Cooking Deep Dive

newworld.com:

Greetings, Adventurers!

Join Lead Seasons Designer Patrick Smedley and Senior Systems Designer Tony Morton for a taste of the changes coming to Cooking and other Trade Skills in Season 5. Look forward to ingredient updates, revamped Cooking progression, Legendary Fish recipe tweaks, the removal of split attribute food, and more. Let’s dive in.

From recipes and ingredients to food, buffs, and other items like Dye, Cooking can be complex, especially for players less familiar with the Trade Skill. Let’s start with how we’re simplifying some of the options.

At launch Cooking was front-loaded with an enormous amount of potential combinations for food buffs. We were very much in the discovery phase of understanding how this would impact players throughout their early travels in Aeternum. Now, after millions upon millions of hours played, we have a far better idea of how players structure builds and use consumables.

There are 5 Tiers of food. Almost every Tier offers both split and full attribute options, but most players only use pure attribute food. To simplify things, we’re going to sunset split attribute food in Season 5. This goes for both the consumable food, learned recipes and physical recipes that may be in your inventory.

The last thing we want is to remove items and wipe them from the player’s inventory. Instead, we’ll swap those ingredients for more desirable options.

Take the Pesto-stuffed Turkey Breast as an example. This Tier 4 food gives players a Strength and Intelligence bonus. When Season 5 goes live, it will be replaced with Clam Chowder, a Tier 4 pure Strength food. In any scenario where an item is being deprecated, we will replace it with the same Tier of item that shares the main attribute. Since the Pesto-stuffed Turkey Breast gave more Strength than Intelligence, we’ve swapped it with a Tier 4 Strength food.

What about recipes? The physical recipes in your inventory will be swapped using that same logic. However, you’ll lose access to any known