 adventures per fullness.

Reagent pastas, long considered the best food of the game, only offer 4.25 adventures per fullness at best. Because they have 6 fullness, you'll most likely need shims... lower quality foods to finish off the day. Reagent pastas also require Advanced Saucecrafting and scrumptious reagents. These reagents can be better used for Sauceror potions, including the milk of magnesium, which increases adventures obtained from eating food.

• Saucemaven still showcases some of the power of these dishes, adding 5 adventures per item for Mysticality classes.
• Since 2015, the newer Level 8 Reagent pastas are size 5, allowing one to benefit from the skill multiple times per rollover.
• Since 2020, multiple milks of magnesium are no longer needed, indirectly freeing reagents for use with Saucemaven.

Examine the recipe tables in Pastamastery and Transcendental Noodlecraft for a full explanation of all dry noodle items, adventures and stats gain.

Once In A Lifetime

At level 9, all adventures will be able to find a grue egg, which can be cooked to make a grue egg omelette, a food offering 6.0 adventures per fullness. No skill is required. As the grue egg occurs only once each ascension, one cannot use it as a regular food, but its definitely worth making and eating when you can.

Tempura-Rarely Yours

High-level players in Aftercore may want to consider Tempuramancy as an option. The positives are the high adventure yields (6.0 adventures per fullness for the tempura radish and tempura carrot); the negatives are the difficulty in obtaining the ingredients (bubbling tempura batter requires 200MP and an adventure, with a limit of 3 obtainable per day).

Additional Cooking Notes

A Little Help, Please

Advanced cooking consumes adventures, unless you have a chef-in-the-box. Obtaining a chef-in-the-box, either through a pull or through adventuring, is often a concern early in adventuring. Whether or not to spend adventures obtaining the parts for a chef-in-the-box is part of ascension strategy, and not included here.

Everybody Must Take Home Ec

Even if you're in Oxycore, you will have to cook at least twice per ascension, which means no matter what, you will have to use your E-Z Cook™ oven at some point.

Alternatively, you can spend 25 or so adventures in The Palindome to find wet stunt nut stew in baited traps. So, y'know, turns and roundabouts or whatever.