The weekly grocery bill: 474,200 gold, or 1,819,800
✍️ Alice・愛麗沙
Fill the limited-stock cooking shop for one full week and the bill is 1,819,800 gold. Of that, 1,345,600 — 74% — goes on exactly four items: asparagus, peas, tomato, lemon. Drop those four and a week’s groceries cost 474,200, barely a quarter as much. The gap deserves attention because it is the same order of magnitude as income: fixed weekly income at Korean season-1 endgame runs 2.0 to 2.5 million gold, so buying everything means spending 73% to 91% of a week’s income on groceries, against 19% to 24% without the four. Converted into something more tangible: 1,819,800 gold is 45 gem boxes. Which is why “what cooking level should I reach” is the wrong question. The real one is whether you buy those four vegetables — and for most players the answer is no, not to save money, but because the recipes they lead to currently have almost nowhere to go.
Update 9/14: The 1,819,800 above is the limited-stock shop total before Taiwan’s 9/9 update. The 9/9 patch notes (thread 3541097) add Jennifer’s Tavern in the new town of Bangkel (班克爾): light meat 400, chili powder 3,000, white radish 10,000 gold, all 30 per character per week — filling those adds 402,000 gold a week (the radish alone is 300,000, a fifth “expensive one”), plus a barter of 15 light meat for 10 soybeans (1 per character per day). The notes also spell these caps out as “per character, weekly”, which officially confirms the per-character arithmetic this page uses. Where the new ingredients lead is still being checked; until then, file the radish with the four vegetables: confirm there is something to trade it into before buying.
The bill, laid out
Roughly half of all cooking ingredients are gatherable. The other half are shop-only, and that half is capped: 30 per week, restocked Monday 06:00 — weekly, not daily. That cap is what makes “a week’s groceries” a number with a hard ceiling rather than a vague running cost, and therefore something you can actually compute.
Multiply the weekly quantities by their unit prices and it comes out like this.
| Ingredient | Unit price | Weekly quantity | Subtotal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asparagus | 10,000 | 60 | 600,000 |
| Peas | 10,000 | 40 | 400,000 |
| Tomato | 6,800 | 42 | 285,600 |
| Lemon | 3,000 | 20 | 60,000 |
| Those four, subtotal | — | — | 1,345,600 |
| Everything else (meat, salt, sugar, oil, cabbage, apple, pepper, garlic…) | — | — | 474,200 |
| Total | — | — | 1,819,800 |
474,200 plus 1,345,600 is 1,819,800 — exactly the total the original tally printed for itself. That is our independent re-derivation: two halves computed separately landing on the same figure, which is the reason we are willing to build a decision on this bill at all.
Four vegetables are 74% of the whole thing. That concentration is the entire point of this page. A decision with four cells that matter and a dozen that do not is a decision you can actually make.
What 74% means in practice
Convert the bill into spending you already have a feel for:
- 1,819,800 / 40,000 = 45.5 gem boxes. The shop’s gold tab prices a gem box at 40,000 with a daily cap of ten, so a full grocery week is four and a half days of gem fragments given up.
- Against 2.0 to 2.5 million of weekly income, buying everything is 73% to 91% of that income.
- Skipping the four: 474,200, which is 19% to 24%.
The second line is the one that should land. A player who clears every weekly and buys a full slate of ingredients keeps under a third of their income — and has not yet paid for enhancement, repairs, or skill modification.
The Korean community puts it more bluntly. The vegetables high-tier cooking eats cost far more than what a gold nugget converts to: a nugget sells for 5,000, while a single dish using four asparagus is 40,000 in vegetables alone. Their conclusion was that cooking on a whim is not viable — a verdict Korean players wrote on their own wiki, not an inference of ours.
Where those four actually lead
Saving 1.34 million sounds unambiguously good, so check what the saving costs you.
The four expensive vegetables lead to high-tier cooking: the dishes granting comparatively large all-stat bonuses, plus some campfire-shared food. And here is the problem with that destination.
| Dish | Cooking level | Cooking station | NPC (town) | Get | Cap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 旅行者點心 | Lv.1 | No station needed | 貓商人（地下城3區） | 鹽 ×2 | 1/day |
| 馬鈴薯沙拉 | Lv.1 | Lv.1 | 阿蘭雯（杜巴頓） | 絕招秘藥 ×1 | 1/day |
| 蘋果汁 | Lv.1 | Lv.1 | 麗莎（堤爾克那） | 高級鍊金術再燃燒催化劑 ×1 | 1/day |
| 美乃滋炒肉 | Lv.1 | Lv.1 | 雷納德（堤爾克那） | 暴擊秘藥 ×1 | 1/day |
| 擠著吃的點心 | Lv.3 | Lv.1 | 貓商人（地下城3區） | 愛心幣 ×1 | 3/day |
| 炒蔬菜 | Lv.5 | Lv.2 | 艾爾文（杜加德走廊） | 高級木材 ×4 | 2/day |
| 蘋果舒芙蕾 | Lv.5 | Lv.2 | 潔米（杜巴頓） | 高級布料 ×4 | 2/day |
| 瑞可塔起司沙拉 | Lv.5 | Lv.2 | 傑羅姆（杜巴頓） | 絲綢 ×4 | 2/day |
| 牛奶燉豬肉 | Lv.5 | Lv.2 | 格莉娜（杜巴頓） | 格莉娜手工蛋糕 ×1 | 1/day |
| 蘋果舒芙蕾 | Lv.5 | Lv.2 | 格莉娜（杜巴頓） | 食物製作台設計圖(3級) ×1 | 1/day |
| 蘋果鮮奶油蛋糕 | Lv.10 | Lv.3 | 潔米（杜巴頓） | 高級布料+ ×4 | 1/day |
| 奶油醬牛排 | Lv.10 | Lv.3 | 傑羅姆（杜巴頓） | 高級絲綢 ×4 | 1/day |
| 蒜香橄欖油義大利麵 | Lv.10 | Lv.3 | 基利安（庫漢） | 四葉草 ×8 | 1/day |
| 冰草莓飲 | Lv.10 | Lv.3 | 凱雅拉（庫漢） | 高級暴擊秘藥 ×1 | 1/day |
| 馬鈴薯湯 | Lv.10 | Lv.3 | 卡琳（冰霜峽谷(雪山救助隊)） | 寵物飼料 ×10 | 1/day |
| 沙威瑪 | Lv.13 | Lv.4 | 休馬斯（萊爾特丘陵(龍之遺跡)） | 卓越繃帶 ×5 | 3/day |
| 豆乳防風草蛋糕 | Lv.13 | Lv.4 | 康格（班克爾） | 卓越恢復藥水 ×6 | 1/day |
| 鱸魚辣魚湯 | Lv.20 | Lv.4 | 艾頓（班克爾） | 銀合金錠 ×10 | 1/week |
| 蒸蛤蜊 | Recipe unverified | — | 特蕾西（杜加德走廊） | 特蕾西的原木音樂盒 ×1 | 1/day |
Only live TW routes whose entry ticket is a COOKED dish; barter-only foods (the wholemeal bread, the handmade cake) cost no cooking levels and are not listed. Cooking and station levels are KR player records. Full barter board:Barter
That table is every route where you hand over a finished dish and receive goods, together with the cooking level and workbench tier each one demands. The distribution reads at a glance: the entry tickets are all low-tier dishes — stir-fried vegetables, apple juice, apple soufflé and the like, gated at cooking level 1, 5 and 10.
Which is to say the barter system does not want expensive food. It wants cheap food. The four costly vegetables feed the all-stat-buff line instead, and the value of that line rests entirely on whether you are actually attempting content that needs the buff to pass.
So the decision splits cleanly:
- If your loop is barter, you do not need to buy any of the four. Your bill is 474,200, and a good share of even that is replaceable by gathering.
- If you are pushing content where a buff is load-bearing, the four enter consideration — bought per dish you actually intend to cook, not topped up to the cap every week.
Buying to the cap is a very expensive default
The habit is what this page is really trying to correct, more than the number.
A limited-stock shop produces a specific psychological effect: the interface says “30 remaining”, and not clearing it feels like leaving value behind. That instinct is correct for free resources — daily freebies, attendance, barter charges all evaporate unclaimed.
It is completely wrong for a slot that charges you. The difference is that a free slot costs nothing, so filling it can never be a mistake, whereas every cell in a purchase-capped shop is paid for in the most expensive currency this game has: gold, which has no substitute source. Reading a cap as a target is the costliest reading habit available here.
The practical test is one sentence. Before buying, be able to say what this ingredient becomes, and what that dish gets traded for or fed to. If you cannot finish the sentence, do not buy it. The stock returns every week. Your gold does not.
The conclusion
Four vegetables, 74% of the bill. That is the only real decision on the cooking line. The rest of the shopping — meat, salt, sugar, oil, cabbage, apple — totals 474,200, which measured against income is a survivable fixed cost. Buy it.
Do: fill the cheap half at the Monday 06:00 restock; buy the expensive vegetables per dish you genuinely intend to cook. Ignore: the goal of clearing the purchase cap, and any purchase whose justification is “it refreshes every week anyway”.
Two things would overturn this page:
- The prices and quantities here are a 2025-04 record, unreconciled for seventeen months. If current unit prices have moved, the ratios move with them. The concentration is much stickier, though — it survives as long as asparagus and peas remain the two most expensive lines, which is a structural fact rather than a price point. What would genuinely flip the page is those vegetables being halved in price.
- If content ships that requires high-tier food to clear — a raid tier designed around an all-stat buff, say — the four vegetables move from luxury to necessity and the advice inverts wholesale. The recomputation then is “how many dishes per attempt”, not “whether to buy”.