Cooking that earns more than it costs
Why cooked dishes beat raw ingredients in the shipping bin, and the specific recipes worth making at each stage of the game.
The short answer
Almost every cooked dish sells for more than the sum of its ingredients, and the markup grows with the dish\u2019s star rank. A single-ingredient dish like baked potato turns a 75g crop into an 80g dish, and late recipes like golden cookies add 480g of profit per dish. Cooking before shipping is the cheapest income upgrade in the game.
Why cooking always wins
The game prices a dish from the value of its ingredients, then applies a markup that rises with the dish’s star rank — one star adds 10%, two stars 15%, up to five stars at 30%. Because the markup is on the whole recipe, a dish made from valuable ingredients earns proportionally more than a cheap one. The exact rule and the star table are on the cooking page.
There is one catch worth knowing: ingredients count once per slot, not per unit. A recipe that takes six of one item only counts that item once for the restore calculation — which matters for energy, not for price. The price side is straightforward: dishes are worth more than their parts, full stop.
The early dishes that pay
| Dish | Skill | Ingredients | Output value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baked Potato | 4 | 1 Potato | 80g |
| Wild Berry Jam | 2 | 6 Wild Berries + 1 Sugar | 115g |
| Tomato Soup | 14 | 1 Tomato + milk + herb | 220g |
Baked Potato is the first money-maker: one potato (75g in the bin) becomes an 80g dish, and you can cook a whole harvest in minutes. Wild Berry Jam is nearly free — wild berries grow on bushes around town — and bins for more than triple their raw value.
The mid-game dishes
Once you have milk, eggs and cheese, Omelet (level 22, 280g output) is a strong staple. Tomato Soup at level 14 is the best early return on a regrowing crop — tomatoes keep producing, and every harvest can become soup.
The general rule: cook the dishes whose ingredients you already produce in bulk. The recipe browser sorts every dish by profit, so check it against what your farm currently grows.
The endgame dishes
The highest-margin dishes in the game:
| Dish | Level | Profit per dish |
|---|---|---|
| Golden Cheesecake | 40 | 580g |
| Golden Cookies | 40 | 480g |
| Harvest Plate | 40 | 175g |
| Beet Soup | 40 | 160g |
| Vegetable Pot Pie | 38 | 125g |
These need ingredients from animals (golden milk, golden eggs), so they arrive with ranching. Their profit per dish is huge, but the ingredient cost is high too — the ranching page explains how golden products are produced.
When not to cook
Three exceptions to “cook everything”:
- Ingredients with a higher use. Ores, stones and most foraged crafting materials have no dish; do not hold them for the kitchen.
- Star-rank floors. A one-star dish ties with the raw ingredients in restore value; it is the price markup, not the energy, that makes cooking profitable.
- Requests that want the raw item. Some request board quests ask for a specific crop or fish, not its cooked form — check the request before converting your whole harvest (request board guide).
The habit that compounds
Cook in the evening after the day’s harvest, ship the dishes the next morning, and keep the ingredient stock low enough that nothing spoils. Combined with the Seed Maker’s seed-selling trick and the money guide, cooking is the reason most players stop worrying about gold by the end of spring year one.