New World Outlines Drastic Changes Coming To Cooking In Season Of The Guardian

Amazon Game Studios will be adding a lot of things to New World when Season 5: Season of the Guardian begins on March 12. It’s also taking away a few things with a particular focus on cutting the open-world MMORPG’s cooking system down to more accessible bite-sized pieces.

To streamline the cooking system, the team plans to reduce the number of available recipes while also making sure that cooking remains a key activity in the game. Don’t worry, they’ll mostly be culling the less-used ones, like dual-stat foods. Recipes that aren’t culled from the list will also be tweaked to focus more on their primary stats and all dual-stat food listings will be removed from the trading post and all affected items will be returned to their respective owners.

XP gains from cooking will remain roughly the same as they’ll be crafted in bundles of three and will require more ingredients than usual. Cooking and gathering tiers are also being removed and level restrictions to use food will be brought down from level 60 to level 15.

The chances of catching legendary fish will also be drastically tuned down to make them “exceptionally rare” and increase both their impact and their value. Players will have to pull out all the stops if they hope to get their hands on the soon to be extremely valuable commodities, that includes seeking out hotspots and having the best fishing gear possible.

That being said, Amazon says that they’ll be offering equally rewarding alternatives if they just can’t seem to get the fish to bite. The team will also be giving other professions the same treatment further down the line to make sure that the game doesn’t have “seventeen different versions of the same shirt.”

In the meantime, you can learn more about what the team has been cooking up for New World in the latest Forged in Aeternum episode below.