Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - Cooking Guide

gamespot.com:

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is now available on the Nintendo Switch, offering up a wide variety of different RPG systems for you to sink your teeth into. One of those systems is the cooking system, which lets players feed their party and gain a wide variety of different boosts. Here's everything you need to know about cooking meals in Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

Cooking is unlocked in chapter 2, while traversing through the desert. Manana is in-charge of making food, but you need to gather the necessary ingredients. Each dish offers different bonuses, like additional XP, CP, enemy drops, or enemy gold drops, all of which last for a specific amount of real-time. Similar to the Gem crafting system, you will need to collect a variety of different ingredients, either by finding them in the open world or getting them as drops from different monsters.

If you don't have the necessary ingredients, you can bypass the requirements by spending Silver Nopon Coins. When the cooking system is first unlocked, you will only have access to a single dish. To unlock more dishes, you need to eat new food at different Colonies. Each Colony only had one dish, which can typically be purchased for a couple hundred gold. You will come across different Colonies throughout the main story and as part of certain side quests. It's a good practice to eat at the Canteen of every Colony you visit, even if it cancels out your current meal bonus.