Foods and Elixirs

Table of contents

• Cooking Vessels and Heat Sources
• Ingredient Restrictions
• Eating Food Raw
• Creating a Dish or Elixir
• Food / Elixir Types
• Cooking Example
• Buying & Selling Dishes and Elixirs
• Random Consumable Effect

Heroes eat Foods (primarily in the form of prepared, cooked Dishes) to restore their energy while they Rest. They also use Elixirs to give them a quick pick-me-up in the heat of battle.

Dishes and Elixirs can provide a Hero with additional special effects, though this weakens their ability to restore Health.

Once consumed, an Elixir’s special property lasts until the end of combat, or 5 minutes. A Dish’s special property lasts until the end of your next Extended Rest, or you eat a Dish with a different special property.

Cooking Vessels and Heat Sources

In order to cook at all, you must have access to a heat source. In many cases, this will be a fire of some kind, such as a stove, a campfire, a lit torch, or a fire-pit. Weapons enchanted with fire or heat may also serve this purpose, as will natural sources of heat, such as lava, or living (but not dead) creatures wreathed in flame. Fire Arrows in and of themselves are not sufficiently hot, but one can be consumed to start a fire. In general, if it’s hot enough to boil water, and lasts a few minutes, it’s good enough to cook with.

Without access to a cooking vessel, a Hero can only create Dishes with a single Ingredient, and cannot make Elixirs, no matter their Cooking Skill.

Most bastions of civilization, such as inns, roadside stables, or even individual homes, will have some kind of cooking vessel that Heroes can make use of, if the owner allows.

Ingredient Restrictions

An Elixir must have at least one Critter as an Ingredient. Elixirs may use Monster Parts as Ingredients, but Food Dishes cannot. Food Ingredients may be used in Dishes or Elixirs.

No Food or Elixir may have more than 5 Ingredients in it.

Eating Food Raw

Individual Ingredients can be eaten raw. When a Hero eats an Ingredient raw, it counts as their meal for that Rest. The Ingredient restores HP equal to its Rank, and does not provide any additional benefits.

Creating a Dish or Elixir

First, select your Ingredients. You may use up to 5 ingredients in a Dish or Elixir, though your choice of cooking vessel may also limit the number of ingredients you can use.

Then, add up all the Ranks of all of the Ingredients in the dish, capped at Rank (base Cooking / 2, rounded down), for each Ingredient. Add the number of ingredients used in the item to this. This is the Dish or Elixir’s Point Value.

Dishes restore (Point Value) Health when consumed. Elixirs restore (Point Value / 2) Health when consumed.

If any ingredient in the Dish or Elixir had a special property, you may choose to apply that special property to the item. A Dish or Elixir may have only one special property. Dishes and Elixirs with special properties restore half as much Health, but can apply useful bonuses. Consult the chart (right) to see what Rank the special property is.

If a Dish or Elixir has a Point Value less than 6, if cannot have a special property.

The exception is if the Dish or Elixir’s special property is to restore Magic or Stamina, or to grant Temporary Health, Magic, or Stamina. Then you may choose whether half (rounded down), or all, of the Health the item would restore instead goes to the alternate pool.
This can occur even if the item’s Point Value is less than 6.

Food / Elixir Types

If a Critter or Food Ingredient has no special effect, it is simply Healthy.
However, such simple Materials are rare – most Critters and Food Ingredients have a proper special effect!

Boosted Trait Dishes and Elixirs increase the affected Trait(s) by (Rank).

Combat Prowess Dishes and Elixirs increase the affected secondary stat by (Rank).

Resist Damage items grant you (Rank) Resistance to the specified damage type. In most cases, this results in increasing your Defense against that damage type by (Rank x 2).

Resist Weather items grant you (Rank) Resistance to the specified type of Weather. In most cases, this results in you treating that Weather’s effects as if it were (Rank) ranks more mild.

Restorative Dishes and Elixirs restore Spent and Burned points of that resource.

Temp Pool Dishes and Elixirs grant Temporary points in the specified resource.

Cooking Example

While scouting out in the wilderness, Savelle the Hylian rogue makes a campfire to keep warm for the night. He’s found several Hylian Shrooms (Rank 1, no effect) that day. He could eat one raw, and it would restore a single Hit Point. He decides instead to cook them; since he lacks a Cooking Vessel, he opts to roast them over a campfire, one at a time. Each Dish (a Roasted Mushroom) restores 2 HP when eaten.

A few days (and one trip to a nearby town) later, Savelle has purchased a cast-iron wok (Rank 1 Cooking Vessel), which will allow him to cook more than one ingredient at a time over a fire. Since his Cooking Vessel is only Rank 1, it can only contain 3 ingredients at a time. (See the Mundane Tools section.)

This time, his scouting has found not only a Hearty Truffle (Rank 3, Hearty), but he catches some Armored Carp (Rank 2, Tough) in the nearby river, as well. With the Hylian Shrooms he still has from before, Savelle can make quite a nice spread!

Savelle puts two Hylian Shrooms in his pot with the Armored Carp, and begins cooking. Adding the Ranks of the items up (1 + 1 + 2), plus the number of Ingredients in the dish (3) equals 7 – the Dish’s Point Value. Savelle could leave it at that, and have a Dish that restores 7 HP, but he decides to bring out the special effect of the Carp.

The Dish’s Point Value is high enough to allow for a Rank 1 effect. Thus, Savelle creates a Seafood-Mushroom Skewer, which restores 4 HP, and grants TOugh (Rank 1), when consumed.

After another few days, Savelle returns to town. While staying at the Inn, he decides to make use of the kitchen. Since this is a full-featured kitchen in a civilized town, he can use 5 Ingredients in his Dish.

Savelle decides to celebrate by making a veritable feast of a Dish, using the Hearty Truffle and the remainder of his Hylian Shrooms. Savelle only has a Cooking Trait of 4, though, so while the Hearty Truffle is Rank 3, he must treat it as a Rank 2 item – a cook even marginally more skilled than Savelle could bring out the full power and flavor of the Hearty Truffle.

Savelle throws 4 Hylian Shrooms and the Hearty Truffle into the pot. He adds up the Ranks of the items (1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2), plus the number of Ingredients in the Dish (5), for a total of 11. As before, he can choose to bring out the special property of the Hearty Truffle, and does so, choosing to have the Hearty effect grant half the Dish’s Point Value in Temporary Hit Points. This means the Dish will restore 6 HP, and grant 5 Temporary Hit Points, when consumed.

Buying & Selling Dishes and Elixirs

Typically, Dishes and Elixirs have a Market Value equal to their constituent ingredients – meaning merchants buy Dishes and Elixirs for half that price, and sell them for twice that price, unless haggled with.

The below prices are for buying generic Dishes or Elixirs from merchants, where the ingredients used in the Dish or Elixir don’t particularly matter – only the result does.

Be careful when selling cooked food to merchants – moreso than with raw ingredients, the merchant’s tastes and the needs of their customers are first and foremost in their minds. This means you should try to find out what a merchant’s favorite dish is, and sell that to them; and avoid selling them cooked Dishes and Elixirs that they might not find tasty, or that they cannot easily resell to others.

Prices for buying and selling Dishes and Elixirs, and their Point Value.

After buying a Dish or Elixir of a certain type, remember to check the “Creating a Dish or Elixir” section to determine what it does, while using the Point Value indicated in the table above.

Random Consumable Effect

If there is ever a need to randomly determine a Dish, Elixir, Food Ingredient, or Critter’s special Effect, you can consult this chart. Simply roll two separate dice: select one for the X axis, the other for the Y axis, and that determines the effect that the Dish, Elixir, Critter, or Ingredient has.

Table of Random Consumable Effects.

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