Revision 1

Consumables in Soulbound: Online split cleanly in two. Chemistry brews the combat line: vials, flasks, stims and elixirs that restore health outright or buff a stat for a fixed window. Cooking makes food, which grants longer and gentler buffs and is the practical way to keep your stamina bar topped up while you are out gathering.

Both are artisanal life skills with their own experience pools, and both have the same trap. Crafting at a public station in town produces the item but pays no skill experience. Only a station you own, in your own apartment, feeds the skill. That single rule is the most common reason a cooking or chemistry level stalls while the character's bags fill up.

Two Skills, Two Stations

Recipes are gated twice over. The station has to be upgraded far enough to hold the recipe at all, and the recipe itself carries a skill-level requirement on top. A high station with a low skill behind it will show you recipes you cannot yet use.

The Chemistry Ladder

The vial, flask and stim tiers are the same six effects at rising strength, so the early lab is mostly about depth rather than variety. Elixirs are the exception: each one is its own effect rather than a bigger version of an earlier potion. The chemistry line also refines materials, not just potions, which is why a gearforging recipe can end up waiting on a chemist.

Yoku Fillet and Viridium Yoku Fillet

This pair has broken more recipes than anything else in the crafting chain, so it is worth being precise. The plain Yoku Fillet is the tier 4 item. The Viridium Yoku Fillet is a separate tier 5 item, it comes from the Chemistry Lab, and it is the one Gearforge recipes ask for. Holding the wrong one looks identical in a recipe list and simply refuses to work.

The Viridium version went missing from the game for a stretch and was restored, along with correct recognition by Gearforge recipes, in the patch of 13 August 2026. The following patch, on 20 August 2026, corrected the tier 5 and tier 6 stim and elixir recipes, which had been listing the wrong crafting materials outright. If you have an older recipe list written down, check it against what the station shows you now.

What the Kitchen Makes

Ingredients come from all four of the other gathering skills plus a handful of vendor staples. Water, milk and flour-grade basics are bought in town, fish come out of the water, produce comes off a farm plot, and the top two kitchen levels lean almost entirely on tier 5 and tier 6 fish and exotic produce. See Materials and Resources for where each of those lines starts.

What Food Does

Every dish grants a timed buff rather than an instant effect, and the buffs sort into rough roles: a health-and-crit line, a cooldown-reduction line, a heavy-hit and raw-damage line, a dodge-and-defence line, and a movement-speed line. Community documentation records two buff families, Satisfied and Headrush. The Headrush line is the fast one, and it pays for its speed with a real penalty to damage or maximum health, so it is a travel tool rather than a combat buff.

Exact per-dish numbers are not reproduced here. They have moved with balance passes, and two different community records of the same dish already disagree, so the honest answer is to read the tooltip in front of you.

There is also a food-sickness debuff that limits how often you can eat. Since the patch of 20 August 2026, abandoning a dungeon run no longer clears it, so bailing out of a bad run is no longer a way to reset your buffs.

Stamina, Health and Food

The live build tracks two resources on your character, and neither of them is mana in the traditional sense.

Health is the combat bar. It is restored by health food, by a health potion on a hotkey, by a healing oasis found mid-run in some dungeons, by simply leaving a run, and slowly on its own once you are out of combat.

Stamina is the gathering bar. Every gathering action costs three stamina, and a hack or a cast that fails does not consume any. It refills passively over time, and it keeps refilling while you are logged out, which means logging off with an empty bar is a perfectly good strategy. It refills faster if you help it along: community documentation names Salad, Grilled Cheese Sandwich and Onigiri from Farok in Virelda as stamina food, and sitting inside The Tired Soul, the bar in Arcadia, gradually tops the bar up while you are parked there.

Yoku was once a third bar, spent to open dungeon chests. It is gone, chests are free, and the Yoku items still in the game are ordinary materials with an inherited name.

Consumables You Do Not Craft

Not everything with a use button comes off a station.

• Dungeon chests drop potions and food by rung. Health Stims, for instance, turn up in Fractured-rung chests across several regions.

• Guild Cache chests, opened after handing in Pioneer tasks, roll one item from each of several categories, consumables included. The tier of the cache sets the grade.

• Live event loot crates pay out consumables alongside their cosmetics. See Live Events and Commissions.

• Vendors sell staples and prepared food. The seed vendor in Virelda checks your farming level before selling you the higher-tier seeds, a requirement realigned in the 20 August 2026 patch.

Notes

Recipe rosters and station levels describe the live Early Access build as of 26 August 2026. Buff values, durations and drop rates are being tuned and are deliberately left out. For the skills behind all of this, see Life Skills; for the stations, Crafting Stations; for what a buff actually modifies, Stats and Attributes and Combat.