Ultima Online Cooking - the sixteen fish pies, the full recipe ladder, and a skill with no published mechanics

The mechanics are not published, and that is the headline

Said first, because a reader coming to Cooking from Blacksmithy or Tailoring will expect numbers that do not exist:

• [!] There is no published success-chance formula. Nothing published maps a cooking skill value against a recipe’s minimum to give odds of success. The recipe minimums below are gates, not probabilities.
• [!] There is no published gain-rate table. uo.com says only that the skill is trained by cooking.
• [!] There is no published figure for how much stamina ordinary cooked food restores. Most cooked food restores only a minor amount of stamina [!], with no number published.
• [!] There is no exceptional-quality mechanic published for food. Every other craft on this site has one; Cooking’s is not stated anywhere.
• [!] No stacking rules are published between the enchanted foods — Grapes of Wrath, Fruit Bowl, Enchanted Apple — and the fish pies, beyond uo.com’s statement that only one pie effect may be active at a time.
• [!] No mechanical link to Taste Identification is published, despite the obvious thematic one.

Everything from here down is published. Nothing above it is.

Tools and heat sources

A cook needs a tool and a heat source within reach. uo.com names the three tools and where they come from — an NPC cook, or a Tinkering character:

Tool	Requirement
Rolling pin	No Tinkering required; 5 boards
Skillet	Minimum 30 Tinkering; 4 ingots
Flour sifter	Minimum 50 Tinkering; 3 ingots

The rolling pin is the odd one out: it is made from boards, so it sits on the Lumberjacking and Carpentry side of the economy rather than the Mining side, and needs no Tinkering skill at all.

uo.com’s published heat sources are the campfire, fireplace, forge, heating stand, oven, the Khaldun Cooking Tent, the Steam Powered Beverage Maker (for beverages specifically) and the Flour Mill, which grinds grain and does nothing else.

The three enchanted foods

These are the reason a serious character ever buys anything from a cook. uo.com publishes the effects, durations and cooldowns exactly:

Item	Published effect	Cooking
Enchanted Apple	Removes all curses. 30 second cooldown.	—
Grapes of Wrath	Spell Damage Increase +15%, Damage Increase +35%, 20 second duration, 2 minute cooldown.	95.0
Fruit Bowl	Approximately 5% to all stats, approximately 2 minute duration, 2 minute cooldown.	55.0

Grapes of Wrath is the strongest published cooking buff in the game and the single number that justifies the last stretch of training: +35% Damage Increase and +15% Spell Damage Increase together, for twenty seconds, on a two-minute cycle. It is a burst-window item, and it works for a melee character and a caster equally.

uo.com also notes that a character can become too full to consume magical foods at all. The published remedy is Pepta’s Satiety Cure, a reward from the quest “I Think I Overate”.

The sixteen magical fish pies

This is the best-published thing in the skill. Sixteen pies, one per skill point from 60.0 to 75.0, each with a 5 minute duration, and only one pie effect may be active at a time. The fish they are named for come from Fishing.

Pie	Effect	Cooking
Great Barracuda Pie	Hit Chance Increase 8	60.0
Giant Koi Pie	Defense Chance Increase 8	61.0
Fire Fish Pie	Soak Fire Damage 5 (PvM only)	62.0
Stone Crab Pie	Soak Physical Damage 5 (PvM only)	63.0
Blue Lobster Pie	Soak Cold Damage 5 (PvM only)	64.0
Reaper Fish Pie	Soak Poison Damage 5 (PvM only)	65.0
Crystal Fish Pie	Soak Energy Damage 5 (PvM only)	66.0
Bull Fish Pie	Increase Melee Damage 5	67.0
Summer Dragonfish Pie	Increase Spell Damage 5	68.0
Fairy Salmon Pie	Increase Casting Focus 2	69.0
Lava Fish Pie	Increase Soulcharge 5	70.0
Autumn Dragonfish Pie	Meditation Skill 10	71.0
Spider Crab Pie	Focus Skill 10	72.0
Yellowtail Barracuda Pie	Hit Point Regeneration 3	73.0
Holy Mackerel Pie	Mana Regeneration 3	74.0
Unicorn Fish Pie	Stamina Regeneration 3	75.0

Read the PvM only tags carefully, because they are uo.com’s own and they split the table in two. The five damage-soak pies — Fire, Stone Crab, Blue Lobster, Reaper, Crystal — do not function in player-versus-player combat. The other eleven carry no such tag, which means the Hit Chance Increase 8 and Defense Chance Increase 8 pies are, as published, PvP-legal.

Two of them hand out skill rather than a property: the Autumn Dragonfish Pie gives Meditation 10 and the Spider Crab Pie gives Focus 10, for five minutes each. That is ten points of a real skill from a pie, which is a larger number than most jewellery carries.

The recipe ladder

uo.com publishes the minimum for each recipe. This is the whole progression of the skill:

Skill	Unlocks
0.0	Basic breads, meats, pies
15.0	Dark Chocolate, Dark Chocolate Nutcracker
32.5	Milk Chocolate, Milk Chocolate Nutcracker
35.0	Gingerbread Cookie
37.5	Parrot Wafer
45.0	Hamburger, Hotdog, Sausage, Grilled Serpent Steak, BBQ Dino Ribs, Waku Chicken
50.0	The Forager’s Field Guide
52.5	White Chocolate, White Chocolate Nutcracker
55.0	Savage Kin Paint, Fruit Bowl
60.0	Fish Oil Flask, Miso Soup variants, Great Barracuda Pie, Khaldun Tasty Treat
61.0–75.0	The magical fish pies, one per point
75.0	Fresh Seasoning, Plant Pigment, Natural Dye, Color Fixative, Unicorn Fish Pie, Food Decoration Tool
80.0	Green Tea
90.0	Sushi Rolls, Sushi Platter, Egg Bomb
95.0	Grapes of Wrath
100.0	Charybdis Bait, Pumpkin Spiced Latte

Two thresholds matter more than the rest. 60.0 is where the fish pies begin, and 95.0 is Grapes of Wrath. Everything between 0 and 55 is training material.

The rest of the product line, from uo.com: dark, milk and white chocolate with matching nutcrackers (which “may contain Cards of Semidar”); coffee, green tea, hot cocoa and pumpkin spiced latte; Savage Kin Paint; Fish Oil Flask; Egg Bomb; Charybdis Bait; sushi; and the decoration consumables Fresh Seasoning, Plant Pigment, Natural Dye, Color Fixative and the Food Decoration Tool. Two further points not on uo.com: Savage Kin Paint prevents morph spells [!], Barracoon the Piper being the case in point, and hunger currently has no effect on skill performance [!].

In PvP

Nobody puts Cooking on a PvP template. The skill matters in PvP because somebody else has it and sells what it makes:

• Grapes of Wrath at 95.0 — +35% Damage Increase and +15% Spell Damage Increase for 20 seconds, on a 2 minute cooldown. A burst window for an axe fighter and a nuke mage alike.
• Enchanted Apple — removes all curses on a 30 second cooldown. A curse strip that costs no mana and no skill points.
• Fruit Bowl at 55.0 — approximately 5% to all stats for about two minutes.
• Great Barracuda Pie (HCI 8) and Giant Koi Pie (DCI 8) carry no PvM-only tag on uo.com’s table, unlike the five soak pies. Eight points of hit or defence chance for five minutes is real, and it does not occupy a suit slot.
• Fairy Salmon Pie — Casting Focus 2, which is interruption resistance a caster cannot easily buy anywhere else.
• Egg Bomb at 90.0.

In PvM

The fish pie table is written for PvM and it shows:

• The five soak pies — Fire, Physical, Cold, Poison, Energy, 5 points each, explicitly PvM only. You pick the one that matches what you are about to fight.
• Bull Fish Pie (melee damage 5) and Summer Dragonfish Pie (spell damage 5) for the two damage archetypes.
• Autumn Dragonfish Pie and Spider Crab Pie lend Meditation 10 and Focus 10 — ten points of skill you did not have to train.
• Yellowtail Barracuda / Holy Mackerel / Unicorn Fish give hit point, mana and stamina regeneration 3, which is sustain for a long fight.
• Charybdis Bait at 100.0 is a content key: it is what summons the Charybdis encounter. That alone makes a grandmaster cook a party’s prerequisite rather than a novelty.
• Savage Kin Paint at 55.0 prevents morph spells [!].

Caps, stats and training

Cooking caps at 100.0 real skill. It is not on uo.com’s Scrolls of Power list, which names only Blacksmithy and Tailoring among the crafting skills with dedicated scrolls. There is no Cooking Power Scroll, and there is no Cooking mastery — the skill is absent from uo.com’s Skill Masteries page. Cooking counts against the 720 total skill cap like everything else.

Primary stat Int, secondary Dex, per uo.com’s stat table.

uo.com publishes no stepped training script — the recipe ladder above is the closest thing it offers. A path uo.com does not publish [!]:

Range	Method
Start	Take Cooking at 50 as a starting skill, or buy NPC training to roughly 30
0–75	Barbecued items from raw meat give the fastest gains; making dough is the alternative
75–100	Miso Soups — 60 skill minimum, water and fish steaks

Reaching 100.0 takes roughly 20,000 cooking attempts [!]. That estimate is unpublished, and there is no published gain rate to check it against.

The Guaranteed Gain System is the floor underneath it: a mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window. On a 700-point character that window is 27.0 hours at 95.0–99.9 — which is why the last five points to Grapes of Wrath are the expensive ones. A Scroll of Alacrity raises each check from 0.1 to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes.

What is not published

Collected, because with Cooking the gaps are a larger fraction of the skill than usual:

• [!] Any success-chance formula for a cooking attempt at a given skill against a given recipe.
• [!] Any gain-rate table.
• [!] The stamina restored by ordinary cooked food — it is minor, with no number published.
• [!] Any exceptional-quality mechanic for food.
• [!] Stacking rules between the enchanted foods and the fish pies, beyond “only one fish pie effect at a time”.
• [!] Any mechanical link between Cooking and Taste Identification.

Where these come from

uo.com Cooking · uo.com Scrolls of Power · uo.com Skill Masteries · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Skill Gain Systems. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.