Qi Seasoning
| Qi Seasoning | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Collection |
| Location | Qi's Walnut Room for 10 |
| Sell Price | 200g |
Qi Seasoning is a pinch of something from Mr Qi's own kitchen, sold by the packet in his Walnut Room, and it does its work without ever being used directly. Keeping a stock of it anywhere the kitchen can reach, in the bag, the farmhouse fridge or a Mini-Fridge, turns every dish cooked afterwards into a gold-quality version of itself. One packet goes into each dish, so the supply drains steadily, and Qi sells them in batches to match. The upgrade is worth far more than it first appears: gold-quality food sells for half again as much, restores a great deal more health and energy, and carries stronger, longer buffs. For anyone who cooks seriously, whether for profit or for a run into the Skull Cavern, the seasoning is the cheapest way to make a kitchen better.
Overview
The mechanic is pleasantly hands-off. There is no recipe step and no machine to load. As long as a packet is somewhere the cooking screen counts as storage, the next dish comes out with a gold star, and the packet disappears. That means a trip to the island can stock the farmhouse fridge for a whole season of baking, and nothing has to be remembered on the morning itself.
Where the gold star helps most depends on why the food was cooked. For selling, the premium is straightforward: a gold-quality dish fetches half again the price of a plain one, so a kitchen running on Pale Ale, cheese or fruit dishes gains a steady margin for very little outlay. The arithmetic only works while the seasoning is cheap relative to the dish, which means it is better spent on the expensive recipes than on a tray of Fried Eggs.
For eating, the gain is larger still. Gold-quality food restores considerably more health and energy, which matters most in the places where food is the only medicine: the lower Skull Cavern, the Volcano Dungeon and the dangerous mines. Any dish that grants a buff gets a point added to each of its stats, speed excepted, and the buff lasts half again as long. That turns a Spicy Eel or a Lucky Lunch from a short burst into something that covers most of a descent, and a mining or luck buff running a third longer is often the difference between reaching a deep floor and running out of time.
The tidy way to use the packets is to separate the two jobs. Cook the one-off dishes needed for the recipe collection without any seasoning in reach, since quality makes no difference to whether a recipe counts as cooked. Then put the packets in the fridge and batch-cook the food meant to be eaten or sold, so every packet buys an upgrade that actually gets used.
Notes
As a present the seasoning goes down badly with everybody in the valley, which is a reasonable reaction to being handed somebody else's cooking ingredient.
Stocking up is sensible, because the Walnut Room is a long way from the kitchen. The vending machine sells the packets in batches rather than singly, and a single visit with a decent purse of gems can keep a farmhouse in gold-quality cooking for years of game time.
All Collections
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