Basic WASD, Use, Squat, your 2 mouse buttons + the scroll wheel. No scroll wheel? Tough luck. Have fun picking peas one tiny pixel at a time. There's a perk that allows you to Dash in the kitchen and honestly, I don't recommend running. It tends to cause whatever you are carrying to fly to god knows where. Food physics on normal speed is already a bit sketch, you don't need more trouble.



Picking up multiple items of the same group: hover over the thing, scroll your mouse wheel up or down to increase/decrease the amount being picked up. Great for everything. No you can't change the binding on this as of the current version.



Having an item in your hand and holding Shift (default key) allows you to enter Advanced Controls, where your only options are: Rotate, Drop, or Move the thing Vertically. Under most circumstances, you DON'T need to use this. (Unless this game suddenly turns into classic Resident Evil) You may think, but how do I empty out liquid in the sink? Garbage can. The magical garbage can will happily gobble up all the content in the container you are holding, even if normally you are not supposed to dispose of burning hot oil in your garbage receptacle.

So far, the only time I found AC to be useful is to shake things out evenly in a pan/pot to ensure proper cooking. Because of the way food is stacked by default, you can have very wacky situations such as 1 single pasta not cooked at all in a big af pot of water. While the game does have some wiggle room for mistakes, just make sure you don't have a tower of food in your pan or pot to avoid customer complaints.

Cutting board is your best friend. You can use it to pick up a large number of items compared to your average plates and bowls. I tend to do the seasoning on top of it as well. I have heard of leftover seasoning transferring over to other food items by accident, personally I haven't seen customer complaints about it. Though I also don't check their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to begin with... If you do want a clean board, you need to wash it with water or interact the trash can with it to... somehow clean it.

It looks like a yellow stick with a mashy bit at the end. It allows you to blend things in a pot rather than go through the hassle of dumping 8 tomatoes, 1000ml of chicken stock and other seasoning in the automatic food processor and then transferring all of that back to the pot to make soup. Just be careful when you use it. Newbie tends to accidentally knock the pot over while it's not in blending mode. Turn it on, point it at the receptacle and interact with it in order to lock onto that container. This allows you to just lower your Blender into the container without fear of knocking it over. While you can go crazy spinning the stick, occasionally stuff can jump out due to the the wonky physics.

Too small to be of any decent use. Skip. Might be usable if the meat doesn't require flipping or you are a good flipper with your spatula, though such recipes are pretty rare unless you plan on cooking a lot of Dunkles Märzenbier BBQ Chicken. Granted, it's stupidly easy once you got the seasoning ready on the side and just reuse the drizzle.


You are given 2 kinds of ladles, one scoop in 50ml increment and the other in 150. You can distinguish them by the color in the middle, blue is the 50ml and red is the 150ml. While they are great for scooping soup, they are also great for transferring liquids from pan to bowl or the reverse. Unfortunately cannot be used to drizzle when the recipe calls for them. At least Pipette now has that covered.

Your basic kitchen utensil to fry things in recipes that calls for "frying x on one side for y seconds." You could get by with the default 1, but I would personally invest in 2. There's one hanging on the hook across from t he grill on classic kitchen layout.

I don't have good experience with this at all even for recipes that calls specifically for the use of this pan. I tend to find my food items to be cold despite cooking for the correct period of time twice. I ended up just using regular Pan instead.


It pipettes things. Allows you to sample liquid in 5 or 10ml increment at a time, E key to swap pickup quantity. Great for transporting small samples of liquid at a time. Now it also allows you to drizzle directly onto any food stuff with little fuss :)

As long as it's not in large quantity anyway



There are 2 versions, Small and Big. Small pot holds less than the big pot and it's narrower. But it does have the one advantage in that it can fit comfortably on the stove with a pan in front of it. Whereas big pot will be slightly tilted if you have pan in front of it. In a game known for its janky physics, you want to avoid as much buggy physics potential as possible. Or just not put pans in front of big pots to begin with. I use 5 big pots. Soup recipes are nice~

Big pot's maximum capacity is 2.6l. Small pot's is 1.8l. Fits the finished tomato soup's 1.7l just fine.

You use it to flip things awkwardly in this game. I'd buy another one and place it near the grill.

While more of a permanent fixture, it's the final resting place of all the food scraps, broken plates, empty cartons, unwanted liquid, paella pan, and broken off cabinet doors you no longer want. Who needs a sink to dump out water and oil anyway?

Also confirmed by Geomancer that the magic can also eats just the seasoning on the cutting board. Truly a magical receptacle. Thank you for your submission!

You can use this to purchase new recipes, pin recipes to the TV, use your skill points and buy UsElESs kitchen decorations.


Picture of a dying stove and shady repair service

Pick up the headset and point your cursor at the thing that's looking a bit scuffed to check its durability. Has various tiers of repair service you can select from. Good technician costs more. Questionable repair service's fixes tend not to last long. I find my appliances deteriorate faster with the company depicted here. Ripair indeed.

Although I discovered on the same save the stove and oven were just dying by purely by existing. This game sure is something.

It's garbage don't bother. Spatula does its job better.

Not available by default and technically it's listed under Miscellaneous in the shop. If you break things a lot, I'd keep one handy to pick up all the broken pieces in one go. Or live in a kitchen of broken plates? Pointless if you have the Magic Wand perk.

It cleans up liquid spills and seasoning spots on your counter/shelf. Sadly does not clean your cutting board. Its existence is rendered meaningless if you picked the Magic Wand perk.

It mops up spills. Mounted on the wall in the pantry area. Again, Magic Wand also steals its job.

There are 9 types of breakables plates/bowls. Only 3 of them can hold liquid. Despite how the rest may look like they have some level of depth, any form of liquid that fall into them will just disappear or splatter onto the surface. It's a cooking simulator feature, don't question it.

Costs:
Basic square plate: 5c
Basic large plate: 10c
Basic plate (middle sizse): 4c
Basic plate (small): 3c
Basic small plate: 3c
Basic bowl: 3c
Basic casserole: 3c
Basic deep plate: 3c
Basic large plate: FREE. Seriously it's 0c.

Basic bowl hold just shy of 100 ml. 98 is its max capacity before spilling.
Basic casserole can hold 500ml.
Basic deep plate holds about 400ml but its the widest of the 3, making it most suitable to transport most finished food. I feel the safest using this to move food to avoid food physics causing things to fall out.

The god of cutting and saving time for you. If it fits, it can probably be cut into the right portion. I have gotten 5 star recipe achievos using just the auto cutter. Lemon in quarters? Sure. Garlic in half? Yep. Sausage and salmon fillet? It cuts meat too. Does not work with tenderloin for some reason. The game is luckily, not so draconian that it needs to be super precise on those cuts. Some customers may grumble about it, but if it's good enough to get those 5 star achievos, use that cutter! Note that this doesn't work for all recipes. Some do call for very specific cuts or odd weight like the Chicken Caprese Salad recipe. Using the cutter at most will just give you a 4 stars rating for those overly complicated recipes.

Also, auto cutter to my knowledge is the only appliance that allows you to mass load multiple items from your tray/plate/whatever.

Not going to see heavy use due to the existence of the smaller and much more portable blender.

It allows you to cook with your pans and pots. Classic kitchen's stove also has an oven below it. I honestly keep forgetting about that bottom oven...

That appliance with the big flat metal surface. Think of it as the bigger pan. If the recipe doesn't call for oil, just cook it on this baby instead.

It fries things. For some reason the fryer basket is not included by default on classic layout. Don't forget to drain the oil once you are done. Bits of vegetables have a habit of falling out of the basket when frying for some reason.

That thing with the grooves in it. Tends to be used for recipes with steaks, beef chucks, tuna, etc.

Bakes things. Modern has 2 oven side by side on counter level. Classic has 2 ovens stacked on top of each other. Oven door has a habit of breaking so the appliance only turns on if you keep the door open. Which is actually better because you won't have to worry about breaking plates when opening the door.

Doesn't do its one job of heating things gud. If you have to heat things up, just use the stove.

Fairly self explanatory so I won't go over them much. I prefer Easier Events, Taste Tolerance, and Extended Clean/Prep Phase. It's really up to your personal play style though. If you hate your selection you could always change it up from the laptop. The first skill reset is a hefty 1000c. The game also warns you subsequent reset will be more expensive.

You do actually need to be picky with your perk selection. Unlike skill points you can't freely respec your perks. Perks are self explanatory for the most part. Steady Hands is one of the perk I'd get first, although you could also get Unbreakable Plates instead. Auto cutter could allow you to bypass Stead Hands for a while or if you just don't want to bother with certain recipes. Unbreakable Bottles is also decent. They just have a habit of breaking because... it's cooking simulator.

I said it towards the beginning and I'll say it again, avoid Fast Feet. Physics will already do weird ♥♥♥♥ to everything on normal speed, faster speed is just going to make things worse. Heat Proof Gloves... I am unsure on this. I use plates to transfer items usually so it's... eh...? Long Reach might be usable if it actually makes picking things up easier. But longer reach and a tiny pixel to hover over things is painful. Thermal Vision is unnecessary in my opinion. I use timers heavily and my oven is usually broken in the sense that it's only operational with the door open. Thus defeating the purpose of TV. Timer based perks are probably better investments.

Perks unlock at level 2, 3, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17 and 20. You are allowed a total of 8 permanent perks.









Magic Wand gets a special mention here because if you are the type that breaks a lot of things (or just enjoy exploding things), Magic Wand makes it disappear with a click of the button. The area of effect is pretty decent. It can't clean the entire room, but it sure beats scrubbing with an itty bitty sponge. It also cleans floor spills too. Seasoning residue on cooking board is impervious to the wand though. Just dump all off all that seasoning in the garbage can.

Does not exist in sand box mode.

Classic hands down. Stay the ♥♥♥♥ away from modern layout. It's garbage.

Why modern kitchen sucks

• Only 1 place to get your plates. Classic has 3. While modern kitchen has these grooves in the island to store ONLY square basic plates, the problem is I still need to get move an obscene amounts of breakables over one piece at a time. If the island can somehow dispense plates that might be more workable.
  
• Only 4 instead of 6 burners to use your pan/pots.
  
• All the cabinets are closed. While you could break those doors off, why not just start on classic layout with already open door design? Most of the modern cabinets don't have additional divider to provide extra shelving as well.

Do not reuse oil in the pan/fryer. Customers can taste if you've cooked something else before hand. If you've used it to cook salmon fillet, stick to just salmon. Using that salmon pan to cook porkchop will cause the customer to ding your score for that. Keep in mind that reusing the same pan and oil to cook the same recipe will still cause you to lose a quarter of a star. There will always be a minor complaint regarding not enough oil on your meat.

Do not reuse water in the pot even though it did cook the same vegetables/pasta in it. It wrecks havoc with the seasoning. If you don't add additional salt/seasoning, customer will complain not enough seasoning. If you DO add the original amount, then they complain it's too salty. I have no idea how the seasoning gets absorbed in the second batch of food and after. You could be sneaky and do double portion vege + seasoning for that one batch though. Tested this with the Salmon Steak and Boiled Potatoes recipe, it worked for the potatoes.

Do not have a billion things in your kitchen. This game is not optimized well. While you may want to play smart to have plates of chopped onions and other things set aside, your mountain of ingredients will degrade your game performance. Auto cutter can drastically cut down on the need to prepare chopped items in advance.

Do not crouch while holding a pan or baking tray full of liquid. It's very easy for things to spill as you stand up.

Avoid setting your daily menu full of overly complicated dishes. Your manager could ♥♥♥♥ you over by setting something complex with long prep time as your dish of the day. ♥♥♥♥ pasta dishes... Manager's Trust perk is a good perk to deal with this.

That extra 3-5ml of olive oil pissing you off? You can use Tasting to subtract the liquid 1ml at a time. Default button is E.



Annoyed that you need to pour by a very specific amount each time? You can empty your sour cream/chicken stock/other condiments in a large enough pot or deep bowl and then use ladles or pipettes to take out the excess amount. For example, tomato soup calls for 700ml chicken stock, but you can just pour in all 1000ml and then use the 150ml ladles to take out 300ml of stock in 2 scoops. Nice and clean.

For oil and other types of sauces, I opt to set aside a lot of bowls with each one dedicated to a specific sauce. This allows me to easily pipette peanut oil or butter directly into a pan without worrying about measuring (and spilling) while from pouring from a bottle.

Those magic cardboard boxes that function as shops? You can move them elsewhere.

The cardboard box shop sells water in 1.0l size bottle. If money isn't an issue for you and you detest measuring 1 liter water at the faucet for your pot; you could just buy these from the shop. It's only 2c a bottle. You save so a lot of back and forth of going to the trash can, faucet, waiting, measuring, grabbing vege, etc.

Keep a small pile of foods close to where they are going to be used. I keep pre-seasoned meat under my prep station across from the stove top. I have tray of onions under the auto cutter. Plates of seasoned T-bone steak and tuna fillets next to the grill. However avoid over stocking to prevent game performance drop.

Get more timers and place them where you need them to be. I have 3 above the stove top. 1 next to the oven. 1 by the fryer and 1 by the grill. They are dirt cheap anyway.

Timer ringing pissing your off? If you have an item in your hand you can just click on the ringing timer to shut it off without needing to pick up the infernal contraption.

Do you hate cabinet doors and want open cabinet design? You can break them off. Stand as close toward the hinge of the door and try to clip into the door this way. Nudge the door outwards and just stand inside its hit box. If done correctly, the Door shaped icon will change into a Hand icon instead. It will only take about a second for the door to break off. Pick up the door piece and trash it. If you changed your mind, you can always pay the repair service to fix the doors. Careful with the door breaking though, I've accidentally broken the oven door in the process.



Point your cursor at the item being cooked to checked its temperature. Usually you want that bar to be all green. If you are seeing red, that item is starting to burn. Some recipes such as Baked Cod where this rule may not apply during the pan frying stage because it go through multiple stages of cooking.



Having trouble placing your baking tray in the oven? Aim slightly left or right of the 'fan' in the back. For personal preferences, I like to stick my tray at the bottom. Tray physics sometimes send my chopped onions to the bottom if my tray is placed middle to high.

While microwave exists and its purpose IS to reheat things, it does a poor job of it. Using the stove is much faster. For soup recipe with solid food such as Borscht: if you only need to serve the liquid sans the other solid bits, you can just throw out the solids and then reheat the soup. (Load all the solids with a deep bowl and then empty them into a trash can.) If you are worried about soup growing cold, you can even just leave the fire on forever at the cost of your stove losing durability over time. Granted, hot soup will still take a bit of time for it to become stone cold so usually you only need to heat it up once or twice in a day. For recipe that calls for solid bits like the Duck Broth... You can reheat on the stove, but you will definitely get dinged in the scores due to also over cooking the solids at the same time. But it's still better than making the Duck Broth from scratch rather than chucking out the days old thing. Do note that this is frowned upon in real life, but this is Cooking Simulator and we hate our digital customers.

If you plan on making recipes that calls for a lot of water + salt in it. Have some salt by your water source.



It was covered towards the beginning under the controls but I'll just repeat this again. Remember to shake your pan/pot using Advanced Controls to ensure all your food receives proper heat distribution.

It's also possible to move your container slightly as you are picking up the food to make sure they are not stacked directly on top off one another.

Feed it everything you don't want. It'll even take liquid. No backsies though. Anything that goes in here is gone forever. So do be careful when you empty your containers lest you trash the pot/plate you were holding too.

Seriously. Use it. It will save you so much time.

You are making your soup but you forgot to season the chicken stock before putting in the solid items. Take those out before you put the seasoning in. Seasoning with solids in the pot will end up seasoning BOTH the liquid and solid. Your customer will complain about over seasoned food and ding your score. This applies to pouring liquid as well. Pouring liquid of any kind over solid food the game will assume you are performing the Drizzle function, not only do you 'lose' the liquid to the solid but it also ruins the taste. I've lost some chicken stock to tomatoes because the game assumes I was seasoning it. Hm yes. A perfect intact tomato just sucks up all that stock from a light shower. Very sensible.

I've had few instances where my food stuff is just magically trapped in air and floor. This is very likely confirmation bias, but I found hugging along the wall on the door's side heavily decreases the chance of this phenomenon triggering.

Automatic cutter is your best friend in this kitchen. It doesn't break down like the big appliances. It saves you time with food processing. While some recipes are lenient enough to allow for auto cutter portions for that sweet sweet 5 star ratings, not all recipes will accept them.



Apple: 150g > ~10-20g. 12 pieces. Have to do quarter cuts yourself

Asparagus: 8g > 4g

Beetroot: 120g > ~6-15g

Bread: Too fat to fit in there :(

Broccoli: 50g > 5-12g

Brussels sprouts: 15g > 7 and 8g

Button Mushrrom: 50g > ~10-14g.

Carrot: 70g > 6-19g. Cuts too uneven and too many pieces for some recipe

Cinnamon stick: 4g > 2g

Corn: 180g > ~10-20g. Some require the good ol' knife for that 5 star rating.

Eggplant: 350g > ~10-26g

Garlic: 10g > Half. 5g

Ginger: 60g > 4-6, one odd piece at 13g

Lemon: 80g > Quarters. 20g

Onion: 120g > ~7-12g. Not always 5 star rating friendly, as a good number of cuts are under 10g.

Orange: 180g > ~8-15g

Parsely root: 80g > ~5-10g

Parsnip: 170g > ~8-15g

Potato: 150g > ~7-18g. Fries friendly.

Pumpkin: Too fat

Radish: 15g > 4g and 11g

Red Bell Pepper: 240g > ~8-20g

Red cabbage: Too big

Red potato: 100g > ~7-23g

Scallion leaves: 20g > 3-6g. Acceptable quarter cuts

Tomato: 120g > ~10-15g. Most tomato in recipes are auto-cutter friendly.

Yellow Bell Pepper: 240g > ~8-20g

Zucchini: 600g > ~10-30g




Usually you don't need to cut your meat except for a few. Just for fun/science, I've tossed everything I can into the cutter as well.

Beef chuck: Does not fit

Burger meat: 112g > 17-25g

Cheddar cheese: 150g > 9-27g. Not even cuts. Pick and choose the right size for your burger

Chicken breast: 240g > 18-46g. 10 pieces. Not 5 star friendly.

Chicken leg: 180g > 14g-22g, one random 39g

Cod: 160g > 18-23g, one odd piece at 35g

Egg: Passes right through the cutter

Duck breast: 280g > ~17-29g

Lobster tail: 200g > 23-46g, rather uneven cuts

Mozzarella: 80g > 5-20g. Uneven cuts, too many pieces. Not 5 star friendly unless you pick and choose from multiple cuts

Pork chop: 200g > 18-31g

Pork shoulder: Does not fit

Sausage: 240g > 9-15g

Salmon fillet: 210g > 18-32g. Not salmon pasta 5 star friendly.

Shrimp: Denied

Steak: Doesn't fit

T-bone steak: nope

Tenderloin: Rejected

Trout: Rejected by the cutter

Tuna steak: 200g > 18-30g

In the course of your cooking career your perky happy manager will on some days ask if you want to participate in contests. The problem with these contests is that you are just told it's a contest for Seafood/Soup/Dining/whatever, but not necessarily what dish you need to prep for. The first two you encounter will be seafood and soup, which are fairly self-explanatory. Later contests though...

A lot of Italian dishes. Expect a few pasta dishes, got 3 different pasta dishes I had to make one time. I've seen Fast Caldo Verde, Baked Cod, Pork Tenderloin with Caramelized Vegetables and Tomato Bruschetta. Since pasta orders are practically guaranteed, I'd portion out the noodles beforehand. Then it's the usual pre-season your meat and cut them accordingly before contest begins.

Fast Pasta ala Genoverse, Corn Chowder, Pork Tenderloin with Caramelized Vegetables, Fast Beef Stroganoff over Fusilli, German Potato Salad, Steak with Barbecue Sauce and Vegetables (upgraded version of Steak and Fries if you upgraded this recipe), Fast Caldo Verde, Fast Ratatouille.

It's not an easy contest for sure and one of my least favorite due to how many manual cuts I need to make.. A few recipes will call specifically for potato, onion or even tomato in the 15g range. Caldo Verde's sausage you can just use the auto cutter and then pick out the ideal size for your serving. Brussels sprouts as well. Ratatouille's zucchini and eggplant you can also use the cutter to scavenge the correct size since both are sizable vegetables. I'd also get the chicken broth or whatever blended recipe prepared beforehand. As all these dishes take too long to make and you do want to serve all the customers. The margin of error for this particular contest is very, very small. If you see a 4.5 star rating, consider just reloading a save.

Despite following every step perfectly, the game keeps saying there was heating mistake with the cod?

When drizzling the cod, do it over a bowl. Do not be lazy and drizzle the cod while it's on the baking tray. The seasoning on the tray throws off the game during the baking process and makes it think it's doing something else...



Similar situation with the cod, another very vague heating mistake complaint. It's the sage leaves. If the duck breast is in the center of the pan and directly on top of the sage leaf, it doesn't get heated enough. Just Cooking Simulator being stupid again.


Though recipe says fry for the vegetables, it means Pan Fry not Fryer Fry.