Cooking & Food Buffs
Core Keeper cooking guide — how cooking works, best food buff combinations, and which ingredients produce the strongest dishes for each build.
How Cooking Works
Cooking in Core Keeper combines 1 or 2 raw ingredients at a Cooking Pot to produce a cooked dish. Each ingredient has three properties that determine the output: a type (meat, vegetable, fruit, mushroom, fish), an adjective (hearty, spicy, sweet), and a noun (stew, pie, salad). The combination of these properties determines which dish you get and what buffs it provides.
Key Numbers
Cooking Tips
- Combining two ingredients of the same type produces a stronger dish than mixing types.
- Rare ingredients (marked with a star) produce higher-rarity dishes with stronger buffs.
- Single-ingredient dishes work but are weaker than two-ingredient combinations.
- Fish count as ingredients — check the fish database for which fish work as cooking inputs.
- Use the cooking calculator to preview every possible dish from any ingredient pair.
Best Buff Strategy
For boss fights, prioritize food that boosts max health, damage, or armor. For exploration, movement speed and mining speed buffs save the most time. Check individual food pages for exact buff values — they scale with the rarity of ingredients used.
Browse all food items in the food database or use the consumables page for a combined view of food, potions, and treats.