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Cuisineer Guide to Elements, Modifiers and The Brewery
Fighting is a big part Cuisineer’s gameplay loop, but enemies can feel extremely tough and spongey if your gear isn’t up to par. So I’m here to guide you through The Brewery system, the Flavors, and Modifiers you’re going to be using on your journey to culinary greatness.
Intro to the Perfect Culinary Beatdowns
So, you’re struggling to beat a single cow or hog because you’re doing pitiful damage? We’re going to fix that. In this guide I’m going to show you how to turn the beefiest of enemies into mincemeat with well-crafted gear, and how to turn Pom into a culinary hurricane.
Flavor Basics and Quirks
Your Flavor choice has a big impact in how you play the game and since creating new gear is extremely time consuming, it makes sense to know exactly what you’re going to want to invest in. If you’re already familiar with the flavors and some of the little quirks they can accomplish then feel free to skip this part:
Sweet
This flavor is an excellent choice if you’re trying to outsurvive and outlast enemies. It’s modifiers primarily improve the damage reduction bonus from it’s effect. However, this does mean that you’re going to be doing less damage with this compared to other flavors since it’s only damage increase will come from Sweet Damage modifiers. Heavier weapons like Tenderizers and Deva knives can get good use out of this, since your slow speed opens you up to getting hit often and their raw attack power more than makes up for Sweet’s lack of up-front damage.
Spicy
The first of the damage over time flavors, Spicy is the first element you’re going to be getting your hands on in the game, from the starter spatula you get early on. This element is focused on igniting enemies and making them take average amounts of damage over time. This is great if you’re planning on doing a hit and run strategy, but is very poor when it comes to getting quick kills on it’s own. This is likely the main reason there are a lot of complaints about the tankiness of enemies. If you want enemies dead fast, this most certainly is not the element for the job unless you’re late into the game.
Bitter
The second of the damage over time flavors, it’s almost exactly the same as spicy. It does slightly less damage, but lasts much longer. Similar to Spicy, Bitter is well suited for hit and runs strategies but is poor at killing stuff quickly. I consider Bitter a bit better than Spicy, since the Durian Bomb exists. It inflicts poison innately so you have a free modifier slot to use whenever you plan on going focusing on Bitter for your dream set.
Umami
Umami is a weird one. This flavor has a huge impact on your survivability but can become completely useless when there isn’t anything shooting at you. Ideally, you should only ever have one source of Umami in your gear set, since it’s impact isn’t that felt outside of projectile rich environments.
Ice
My personal favorite, Ice is a flavor that lets you take control of a battle. It’s main use is to lock down enemies with the Frozen effect and prevent them from hitting you back. it can even cancel enemy attacks while they’re mid-animation. Especially useful for dealing with high priority targets like the Bulls, or Potchers. It’s base damage is a bit weak though, so you need a bit more Brewery investment to get this flavor to do decent damage, since it’s “frost burst” effect(stacking freeze on unfreezable enemies like bosses) causes a pitiful amount of damage. Plates, Spears and Durians can put this flavor to work very effectively due to how often they can land Flavor triggering attacks.
Salty
Salty is another control flavor, like Ice. But instead of locking enemies down, you displace and throw them around. This flavor is hands down the most powerful in the game because of how it can cause massive damage through wall/mob collisions and it’s Concussive Blast modifier. Concussive Blast causes immediate damage the moment something is knocked back. The damage is spectacular as well, starting at 10 damage at 1 star and 30 at 3. For reference, a plate that does 6 damage per hit, is now doing 16 at 1 star CB, and 36 at 3 star CB. This makes this flavor an amazing boss buster with how much extra damage it puts on your plate, literally.
Sour
Last but most certainly not least, Sour is the upfront dedicated damage dealer of the flavors. Sour triggering attacks create arcs of lightning between enemies, making short work of entire groups in seconds. This flavor is very beginner friendly and does not need a lot of investment(like Ice or Sweet), unconventional strategies(like Spicy and Bitter) or proper positioning to reach its full potential(like Salty). So if you’re looking for a great simple flavor, this is your pick.
Choosing Your Culinary Toolkit
Now that you’ve gotten a quick rundown of the various flavors you’re going to want to pick the modifiers for your dream set.
Choosing Your Modifiers
Modifiers are the bread and butter of your damage output in Cuisineer and picking the ones that match your playstyle can make your ingredient hunting much quicker. Modifiers can generally be broken down into moveset modifiers, damage boosts, skins, triggers, and durability increases
Moveset Modifiers
These modifiers generally give your weapons a new flavor when doing certain actions. These include dashing, dash attacking, end-of-combo, and on-impact flavor modifiers. These are your primary ways to trigger your flavors of choice. Personally, I find the Dash Attack modifiers to be the best ones to have, mainly because most fights start with you dashing in for one. Ranged weapons get higher benefit from their exclusive on-impact modifiers though, since ranged weapon’s regular attacks are better than their dash attacks.
Damage Boosts
These modifiers boost your base damage by a certain amount, as long as it’s associated flavor is on an enemy, and the crit damage modifier. These are great boosts to your base attack power, and can compensate for certain flavor’s lack of innate damage like Ice or Sweet. These boosts also increase the effectiveness of any upgrades you get from the Blacksmith, Briquette. Quick sidenote, I see a lot of complaints about how Blacksmith upgrades kinda suck. They’re actually alright in practice. The way damage is calculated is that your various attacks have a “motion/attack value” percent thats based off of your weapon’s base attack power. So that 1 damage from upgrades is actually a +2-9 per hit depending on the weapon and attack used.
Skins
These are modifiers that trigger whenever something hits you. They either send back a small amount of damage or inflict a flavor. Ideally, you don’t want any of these on your gear set as using your face as a weapon when you have a comically large spatula is kinda a bad idea. The only exception is if you’re planning to make a Sweet face tanking set. In this case, your face “can” be a good weapon alongside a comically large spatula.
Triggers
Trigger modifiers have a random chance of happening whenever you do something. This includes the projectile triggers that throw out a projectile whenever you attack, critical strike modifiers, and the death explosion modifier. Projectile triggers are hilarious to build around, and make dual projectile builds incredibly fun and chaotic, critical strikes give you that massive dopamine hit of landing 500 damage in a single attack, and death explosion is like using Sour but worse.
Durability Increases
This class of modifier is pretty straightforward, you have a higher effective HP whenever you use them. These are your HP Boosts and Projectile Resist Modifiers. I don’t recommend using these too much, since you lose a potential damage improving slot to increase your own durability. Remember, a dead enemy is one that can’t hit you back. The only exception is if you’re planning to use a Sweet build. Projectile resist is also useless considering you can get 100% projectile immunity and reflect with the Umami Dash.
Making the Perfect Brew
Welcome to the most important section of the guide. This here is the ham and eggs you’re going to use for your Cuisineer combat sandwich.
How Brewing Works
The Brewing process is relatively straightforward. You give Ankhiluun the gear you want modified, then you grab a dish to throw into the pot. The dish you pick influences what shows up as potential modifiers based on the flavors of the dish.
Theres also a tab at the top of left corner that looks like a clipboard that gives you a preview of the possible modifiers that specific dish will give you, and is very helpful at trying to figure out what you’re going to roll into.
Brewing Tips and Tricks
- You want to find a piece with something you already want, and ideally at 2 stars or a skill that doesn’t have a star rating.This is due to how Brewing locks the slot you’re not changing. You’re free to edit and change the Brewed slot as much as you like but that other slot is never going to get any better, so better have something thats already good in there.
- The tier of dish matters when it comes to the modifiers it can spawn and the star rating of the resulting modifier. Every dish is also unique in what it can give your armor or weapon.
Tier 1 and Tier 2 Dishes
Tier 1 and 2 Dishes increase the chance of certain modifiers appearing, but with a small chance of a completely random modifier:
Tier 3 Dishes
Tier 3 dishes eliminate the random modifiers entirely alongside having a high chance of rolling a 2 star modifer. You can also get anything between the following:
Modifiers for one specific flavor.
Different flavors of the same modifier type.
A wide spread of modifiers based on their flavors.
Tier 4 Dishes
Tier 4 Dishes are similar to Tier 3, but heavily narrow down the possible outcomes, and it also almost always guarantees a 3 star modifier if the modifier can have a star rating.
Save scumming is a good way to try and get new modifiers in case you don’t get what you want. The game only saves when you wake up at the start of the day, so resetting is a viable strategy to getting the gear you want faster and with fewer ingredients wasted.
Iron Chef Recipe Builds
In case you’re a bit lost on where to start, here are a couple builds I’ve used in my own restaurateur journey:
Flavor Damage Stacking aka “Beefy Beatdowns”
The goal of this build is to just stack as much damage as possible without consideration for anything else. Normally you’d think that the the Flavor Damage upgrades wouldn’t stack because of the tooltip that says “This Does Not Stack” clearly written at the bottom. Don’t trust it, it’s lying to you.
First image is without an element application, 2nd is with Freeze applied with a 105% damage modifier.
This works incredibly well with every flavor, and not just Ice. It makes the already hard hitting Salty, and Sour hit harder, and the other flavors gain the damage they need to clear out rooms quickly and efficiently despite focusing on damage over time, or utility.
Concussion Slamming aka “Chef Brutality”
The idea behind this build is to be able to push enemies into walls with rapidfire attacks from a plate, or drag them into one with a Durian’s slow but persistent projectile. Once something is on a wall, you continually slam them into it with all of your Salty effects. Mastering this setup makes obliterating the beefiest of enemies a pinch… of salt. You do need to position yourself well with this kind of build to get the most out of it though, so keep that in mind.
