Petit Planet is a life sim made by HoYoverse, and long-time fans of either will know what that means: sooner or later, you’re going to be cooking up some mouthwatering dishes to feed to your characters and keep them in their best shape possible.
Food is an essential contributor to keeping your Strength up in Petit Planet, but it’s no simple affair. Sure, munching on fresh fruit is good for a temporary pick-me-up, but when you’re looking for a more satisfying culinary experience, properly cooked food is where it’s at.
Petit Planet features a whole cooking skill that your character develops over time, from humble beginnings in your first makeshift camp to operating out of a fully-equipped kitchen. There are loads of recipes to discover and, with the game’s second beta test currently ongoing, I’m not going to pretend that I’ve seen even close to all of them yet. However, if it’s advice on how to discover more cooking recipes in Petit Planet you’re after, I’ve got you covered.
How to discover cooking recipes in Petit Planet
Delightfully, unlike many games, Petit Planet allows you to discover recipes for yourself through trial-and-error. In other words: once you unlock the ability to cook, you can try throwing various different ingredients together to see what works. It’s more fun than just reading recipe cards and following their instructions!
You unlock the cooking ability by progressing through the game’s prologue tutorials – when a cooking station complete with crock pot pops up in your town square (which at this point is still about 50% campsite) you can begin experimenting.
Interact with the cooking pot and you’ll see that you have access to a bunch of recipes that match your current cooking proficiency level. However, these will be greyed out (although not locked) until you successfully cook each recipe one time.
To get started, choose a recipe you like the look of and select “Discover Recipe”. You’ll have the option to select a couple of ingredients from your inventory, and – at higher levels – your kitchenware as well. For example, reaching Cooking Level 2 allows you to switch between the cooking pot and a blender.
There’s usually a good clue as to which ingredients you need in the recipe name, although it can still take a few tries to get an idea of what the game is after. “Fish in tomato sauce” is relatively straightforward, for example, but figuring out exactly which crab Petit Planet considers appropriate for a shellfish dish can involve a bit more experimentation.
Helpfully, you get a sort of Wordle-style assessment upon finishing cooking a dish, indicating which of the three factors you got correct, and which are still undiscovered.
There’s a further complication with higher level dishes requiring ingredients of certain qualities – this seems to refer to the classic colour-coded rarity ranging from Grey (Common) to at least Purple (Very Rare) from what we’ve seen so far, rather than any star rating attached to the ingredient. I’m still figuring out exactly how to calculate these requirements, but I’ll update this page with more information as I find it!
You can also freestyle cooking at any cooking station by switching from “Recipe Mode” to “Freestyle”. From what I’ve seen so far, freestyle cooking doesn’t seem to unlock any hidden recipes, which is a bit of a shame – but it does reliably produce dishes and drinks in the “Homestyle” series, which can be helpful for restoring your Strength using the ingredients you have to hand during the early game without worrying too much about having access to the right recipes.
For more on Petit Planet’s latest beta, see our guide to collecting and using Archiboos in Petit Planet, and our page on how to check your Petit Planet Home Rating.