Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night - An Introduction To Cooking, Plus Locations For All The Recipes And Some Tips On Ingredient Farming

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has been out for two weeks now, and the general consensus across the board – save for the Switch version – is it’s a return to form for Koji Igarashi and an overall successful Kickstarter project. In my review, I noted that even though it lacks polish, it’s still a pretty enjoyable game, and title that will ultimately be overshadowed by how much it’s compared to Symphony of the Night.

In any case, Bloodstained is a game that has some very deep mechanics, and is certainly replayable due to the fact. For instance, Bloodstained has quite the deep alchemic system with preparing various recipes, all of which you can prepare, cook, and ultimately eat in order to gain permanent bonuses which will help Miriam on her quest to conquer the castle.

If you’re just starting out in your own quest, or stuck because you don’t know what cooking and eating does, then here are some very neat tips, tricks, and pointers to remember for cooking in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

Cooked food requires both recipes and ingredients

Most of the food and drinks that can be prepared in Bloodstained need a recipe first, in order for you to cook it in Johannes’ crafting window in Ardantville. These recipes can be found in various chests across the castle, and some of them cannot be accessed until later in the game, when you get certain traversal powers (Invert, Deep Sinker and the like). However, the only thing to remember is that these are not individual recipes, but rather groups of them according to categories. This makes it easier in general if you’re looking to complete Susie’s Food Quests, simply by figuring out which category the food recipe belongs to.

To help you hunt for those food recipes, here is a handy map of which room you can find them in. Note that I did not include some areas (Den of Behemoths, Glacial Tomb) because there are no food recipes to be found there.

1. Meat Dish (Castle Entrance)
2. Cake ( Dian Cécht Cathedral)
3. Pasta Dish (Towers of Twin Dragons)
4. Sweets (Towers of Twin Dragons)
5. Cookies (Livre Ex Machina)
6. Drink (Livre Ex Machina)
7. Supreme Dish (Forbidden Underground Waterway)
8. Ultimate Dish (Forbidden Underground Waterway)
9. Fish Dish (Forbidden Underground Waterway)
10. Curry Dish (Forbidden Underground Waterway)
11. Ramen (Oriental Sorcery Lab)

As for ingredients, these can be found and harvested in the various monsters of Bloodstained. These ingredients are, like any other item, affected by drop rate, so if you’re hunting for them and find them dropping very rarely, it might be beneficial to boost your LCK (Luck) stat.

There are more than a hundred monsters in Bloodstained, each with their own unique drop tables. The best way to figure out what monster drops which inredient is to kill them repeatedly until you finish their drop table. For future reference, you can check out which monsters drop which by accessing the Demons tab in the Archives. Here you can find all the monsters you’ve encountered, and all the Shards, items, and ingredients that they drop. Monsters will only appear here once you’ve encountered and killed them, and their drops will only show up once you’ve gotten the items to drop for the first time.

Eating cooked food for the first time will boost your stats

Food preparation is a very important aspect of Bloodstained, especially on harder runs. For each food you eat for the very first time, you get a boost in specific stats. Stats that can be boosted are Max HP, Max MP, STR, CON, INT, MND, LCK, EXP Gain and MP Quickcharge. Do not underestimate these stats, especially later in the game, as they can provide you with significant boosts to whatever area they’re in.

Once you’ve already eaten a specific food and gained its stat bonus, you will see a spoon and fork symbol on its left side. Of course, you can still consume it provided you’ve made more than one, as food can recover your HP if you’ve run out of HP potions.

Ingredient farming

A good tip to farming ingredients once you’ve found the monster that drops them is to find the shortest route possible out of the room once you’ve killed them. Then, since the monsters reset after you leave the room, you can just run back in to find them there. Rinse and repeat as needed until you’ve gotten all the ingredients you need.

In the example above, you can see a very short room with the demon Zagan. This demon drops the Beast Milk, which is one of the most popular ingredients you’ll find in baked and pasta recipes. Since the room is short, you can immediately kill it and run back to the starting point and reset the monster as you please in order to farm ingredients.

It’s also worth noting that you can increased your LCK (Luck) stat in order to increase the drop rate for these ingredients. The LCK stat can be increased with both equipment and Shards – here’s a sample set-up for increasing your overall LCK stat.

• HEAD: Ribbon Accessory (+7 LCK)
• BODY: Valkyrie Dress (+7 LCK)
• ACCESSORY 1: Plunderer’s Ring (+5 LCK, and innate ability to increase item drop rate)
• ACCESSORY 2: Solomon’s Ring (+6 LCK, and innate ability to increase shard drop rate)
• SCARF: Bunny Scarf (+2 LCK)
• SHARD: Passive Augment LCK

The Farmer and his crops

There are some ingredients that can only be obtained via the Farmer in Ardantville. While most of the ingredients are monster drops, rice, potato and corn are only acquired through harvests, so it’s important to give the Farmer seeds for this, after which he will plant and grow them for you.

Harvests take some time to finish, so you should continue playing for a bit first before returning to him. Afterwards, you get 10 of each for your trouble. Note that you can only plant one of them at a time, and that the seeds are available for purchase through Dominique.

Rice, potato and corn are the most basic ingredients, and most of the recipes you’ll end up cooking require them in some form or another. It’s worth your time to stock up on these items because of that, as the seeds for them are relatively cheap and you’ll most certainly find yourself teleporting back to Ardantville every once in a while.

Susie’s Food Quests

Bloodstained has a myriad of side quests to discover and complete, including one for an old woman named Susie who resides in Ardantville. She will often give out vague descriptions of the food as well as a brief hint of what it is via a thought cloud showing the food’s picture. Once you figure out what it is, you can then prepare it with Johannes in the next room and give it to her, which will lead to her giving you a reward.

Some of these rewards are unique rewards that can only be obtained via the questline, so it’s very important to finish these. It’s always good to prepare two portions of the food in advance so that you can also get the stat boost before you give the other one to Susie. Finishing her questline by feeding her all the food she requested will yield the Recycle Hat, a powerful head accessory that stops ammo from depleting, allowing you to wield your gun with special ammo indefinitely.

Stay tuned here with us for more guides on the latest and greatest titles. Check out my review for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night here.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is now available to play on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC.