BotW How to Cook: No Pot, Effect Stacking, incredible success

Breath of the Wild has no menu of dishes: what you get depends entirely on what you throw in the pot. This page covers the mechanics themselves: how to cook, what to do without a pot, how effects are calculated, how incredible success happens, elixirs and failed dishes. For ready-made recipes, see best recipes and the recipe finder.

How do you cook?

Stand at a lit pot, pick ingredients from your inventory to hold (up to five) and throw them in. Villages, stables and camps in the wild all have pots. The game’s tip reads: “Cook up some wild cuisine by throwing together some ingredients and seeing what happens. You can’t cook with an unlit pot.”

Three basic rules:

• Healing doubles. A dish heals the total of what each ingredient heals raw, times two, up to 30 hearts.
• The name and the effect are separate. The dish name comes from the base ingredients; prefixes such as “Mighty” or “Hearty” come from the effect ingredients.
• More is stronger. As the tip puts it: “Using more of an effect-imparting ingredient when cooking will increase that effect in the resulting dish.”

How do you cook without a pot?

Take Raw Meat: raw it heals 1 heart, as Seared Steak 1.5, as Icy Meat 1 plus a short burst of heat resistance, and cooked in a pot 2. An apple left by the fire becomes a Baked Apple.

The tip says: “In the extreme heat of volcanic regions, ingredients will cook simply by placing them on the ground.” It also warns: “Keep in mind that roasting an ingredient won’t activate its potential special effect.” Save effect ingredients such as Mighty Bananas and Endura Carrots for the pot.

Frozen meat is easy to make on a snowy mountain and handy for a daytime trip into the Gerudo Desert, but its heat resistance lasts only a minute, far less than a Chilly dish; see Chilly dishes.

How do effects stack?

One effect per dish. “Certain ingredients give elixirs or dishes special properties. But don’t get greedy: ingredients with different effects will cancel each other out.” Two different effects in one pot means neither survives, and you are left with plain healing. So use one kind of effect ingredient and fill the remaining slots with effect-free ingredients like meat, apples or mushrooms for hearts.

The level comes from points. Each effect ingredient carries points. The points for the same effect add up, and the dish levels up at each threshold. Every ingredient’s points are on the effect pages, such as Mighty dishes.

The duration comes from the number of ingredients. Every ingredient gives 30 seconds; each effect ingredient adds its effect’s base time on top. The cap is 30:00.

Effect-free ingredients add only their 30 seconds. A few add more: seasonings (Cane Sugar, Goat Butter, Bird Egg and the like) a little extra, monster parts bring their slot to 1:10, 1:50 or 3:10 by grade, and a dragon’s horn shard adds 30 minutes on its own, straight to the cap.

Example: four Mighty Bananas and one Raw Meat. At 2 points a banana that is 8 points, past the threshold of 7, so level 3 Mighty; the time is 4 × 0:50 + 0:30 = 3:50.

Hearty, Enduring and Energizing have no duration: they restore hearts or stamina the moment you eat, and Hearty and Enduring add yellow extra based on points. See Hearty dishes and Enduring dishes.

What decides an incredible success?

An incredible success adds one of these at random (an option that does not apply to the dish is never picked):

• 3 extra hearts of healing (one more extra heart for Hearty dishes);
• 5:00 more duration (still capped at 30:00);
• one more effect level.

The base chance comes from variety. Each different ingredient in the pot adds 5%:

Then add the best bonus among the ingredients (bonuses do not stack):

• Cane Sugar and high-grade monster parts (all guts, Lizalfos Tails, Ancient Cores and so on): +30%
• Bird Egg, Goat Butter, Goron Spice and mid-grade monster parts: +10%

The banana-and-meat example above uses only two different ingredients, so its chance is 10%.

An incredible success is certain when:

• You cook on a Blood Moon night, from about 23:30 until the moon rises at midnight. See Blood Moon.
• The pot holds a Star Fragment, or a scale, claw, fang shard or horn shard from Dinraal, Naydra or Farosh.

Monster Extract does the opposite: with it in the pot there is no incredible success, the duration becomes 1:00, 10:00 or 30:00 at random, and either healing or effect strength drops to its minimum or goes up a step. Leave it out when you want a predictable result.

How are meals and elixirs different?

Elixir = critter + monster part. “If you combine monster parts dropped by fallen foes in a cooking pot with things like lizards and butterflies, you can create elixirs with special effects.”

• The effect comes from the critter (frogs, lizards, butterflies, darners, rhino beetles, fireflies…).
• Monster parts add no hearts and no effect level, only duration and incredible success chance. Which monster they came from does not matter, only the grade: low-grade parts like horns 1:10, mid-grade like fangs and eyeballs 1:50, high-grade like guts and tails 3:10.
• You can add food to an elixir as long as the effects do not clash.
• An elixir is named after its effect: Mighty Elixir, Fireproof Elixir and so on. Recipes for each are on the elixirs page.

Fairies. Throw a fairy in alone, or with ingredients that would otherwise make an elixir or a failed dish, and you get a Fairy Tonic that heals a lot. “If you have a fairy help you cook, the tonic you produce together restores a great deal of hearts.”

Why did I get a failed dish?

How do you check what you cooked before?

The tip: “Check a meal’s ingredients by selecting it from your inventory and then selecting Recipe.” Tears of the Kingdom turned this into a Recipe Book that can pick the ingredients up for you; see how to cook in Tears of the Kingdom.

Related

• Best recipes: hearts, stamina, buffs and rupees
• All recipes: every meal and elixir
• Recipe finder: tick what you carry and see what you can cook
• Elixirs: which critters make which elixir
• Recipes to sell: how sell prices work