The Cooking Station is the one bench in SL Colonies with no fixed recipe list. There are 77 recipes we wrote to get you started, and everything else in the game’s kitchens was invented by a colonist who tried something.
The interface, rebuilt
The station was rebuilt and it is a great deal less fiddly than it was:
- One click, not two. It tells you when the HUD is ready to tap rather than leaving you guessing.
- Your ingredients are a menu, not a list you scroll and hover over.
- Real numbers, not bars. It shows exactly what a dish will give — health, hunger and the rest — before you cook it.
- It shows the level of what you are building, based on how many ingredients you have added, and the crafting experience you will earn.
- Choose food or drink, and how many to make.
The recipe book
Open the recipe book and you see every recipe you personally know, with the ingredients colour-coded against your inventory:
| Colour | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Red | you have none of this ingredient |
| Yellow | you have some, but not enough |
So you can tell at a glance what you can actually cook right now, and cook it straight from the book without opening your HUD at all.
Inventing something
This is the real work. Add ingredients, and the station tells you what the result would do before you commit.
Press check recipe and one of two things happens:
- Somebody already made this. It names their dish. You can cook it.
- Nobody has. It is yours, and you are invited to name it and write a description, then scribe it.
A scribed recipe becomes a permanent, named dish with your name on it.
How many ingredients you may use
Anyone can walk up and cook. What limits you is slots — how many different ingredients you can put in one dish.
Everyone starts with three. Every level of cooking you gain increases them.
That is what separates a cook from someone who cooks: three slots makes simple food, and the interesting inventions need more room than that.
The catch, and it is a real one
Only a cook keeps recipes.
If you are any other profession you can still invent something — the station will tell you it is new — but it will not go into your book. You will have to write the ingredients down yourself, on paper, outside the game, and re-enter them every time.
If you intend to invent, be a cook first.
What the 77 look like
Of the recipes that ship with the game:
- 63 of 77 are open at level 0, so you can work here from your first day
- 70 of 77 finish inside four minutes
- 75 of 77 spoil twenty-four hours after they leave the station
That last one is the mistake everybody makes. Do not cook ahead. Cook to order and stockpile the ingredients instead.
Where to start
The dairy line, because everything downstream wants it:
2 milk → 1 cream · 2 cream → 1 butter
Four milk per butter. Butter, cream and syrup are ingredients in their own right, so a cook quietly supplies the brewers and herbalists as well as the dinner table.
Flour comes from the Flour Mill, cuts from the Butcher Table, milk and eggs from the Cow Breeder and Chicken Coop.
Recipes
The 77 we wrote are listed here — the rest belong to the colonists who invented them: