Cooking Specializations, Mastery & Recipe Books

Your kitchen's growth runs on three layers that all point the same way — get better at what you cook:

Mastery — you get better at a craft simply by cooking it. Always on, nothing to equip. (Live for everyone.)
Discipline slots — high Mastery unlocks more cook slots tied to that craft, and cooking a matching recipe in one earns a bonus. This is your specialization. (Live for everyone.)
Recipe books — collect a world's book to unlock its deeper recipe block. (Live for everyone.)

No loadouts to manage, no talent trees to plan, no penalty for cooking broadly. You simply build the most Mastery — and the strongest discipline slots — in the crafts you cook most.

The seven crafts

Every recipe belongs to one of seven crafts (plus a catch-all General for anything unclassified). You can cook any of them; each makes a different family of outputs:

Craft	What it makes
Armorer	Anchor gear — plate, anchors, guard sets.
Bonecrafting	Striker gear — chitin, carapace & bone.
Tailoring	Mender gear — thread, cloth & weave.
Scribing	Glyphs, runes & notes — the enchanter's etch, and the home of the Scribe's Transcribe recipe.
Culinary	Snacks & dishes — the buff kitchen.
Cultivation	Cultivators & refined materials — leveling a cultivator is a Cultivation cook.
Ascendancy	The avatar ascension chain — Souls, Medallions, Cores.

Every recipe already knows its craft

You don't assign a craft — each recipe carries one. Gear recipes sort by the role they build (tank → Armorer, damage → Bonecrafting, healer → Tailoring), snacks are Culinary, glyphs/notes are Scribing, cultivator upgrades and refined materials are Cultivation, and ascension pieces are Ascendancy. The picker shows each recipe's craft.

Layer 1 — Mastery: you get better at what you cook

Each craft has its own Mastery level, and there's exactly one way to raise it: cook that craft's recipes.

Every successful cook feeds its craft's Mastery — by the kXP it actually earned. A cook's Mastery XP now uses the same tier-weighted ingredient measure as your global Kitchen XP: each ingredient unit is worth 1 (Standard) / 3 (Rare) / 5 (Mythical) × its quantity, so a bigger, rarer basket teaches more than a cheap hand-cook — and a failed cook still teaches a little. Only a craft's own cooks raise its discipline Mastery; every cook, of any craft, still feeds your Kitchen Level.
A per-cook ceiling keeps mass-production honest. You earn full Mastery credit up to about 50 tier-weighted units in a single cook; past that, each further unit counts only 0.25. A giant basket still earns the most overall (never less) — it just isn't a leveling shortcut, and ordinary hand-cooks sit well under the ceiling, so they're unaffected.
Mastery is a passive edge on every cook in that craft. It adds the same kind of stat points your equipment does — more Skill (success), Speed (faster cook) and Elegance (rarity upgrade) — no upkeep, always on. At Mastery 90 a single craft is contributing up to +120 Skill, +160 Speed (≈ 40% faster) and +40 Elegance on its cooks.
It's a snowball — the curve is convex, so early Mastery levels give a little and late levels give a lot. Leaning hard into one craft pays off more the deeper you go.
It's per-account (shared across your wallets) and caps at Mastery level 90. Your effective Mastery is also clamped to your current Kitchen Level at all times — you can't bank Mastery above your Kitchen Level, so raising Kitchen Level lifts the ceiling for every craft at once.
There's nothing to equip or choose, and no penalty for cooking outside a "main." Cook broadly and every craft climbs; cook narrowly and one craft races ahead.
Mastery unlocks bigger batches on that craft's single-input tier-up recipes (Standard → Rare, Rare → Mythical). Batch size steps up with the craft's Mastery — ×1 always · ×5 at L10 · ×10 at L20 · ×20 at L35 · ×50 at L50 — with each locked rung showing what opens it. See Recipes & Cooking — Single-input tier-ups are batchable.

Naturally become the network's specialist

Because Mastery rises with what you cook, the crafts you lean into become the ones you make best — and those outputs are exactly what other players come to the Bazaar to buy. Find the craft you enjoy, cook it often, and sell your surplus.

Layer 2 — Discipline stalls: your specialization

As a craft's Mastery climbs, it unlocks more cook slots tied to that discipline — and cooking a recipe of that craft in one of its slots earns a bonus. This craft-to-slot match is the recipe's affinity (see below).

The gear and food disciplines live in the streamlined Cook Slots grid — 12 slots, each wearing a craft-coloured ring and recipe-picker icon so its discipline reads at a glance (a locked one says "Cook <craft> recipes to raise <craft> Mastery"). Scribing, Ascendancy, and the Signal slot sit as their own tiles beside it. Fifteen stations in all — the grid's 12 plus the 3 tiles:

Discipline slot	Discipline (craft)	Unlocks at	Bonus when you cook a matching recipe
Culinary ×3	Culinary	Kitchen Level 1 / 12 / 24	— (your everyday lanes)
Armorer ×3	Armorer	Armorer Mastery 6 / 24 / 50	+10% Skill · +10% Elegance · +10% Speed
Bonecrafting ×3	Bonecrafter	Bonecrafter Mastery 6 / 24 / 50	+10% Skill · +10% Elegance · +10% Speed
Tailoring ×3	Weaver	Weaver Mastery 6 / 24 / 50	+10% Skill · +10% Elegance · +10% Speed
Scribing	Arcanist	Arcanist Mastery 30	+15% Elegance
Ascendancy	Ascendancy	Ascendancy Mastery 30	+15% Speed
Signal	any	Signal subscription	+10% Skill · +10% Elegance · +50% Speed

Reading the bonus:

Skill raises your cook success rate.
Elegance raises your rarity-upgrade chance (a better shot at a tier-up on the output).
Speed reduces cook time (a bigger number is faster — the Signal slot's +50% Speed roughly halves the cook).

The three Culinary slots are your everyday lanes — they gate on Kitchen Level (1 / 12 / 24), not Mastery, so every player has them. The gear and special slots gate on craft Mastery, which is how leaning into a discipline literally builds you a better slot for it.

Recipe affinity — cook it where it belongs

Affinity is the match between a recipe's craft and the slot you cook it in. Cook an Armorer recipe in an Armorer-ringed slot and you get its bonus; cook it anywhere else and you get no bonus — but also no penalty. Off-affinity cooks are simply neutral.

On-affinity (recipe craft = slot's discipline) → the slot's bonus applies.
Off-affinity → neutral. Nothing is taken away; you just don't get the boost.
No recipe is ever locked out of a slot. A free slot will always accept any cook — the kitchen just prefers to route a recipe into its matching-craft slot when one is open. Affinity is a pull toward the right slot, never a wall.

That's the whole design: cook in your discipline and it pays; cook outside it and you're no worse off. It rewards specializing without ever punishing a player who wants to cook a bit of everything.

All three layers are live

The discipline slots are live for all players (2026-08-10), alongside Mastery (Layer 1) and recipe books (Layer 3) — and the whole cooking area opened to everyone in the streamlined layout. Your 15 cooking stations are the discipline layout above — the 12-slot Cook Slots grid unlocked by Kitchen Level and craft Mastery, plus the Scribing, Ascendancy and Signal tiles, with temporary rentals stacking on top (see Recipes & Cooking).

Layer 3 — Recipe books: unlock new recipe blocks

You start with the base recipes of every craft, free forever. To open a craft's deeper, world-specific recipes — a world's gear line, its materials, its ascension pieces — you collect that world's recipe book. Owning the book unlocks the whole block at once.

Books can't be traded or sold. You get one two ways:

Buy it from the Hollow Merchant for a flat 15 Chits — one price, every book.
Cook it from Pages — collect 25 of that world's Pages (a drop that stacks up as you play the world) and cook them into the book (a book cook can't fail).

Either way, the moment you hold the book its recipes appear in your picker. If you were already cooking a world's recipes before books arrived, you keep them — books only ever add.

One noun, one number, one choice

Collect Pages (or bank Chits), watch the number climb toward 25 Pages / 15 Chits, and spend it on the book you want next. That's the whole loop.

How the three layers stack

For any given cook, they compound cleanly:

Mastery in the recipe's craft adds its always-on edge (better the more you've cooked that craft).
The slot adds its bonus if you're cooking on-affinity (a matching-craft slot).
The book decides whether the recipe exists in your picker at all.

So the deepest way to play a craft is to collect its books (more to cook), cook it often (rising Mastery), and cook it in its matching slot (the affinity bonus). One craft, three reinforcing rewards — easy to learn, deep to master.

The seven crafts​

Layer 1 — Mastery: you get better at what you cook​

Layer 2 — Discipline stalls: your specialization​

Recipe affinity — cook it where it belongs​

Layer 3 — Recipe books: unlock new recipe blocks​

How the three layers stack​

See also​