Cooking and gathering, not the first thing you think of when trying to make your character stronger, but what most people don't know is the sort of buffs and strengths that can be provided to you by it.

I've split them into 3 different groups of ingredients, Passives, Actives, and most useful of them all, immunities.

First let's take a look at passives, passive meals are pretty weak, they consist of things like starapple jam, vinewafer sheafs, and jerky. These are generally the weakest of the bunch bunch but are very easy to come across, you can usually get these sorts of ingredients practically lying on the ground and are a cheap way to get an extra 10-15% health or making you thirst at half rate for little to no cost while keeping your character satiated, less common passive ingredients such as mirror dust and spinefruit jam can be very powerful, for example a recipe which makes it so every time you take damage you have a 10% chance to reflect to reflect 100% of damage the next three times you take damage.

Next you have actives, things like spark tick plasma and acid, these can be strong since they're basically just more abilities which you can use to cause damage to enemies, they're usually quite strong and can have very powerful side-effects which is where immunizing ingredients come in.

Finally, immunizing ingredients are simply gland pastes, pastes give you a breath ability that corresponds to what kind of paste you use, what makes this so strong is that you're immune to what element or effect the gland you use is, for example flamebeard paste making you immune to heat, and vice versa for sleetbeard paste, things like stillbeard paste not only make you immune to stun gas, they also make you immune to stun, which means that for powerful enemies such as a leering stalker which would normally be able to stunlock you from a distance, effectively killing you instantly if you can't escape, you merely get knocked back and ignore the stun, making otherwise extremely dangerous enemies easier to eliminate, with the spicer ability you can be immune to up to 3 things at the same time, I can be immune to cold, heat, and stun, ontop of this it also gives me a breath attack per paste, there are two kinds of gland pastes, normal, and concentrated, normal pastes give you breath level 5, while concentrated pastes give you breath level 10, the breath attacks are active abilities that recharge in around 15 to 20 turns, they aren't super strong against individual enemies but they cover a very large area and are good against swarming enemies like snailmothers and their swarms of little snails.

Now that I've figured out how cooking and gathering works I pick it on almost every character I make, I find it to be extremely helpful and without a doubt a well balanced yet powerful skill and one of my favorite systems in the entire game, I hope this helps you out, and good luck.