Genshin Impact cooking: how to cook in Genshin Impact

How do you cook in Genshin Impact? Genshin Impact is kind of obsessed with eating. There's a suite of official game art wallpapers out there that just show various characters chowing down on meals, which is a pretty good indicator of this game's relationship with food.

And there's a good reason for that: food items in the game can be used to increase your characters' health and grant them various useful buffs. A lot of the time you can simply snack on whatever you forage during your adventures around Teyvat. But for the biggest and best benefits, you need to learn recipes, gather ingredients, and get cooking.

On this page:

• How to cook in Genshin Impact
• Manual cooking vs automatic cooking
• Where to find cooking ingredients in Genshin Impact
• Where to get new recipes in Genshin Impact

How to cook in Genshin Impact

To cook in Genshin Impact, you need access to either a campfire or a stove. Campfires are found out in the countryside of Teyvat — if you encounter an NPC or clear out an enemy camp, chances are there'll be a fire there for you to cook on. When in a town like Mondstadt, you can find stoves inside most of the buildings you enter. Other than their locations and appearance, stoves and campfires function basically identically.

To begin cooking, approach a campfire or stove and interact with it. (If it isn't lit, a character with Pyro can take care of that easily by using their power on it.) This opens up the cooking menu, where you have a couple of options:

• Cook (symbolised by the icon of a crossed knife and fork): Begin cooking a meal from the available recipes.
• Process (symbolised by the icon of two crossed chilli peppers): Process raw ingredients into processed items. For more on how this works, see our guide to processing in Genshin Impact.

From the Cooking menu, you can select any recipe your active character knows how to make. If they have all the necessary ingredients in their inventory, you can press the 'Cook' button at the bottom of the recipe panel to begin preparing the dish.

Manual cooking vs automatic cooking

The first few times you cook any particular dish, you'll need to cook it manually. This means playing Genshin Impact's cooking minigame.

The game is pretty simple: you're presented with a meter gauging the potential quality of the dish you're attempting to cook. Hit the stop button to pause the arrow at its current location. Landing on the orange area creates a Delicious Dish; the yellow area results in a Regular Dish; and hitting the the grey area returns a Suspicious Dish.

Successfully completing the minigame a number of times at Delicious quality unlocks the ability to cook that dish automatically in future.

Where to find cooking ingredients in Genshin Impact

There are three main ways of obtaining cooking ingredients in Genshin Impact:

• Foraging them from around the world of Teyvat. While out in the wilds, keep and eye out for glinting interactables. Odds are good these are wild fruits, flowers, etc. that you can stash away for cooking later on. You can also catch small creatures like crabs and lizards in a similar fashion, kill larger creatures (such as fowl or beasts) in combat, or loot from crates and barrels (often found in enemy camps) for meat and other ingredients.
• Buying them from suppliers' shops in towns like Mondstadt.
• Processing them out of raw materials you find or buy. Again, see our Genshin Impact processing guide for more details.

Where to get new recipes in Genshin Impact

You begin Genshin Impact with nine recipes your character(s) know how to cook. This will be enough to keep your party fed and healthy, but to really take advantage of the game's cooking system, you'll need to learn more recipes.

In addition to the nine starting recipes, there are 76 recipes for your characters to obtain and learn. New recipes can be gained in several different ways: as rewards for completing Quests, clearing Domains, participating in time-limited events, and increasing Reputation; by looting chests; or by buying them from shops.

Finally, there are Special Dishes. Every playable character (except the Traveler) in Genshin Impact has a unique special dish only they can prepare — they'll know the recipe automatically, but other characters can't obtain and learn the recipe.

In order to make a character's Special Dish, have that character prepare the corresponding base dish (either through manual or automatic cooking) and there's a low chance that their Special Dish will be created instead. If cooking manually, the quality of the meal doesn't impact its chance of becoming a Special Dish — so you can have Special Dishes of Delicious, Normal, or Suspicious quality. Special Dishes confer better bonuses and gains than regular dishes when eaten.

That's everything you need to know to cook up a storm in Genshin Impact! Seen a Special Dish you like the look of and want to unlock the corresponding character? Check out our guide on how to get more characters in Genshin Impact to find out how! Want to know how your chosen chef will handle the game's combat sections before you take the trouble to obtain them? The have a look at our Genshin Impact character tier list to see how they measure up.