While you’ll always respawn back home with all your stuff in tow should you happen to lose too much health in Aloft, there’s an easy way to give your character a handful of helpful stat boosts and health replenishments: cooking and consuming a variety of meals.
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Whether you’re finding Gourmet Recipe cards out in the wild as you explore or just messing with ingredients while using the Cooking Plate over a fire back on your home island, there are several cooking recipes in Aloft that provide extra health and occasional stat boosts when consumed while you’re out on your adventure.
Aloft is out now in early access, so we’ll update our guide if things change over time between now and the full launch.
Make Meals Using A Cooking Plate Over Fire
While you’ll earn a small buff from eating ingredients raw, the fastest way to earn better stat boosts in Aloft is to eat prepared meals for extra health and additional stats. Not only do meals fill more of your health when consumed than using standard bandages, but you’ll also receive limited-time buffs that make things like fighting off monsters or sprinting across a planet that much faster. Stat boosts are timed, but the effects last the entire duration, which is often several minutes of real time.
It’s likely that the first meals you’ll get are when you find meals in chests while exploring new islands. These are tucked into the treasure chests and assorted baskets you find in the ruins of what looks like towns mostly, but they may be hiding in stray chests and baskets elsewhere as well. Even meals that look unsatisfying in real life offer benefits to your character, so always take meals when you find them, even once you do have access to cooking.
Before you can begin prepping your own meals, though, you’ll need to have found the recipe for a Cooking Plate, a stone platter that you’ll put onto an open flame like a campfire or a fireplace (both of which are also unlockable crafting recipes). After you’ve placed the Cooking Stone, interact with it to bring up the cooking menu, where you can either select three ingredients to experiment on your own, or cook with recipes you’ve found while exploring.
These can be few and further between than other resources, but you’ll periodically find Gourmet Recipe cards in treasure chests, particularly when exploring large planets that often require a good amount of work destroying corruption nodes to heal the unhealthy ecosystem you find. Simply interact with the Gourmet Recipe card to learn it when you’ve got it selected on the inventory screen.
You’re not limited to only using the recipes you know, though! Those are stored on a separate tab under your ingredients, but if you’d like, you can try to experiment with ingredients to unlock new recipes – who knows what you might make!
When cooking on your Cooking Stone, you’ll see a flame icon to the right of your ingredients after you’ve added them, which is your indication that you’re in the process of cooking! You’ll need to keep the meter on the flame yellow by periodically hitting the button shown to ensure that the meter stays yellow, but don’t let it go into the red too long, because this will always result in a burnt meal that wastes your ingredients and provides much lesser benefits.
After you’ve cooked a meal on a Cooking Stone, you’ll need to remove the finished meal before you can add more ingredients if you plan to continue cooking. You can also take ingredients back off the menu after adding them if you did so by mistake.
All Cooking Recipes In Aloft
|
Recipe |
Ingredients |
Effect(s) |
|---|---|---|
|
Berry Loaf |
|
Duration: 14 Minutes
|
|
Bland Soup |
|
Duration: 14 Minutes
|
|
Blueberry Pie |
|
Duration: 6 Minutes
|
|
Broth |
|
Duration: 8 Minutes
|
|
Corn Loaf |
Duration: 8 Minutes
|
|
|
Digestive Tea |
Duration: 8 Minutes |
|
|
Flatbread |
|
Duration: 14 Minutes
|
|
Fresh Bowl |
|
Duration: 10 Minutes |
|
Fried Eggs |
Duration: 10 Minutes |
|
|
Fruit Salad |
Duration: 8 Minutes |
|
|
Grilled Fruits |
Duration: 8 Minutes |
|
|
Healthy Smoothie |
|
Duration: 10 Minutes
|
|
Marrons Glaces |
|
Duration: 8 Minutes |
|
Mixed Veggies |
|
Duration: 10 Minutes |
|
Oatmeal |
TBD |
|
|
Pumpkin Pie |
TBD |
|
|
Savory Smoothie |
|
Duration: 8 Minutes
|
|
Stale Meal |
Duration: 6 Minutes |
|
|
Sweet Roll |
Duration: 11 Minutes
|
|
|
Underwhelming Soup |
|
Duration: 8 Minutes
|
|
Veggie Skewer |
Duration: 10 Minutes |
Some recipes appear to have multiple recipes, such as the fresh bowl and underwhelming soup recipes. We’ve included the recipes that we used to test and make these dishes!
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There’s no wrong way to play a cozy sandbox game like Aloft, but we’ve got some tips to get you started.