Cooking

Every ingredient cooked on a grill or campfire is 10 XP, every meal prepared is 20 and every drink 15, and levelling lowers the chance of burning. That flat rate is what makes Cooking a buying skill once you reach the Umbral Sands: after Icthlarin's Little Helper opens the garou merchants, redberries cost 3 chits each and cook for 10 XP, so the climb from level 41 (where Dowdun Reach's main quest leaves you, having made you cook syrup) is about 2,400 berries to 50, 16,700 to 75 and 98,000 to 99 at the base rate. With the Inspiring Ring of Cooking, Knowledgable Nourishment from a Wild Pie or Forager's Sandwich and a Focused Cooking potion (+30% at the top tier) that falls to roughly 65,500 berries, which is 13 trips with an empty inventory and the Personal Chest spell, and eleven iron chests to hold them. Build a lodestone beside the merchant.

The farming route levels both skills at once. Dwellberry and redberry crunchies take unprocessed wheat and dried berries, berry bushes crop every day without replanting, and crunchies don't override other foods' XP perks, so they double as combat rations. A farm that makes 990 crunchies a day, about 40,000 Cooking XP, is 135 ash plots of wheat and 80 oak plots of dwellberries on the Stormtouched cliff where the storm waters them, seven super compost bins fed by another 70 willow plots, ten grills to cook ten stacks of berries while you sleep, 10 to 15 plant cures a day and a few lightning rods. The day runs: plant the wheat in the morning, harvest and cure the berries, start the grills and sleep, cure the wheat, harvest the willows and replant them with pumpkins or irit, refill the compost, berries again, grills again, sleep, harvest the wheat with your boosts on, repeat.