Cooking hearty, fulfilling, and occasionally dubious meals was an integral part of survival in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Sure you could have skipped that feature entirely and just eaten 40 apples and a bag of raw meats every time your health was low after a time fight, but combining the right ingredients to cook a big custom meal that would boost your strength, stamina, and resistance to the elements was definitely a much smarter winning strategy.
Well, cooking is back in the upcoming sequel The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and there are a few really cool new improvements to go with it.
A brand new cooking pot
Let’s start with your cooking device itself. In Breath of the Wild you generally needed to find a cooking pot in the wild — usually in a village, stable, or similar communal location — to actually combine ingredients into a recipe and make a meal. You could also start a fire anywhere and crudely throw individual edible items onto it and make stuff like cooked apples or hard boiled eggs, but those things didn’t give Link nearly the same boosts as combining two to five things in a pot and cooking up a specific recipe.
Tears of the Kingdom circumvents the need to travel to specific locations to cook by giving you a cooking pot Zonai device that effectively allows you to cook almost anywhere in the world, or at least anywhere with a flat surface. Zonai devices are depletable resources that you can manipulate with Link’s new powers like Fuse and Ultrahand, so you’ll be limited by the number of cooking pots you have in your inventory if you want to start cooking while you’re up in the clouds or hanging out on a mountain top down in Hyrule.
Either way, it’s pretty awesome that you’ll now be able to cook up a bunch of hearty meals before a big fight anywhere rather than having to fast travel to specific locations. However, and this is important: keep in mind that pots are one time use only and they break after cooking a single meal, so you should definitely make that meal count instead of cooking up a plate of gross, blurry food. Have a spicy pepper steak. You’ve earned it.
Link’s recipe cards
Additionally, Tears of the Kingdom also has a recipe database in your sub menus that shows you a list of recipes, including which items you’ll need to create them, what sorts of stat and health boosts they’ll give Link, and a picture of what the completed dish looks like. Think of them like those recipe cards that come with meal prep kits like Blue Apron or Home Chef. It seems as if cooking a recipe for the first time will unlock that recipe in your records for the rest of that play through.
You’ll still have to manually stack items in Link’s hands and then drop them into a cooking pot manually as there’s no way to hit a prompt on the recipe card and have it sort through your inventory and automatically cook a recipe for you. That feature certainly would’ve been helpful (especially in scenarios when you want to cook several of the same meal in a row before a tough boss) but for now at least you’ll be able to dig through your database to recall a recipe instead of digging through your own memory.
So are you excited to get cooking in Tears of the Kingdom? Are you gonna make hearty, healthy meals anywhere or will you force Link to eat cooked wood like I did to survive the Master Trials? Let us know in the comments below and make sure to check out our full preview for more.
Additional reporting by Casey DeFreitas.
Brian Altano is an executive producer and host at IGN. The Legend of Zelda is his favorite video game franchise, Link’s Awakening is his favorite game of all time, and he’s never finished Skyward Sword despite several valiant attempts.
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