Monster Hunter World: Iceborne - Cooking Guide

Overview

One of the many influential factors to completing a quest successfully is having knowledge on cooking. Cooking is a skill essential to being more efficient in hunts since meals grant stat boosts to compliment your gear. Having access to these stat boosts can make a huge difference when taking on formidable monsters.

Meals

You’ll miss out on a couple of useful boosts if you head out on an empty stomach. To get started, you need to visit Astera’s canteen. Canteens are areas where hunters can eat meals to hunt more efficiently. While you can eat at the nearby camp, some quests will immediately put you in awkward spots. Some instances might not be forgiving enough and might even forbid you from catching a break. To be on the safe side, prioritize on eating canteens to reap the most benefits.

Choosing a Meal

Meals can vary from meat-based dishes, fish dishes, or even those made from vegetables. These offer boosts in attack, defense, and resistance to elements respectively. Another type of consumable related to meals is drinks. Consuming a drink will raise the chance to obtain skills but the effect will vary with type. Focus on gathering fresh ingredients to gain better effects when consuming meals. Bear in mind that you can have a maximum of one meal for each quest. In addition, if you faint during an expedition or quest, the boost given by the consumed meal will disappear.

Improving the Canteen’s Services

The purpose of improving the canteen is to unlock better meals. These meals require you to have access to new ingredients. When starting out, you’ll have access to a few ingredients for cooking. To upgrade the canteen, you need to finish cooking quests to unlock ingredients. To start a quest, interact with the Astera cook, the cat near the canteen. There are other ways to obtain ingredients. Similar to the cook, you need to locate delivery npcs, which are characters with a yellow exclamation point on their heads. These npcs will ask you to deliver certain items. In order to expedite the process, focus on stockpiling items in your inventory during hunts instead of selling them. Other than that, don’t forget to continue the main story since it also has a bearing on the canteen’s development. Ultimately, you’ll want an assortment of ingredients so that you can cook various meals to aid in your survivability.

Canteen progression

You can upgrade the canteen two times during the story. By upgrading the canteen, you can have a larger supply of meals that can be prepared each time. Each upgrade will grant two additional slots to the meal preparation.

Using the Barbecue Spit

During the thick of battle, you may want to grab a quick meal, especially if you have fainted from a recent encounter. For instance, you might be in the middle of a dangerous hunt and it’s far away from a canteen but close to a camp. Using rations will sometimes suffice, however, you will have to rely on better meals later on. To do this, you need to learn how to use the barbecue spit (BBQ spit.) To grill food, you have to first gather raw meat, an ingredient that is found in the wild. After obtaining raw meat, either head to a camp and interact with the barbecue or use your portable barbecue. You need to time the cooking process in order to produce a well-cooked steak. If you take too long to cook it, you’ll risk burning the meat. Conversely, if it comes out half-cooked, you’ll obtain a rare steak, which is inferior to the well-cooked steak. Learning how to cook a fine steak is vital to finishing long quests since they grant higher stamina boosts than rations.