Nintendo has updated the survivalist cooking system in its highly anticipated “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom”. The game’s predecessor, “Breath of the Wild” allows players to unleash their inner chef by cooking dishes with magical health-restoring and element-resisting ingredients. However, in BOTW gamers had to travel to stationary cooking pots and make meals in bulk.
In TOTK, it seems that these stationary cooking pots remain, but giant gacha machines dispense a variety of new gadgets for Link to play with, including single use mobile cooking pots. This inclusion completely revolutionizes the survival aspects of the game, allowing players to cook a high- recovery or high-elemental resistance meal right before a boss fight instead of a common tactic from BOTW: downing as many apples as the inventory can hold in the pause menu. However, players will have to be strategic about how and where they use these pots, since they can only cook one meal before they break.Perhaps this new addition to the cooking mechanic will make players figure out new effect-maximizing recipes to get the most bang for their buck.
Beyond the new single use pots, the game also includes a recipe repository for different dishes the player stumbles upon throughout their journey to save Hyrule. Now, players won’t have to rely on their memories and game wikis to remember how to cook anything beyond a salted steak. The repository even includes an indication if the player’s inventory has the ingredients needed. However, it does not include a “quick cook” feature to automatically add all the ingredients to the pot, so players will still have to load Link’s arms up the old fashioned way. This second cooking related inclusion is perhaps meant to streamline this important part of the game so players can spend less time hunting for recipes and more time hunting bokoblins.
The additions of single use cooking pots and the recipe repository seems to help add a new element of strategy to cooking while streamlining the process. This along with whatever new ingredients Nintendo decided to add to the game will certainly revamp the familiar seven year old system.
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