Genshin Impact cooking guide

Cooking is an essential activity in Genshin Impact. It provides food that can give you a whole lot of different benefits that you'll need throughout your adventure, from healing your characters after a battle to making it easier to climb cliffs and mountains.

Cooking can be an involved process, requiring you to grab ingredients and take them to specific places to whip up your meals. Here's what you need to know about cooking, including how to get started, how to make the best foods that you can and more.

Food is essential in Genshin Impact, as it's the main way to heal your characters when they're hurt in battle. It can also give you additional benefits, like temporarily boosting your stats, restoring your stamina and more.

Eating the right foods before a long climb up a mountain or before a big battle can help significantly; so it's worth having lots of foods on hand. While you can find some foods that are edible raw, like fruits, many need to be cooked before you can eat them. Cooked foods also give much better effects than raw foods, so it's worth taking the time to cook often.

You'll learn cooking in an early mission, The Art of Cooking, as you start Genshin Impact and make your way across Mondstadt. During your mission, you'll meet Lynn, a woman who will show you the ropes for cooking and gathering ingredients.

Cooking any food requires first finding a recipe for the dish that you want to make. Lynn will give you some recipes as part of the Art of Cooking quest when you first meet her, but to make better dishes, you'll need to seek out recipes yourself.

The good news is that recipes are fairly easy to come by – you can get them from doing just about anything. Recipes are rewards for completing quests and Domains, and can be found in treasure chests, earned by raising your Reputation ranks in specific places or purchased from shops and other vendors. Keep an eye out for recipes and grab them whenever you can.

Lots of things can be used in cooking, and it can be really annoying to not have the ingredients that you need when you finally step up to the cook pot. Luckily, there's no limit to the number of ingredients that you can carry with you, which means that there's no reason for you not to pick up everything that you see as you're travelling the world.

Mushrooms, fruit, meat, herbs – it's all useful, so grab anything that you see as you're completing quests and exploring Teyvat. Having all those ingredients will make things a lot easier later on.

Once you have the ingredients that you need and the required recipes, you can finally start cooking. To do so, you'll need to find an open fire source and a cook pot. These are pretty common around the world; they're in towns, cities and villages, as well as scattered around the wilderness at campfires, and even located in hilichurl camps.

Cook pots are suspended over a small fire by a wooden tripod. To use them, just walk up to them and tap to activate the cook menu. If the fire under the pot is out, you'll need to use a Pyro ability or a piece of amber to light it before you can cook.

Before you start cooking, pick a dish that you have ingredients for. Once you've selected your ingredients, you'll see a curved meter on your screen that's grey on the ends, yellow in the middle and orange in the very centre. A slider will move back and forth over the bar.

Your goal is to tap the screen when the slider is in the small orange centre of the bar to make a delicious dish. If you tap outside of the orange, the dish that you make will be of a lower quality because you did a poor job. Dishes that aren't cooked well will give you fewer benefits than dishes that are cooked perfectly.