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Cooking
April 17, 2026 at 09:54 PM
Added recipe details for Pastechi, Tamale, Burrito, Taco, Cocoplum Pie, Tangy Nut Roll, Banana Muffin, Bean Soup, Chowder, Meat Salad, Fish and Tostones, Meat in Tangy Mushroom Sauce, Sweet Lime Juice, Sunmilk Tonic, Crocodile in Swamp Sauce, and Spicy Swamp Juice
Cooking in Windrose is the food-buff loop that feeds most combat, exploration, and faction grinding. Prepared dishes grant temporary stat buffs and Max HP, stack in pairs, and scale in duration and magnitude with rarity. The central station is the Cooking Fire, a portable placeable that unlocks higher-tier recipes as upgrade attachments are built within its range.
The Cooking Fire is crafted at the Workbench from 3 Wood + 3 Stone. It is placeable anywhere in the open world, which is the main reason most players carry one into dungeons and cook before boss encounters. Upgrades must be placed within the Cooking Fire's range to count.
Upgrade | Materials | Unlocks |
|---|---|---|
10 Wood, 2 Copper Ingot | Rare-tier recipes (for example Hearty Egg Broth and Spicy Breaded Kebab) | |
10 Hardwood, 2 Ironware | Epic-tier recipes (including Coffee, Gazpacho, Seafood Platter, Taco, Swamp Pie) | |
Hardwood, Coffee Beans, Salt, Nuts, Lobster Mushrooms | Late-game stocking convenience; exact material totals not published uniformly across sources. |
The Food Dryer is a separate Bonfire-adjacent station that some sources list as required for specific Rare dishes. Player-guide consensus is that the Dryer and the Cutting Table both must be in range for certain recipes; the in-game recipe tooltip is authoritative if guides disagree.
Rarity | Buff Magnitude | Duration | Station Requirement |
|---|---|---|---|
Common | Raw ingredients | 7 minutes (Max HP only) | None; eaten raw |
Uncommon | +5 to a single stat, or Max HP only | 15 minutes | Cooking Fire base |
Rare | +10 to a single stat | 30 minutes | Cooking Fire + Cutting Table |
Epic | +20 to a single stat | 30 minutes | Cooking Fire + Cutting Table + Cookware Shelf |
Dishes that only grant Max HP (no secondary stat) exist in both the Uncommon tier (Pastechi, Dodo Broth) and the raw-ingredient Common tier. The Legendary tier exists in database dumps but has not been consistently documented across sources at launch; treat Legendary claims as unconfirmed.
Food slots: exactly two food buffs can be active at once. Eating a third overwrites the oldest.
Identical foods: two of the same dish occupy both slots but only grant one instance of the effect.
Elixirs: community consensus is that elixirs stack alongside food buffs in a separate slot pool, not against them. This is documented on allthings.how and Boostmatch but has not been explicitly confirmed by Kraken Express in patch notes.
Drinks: items like Gunroom Grog and Rum Bottle are classed as consumables but no source clearly separates them into a third buff slot category; treat them as community-variable until clarified.
Stat | Uncommon (+5, 15 min) | Rare (+10, 30 min) | Epic (+20, 30 min) |
|---|---|---|---|
(no confirmed Rare) | |||
(Uncommon tier varies) | (Rare tier varies) | ||
(Uncommon tier varies) | (Rare tier varies) | ||
(Uncommon tier varies) | (Rare tier varies) |
Black Axel is the hireable Cook at the People of Tortuga main camp, recruitable for 500 Piastre. His bonus is a 30 percent chance to craft an additional meal every time you cook at his station. This is a proc bonus, not a deterministic +30 percent output, and it applies across tiers. Players running a food-heavy boss-prep loop almost always hire Black Axel first.
Build a Cooking Fire (3 Wood + 3 Stone at Workbench).
Gather Uncommon-tier ingredients in the Coastal Jungle: Meat, Dodo Eggs, Crab Meat, Cayenne Pepper.
Add a Cutting Table for Rare-tier recipes once Copper Ingots are being produced.
Progress to Foothills for Tomato, Lime, Corn (ground to Cornmeal at a Millstone), Coffee Beans, and Cane Sugar.
Add a Cookware Shelf for Epic-tier recipes.
Enter the Cursed Swamps for Cocoplum, Leek, Beans, Crocodile Tail, and Mysterious Spice.
Hire Black Axel, relocate the Cooking Fire stack near his station, and cook pre-boss buffs on demand.
Epic cooking gates behind Cursed Swamps ingredients, but once you have the biome online, six dishes cover every major build stat. Each dish grants +20 to its stat for 30 minutes, paired with a Max HP increase.
Seafood Platter → +20 Vitality (universal survivability pick; adds roughly 260 Max HP)
Gazpacho → +20 Agility (Saber, Greatsword, and Blunderbuss builds)
Taco → +20 Mastery (critical-chance builds)
Meaty Croc Kebab → +20 Strength (Club and Halberd builds)
Swamp Pie → +20 Precision (Rapier, Pistol, and Musket builds)
Coffee → +20 Endurance (stamina-heavy playstyles)
Cooked buffs scale with rarity across both duration and magnitude. The rough ladder players see in practice:
Uncommon dishes grant +5 to the scaling stat for 15 minutes.
Rare dishes grant +10 to the scaling stat for 30 minutes.
Epic dishes grant +20 to the scaling stat for 30 minutes.
Because the game allows two simultaneous food buffs, late-game players typically pair one Vitality dish with one weapon-scaling dish before every boss attempt.
Beyond the Epic-tier headliners, Windrose ships a broader catalog of Uncommon and Rare dishes that fill the gaps in specific stat lanes. The table below covers recipes not otherwise listed in the Stat Tiers section, grouped by what they reward.
Pastechi is an Uncommon 15-minute dish that grants +5 Mastery and uses 1 Meat plus 1 Cornmeal. Tamale adds +5 Mastery at the same Uncommon tier using 1 Crocodile Tail and 1 Leek. Burrito is the Rare upgrade at +10 Mastery for 30 minutes, costing 2 Cornmeal, 2 Meat, and 2 Salt. Taco sits at the Epic tier (+20 Mastery, 30 minutes) with 6 Cornmeal, 5 Beans, 5 Tomato, and 2 Mysterious Spice.
Cocoplum Pie is the standard Uncommon +5 Precision dish and uses 1 Nuts, 1 Cocoplum, and 1 Cornmeal. Tangy Nut Roll adds +5 Precision from 2 Cornmeal and 1 Nuts, without needing swamp materials. Banana Muffin steps up to Rare (+10 Precision, 30 minutes) using 1 Banana, 2 Cane Sugar, 3 Cornmeal, and 1 Dodo Egg, which makes it the highest-stat Precision meal available without swamp ingredients.
Bean Soup grants +5 Agility at Uncommon tier from 1 Beans, 1 Cayenne Pepper, and 1 Meat. Chowder is the Rare upgrade at +10 Agility for 30 minutes, using 3 Fish Fillet, 3 Sweet Potato, and 2 Salt. The Chowder ingredient list is reachable the moment the Foothills open, so it tends to replace Coconut Soup as the standard Agility buff for mid-game boss prep.
Meat Salad is the common Uncommon +5 Vitality dish: 1 Meat plus 1 Tomato, both farmable from the starter biome and the Foothills. Fish and Tostones scales up to Rare (+10 Vitality, 30 minutes) from 3 Fish Fillet, 2 Nuts, and 3 Banana.
Meat in Tangy Mushroom Sauce is a Rare +10 Strength dish for 30 minutes, using 2 Meat, 2 Lobster Mushroom, and 4 Lime. For Endurance, Sweet Lime Juice is a quick Uncommon +5 buff from 1 Lime and 1 Cane Sugar, while Sunmilk Tonic is the Rare +10 Endurance upgrade using 2 Coconut, 2 Aloe Leaf, and 2 Nuts. Both are useful for long exploration routes where Coffee is overkill.
Crocodile in Swamp Sauce is a Rare +5 Vitality swamp dish using 3 Crocodile Tail and 1 Mysterious Spice, and Spicy Swamp Juice is a Rare +10 Endurance drink using 4 Lime, 5 Cayenne Pepper, and 4 Cocoplum. Both are made from ingredients gated behind the Cursed Swamps, so they double as a reason to keep Cocoplum and Mysterious Spice in surplus once the biome opens.
