Cooking and the Nutrient Processor — Ingredients and Value Multipliers
Cooking exists to multiply the value of ingredients at every step. One Mordite becomes Meat Chunks and jumps roughly twentyfold. But a fair amount of what you’ll find online about it is wrong, so let’s clear that up first.
Three pieces of misinformation
There is no merchant who buys your cooking. The only way to turn food into Units is the ordinary Galactic Trade Terminal. Don’t go hunting for a “food vendor” or a “confectioner”.
Cronus is not a merchant. Iteration: Cronus, aboard the Space Anomaly, judges the dishes you submit and pays out Nanite Clusters. Not Units.
Features like an “ingredients market” or a “dish of the day” shop come from a mod. The Nexus mod Cooking with Cronus adds them, and a lot of English-language guides describe those as if they were vanilla. Vanilla does have a daily donation window at Cronus — but it pays nanites and esteem, not Units.
The Nutrient Processor
| Blueprint | Bought with Salvaged Data at the Construction Research Unit on the Space Anomaly |
| Cost | 2× Metal Plating + 1× Hermetic Seal + 25× Sodium |
| Form | Portable. Place and pick it up anywhere, no base required |
| Power | None. Unlike a Refiner it doesn’t even need fuel |
| Inventory | 25 slots, 50 per slot (shared between processors in the same base) |
The lack of power and fuel requirements is the point. You don’t need to set up a site the way you do with refiners — drop it where you’re harvesting and run it there.
Sources disagree on the blueprint price, so the exact cost is unconfirmed. Most say 10 Salvaged Data, but that figure comes from an older build.
Recipes come from experimenting
Put ingredients into the three input slots and the result previews itself when the combination is valid. Craft it and the recipe is recorded in your catalogue. No NPC teaches you recipes in vanilla — that’s another mod feature.
Ingredient groups
| Group | Examples | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Foraged flora | Solanium, Star Bulb, Frost Crystal, Gamma Root, Fungal Mould, Cactus Flesh, Kelp Sac, Marrow Bulb | Kelp Sac and Marrow Bulb cannot be farmed |
| Crops | Heptaploid Wheat, Sweetroot | Needs a farm for any reliable supply |
| Animal | Fresh Milk, Creature Egg, Faecium, Mordite | Obtained by feeding wild creatures Creature Pellets |
Animal products are the bottleneck. Fresh Milk and Creature Eggs require taming and feeding creatures, which is by far the most labour-intensive part.
The processing chain
Cooking runs on three tiers: raw processing → intermediate → finished dish. Learning the skeleton beats memorising individual recipes.
Raw processing (1 ingredient → 1 output)
This is where value first jumps.
| Input | Output |
|---|---|
| Mordite | Meat Chunks |
| Heptaploid Wheat | Refined Flour |
| Sweetroot | Processed Sugar |
| Faecium | Wild Yeast |
| Fresh Milk | Cream |
| Fungal Mould | Non-Toxic Mould |
| Frost Crystal | Vitreous Grain |
Intermediates
- Flour + Wild Yeast → Dough → Bread
- Cream → Churned Butter / Cream + Wild Yeast → Tangy Cheese
- Flour + Churned Butter → Pastry → Pie Case
- Churned Butter + Processed Sugar → Sweetened Butter → + Flour + Creature Egg → Cake Batter
Pie Case and Cake Batter are the gateways to the high-value lines. Once you’re there, almost anything you add sells well.
Headline recipes and multipliers
The figures below are base item values. Actual sale prices vary by system and demand, so pay attention to the multiplier rather than the absolute number.
| Combination | Result | Base value |
|---|---|---|
| Mordite ×1 | Meat Chunks | 800 |
| Heptaploid Wheat ×1 | Refined Flour | 1,800 |
| Dough ×1 | Bread | 5,200 |
| Cream ×1 | Churned Butter | 7,200 |
| Cream + Wild Yeast | Tangy Cheese | 9,000 |
| Creature Egg + Tangy Cheese | Omelette | 18,000 |
| Flour + Churned Butter → Pastry | Pie Case | 30,000 |
| Creature Egg + Cream + Processed Sugar | Very Thick Custard | 32,000 |
| Sweetened Butter + Flour + Creature Egg | Cake Batter | 38,000 |
| Pie Case + Meaty Chunks | Mystery Meat Pie | 40,000 |
| Custard + Frost Crystal | Ice Cream | 48,000 |
| Cake Batter + Bitter Cocoa | Chocolate Cake | 48,400 |
| Hypnotic Eye + Frost Crystal | Iced Screams | 90,000 |
Mordite is worth roughly 40 as a raw material. One processing step takes it to 800 — a twentyfold jump. That ratio is the real substance of cooking, and it holds up across patches better than any price does.
Cooking is always 1:1 per operation. Timing figures conflict between sources (2.5 seconds per item versus 5 seconds per operation), so the exact duration is unconfirmed.
Is cooking good money?
The prices are real, but it’s not a primary income source. Three reasons.
No economy bonus. Trade goods let you exploit system prices — buy in one economy, sell in another. Food is classed as a consumable and gets no such spread.
Ingredients bottleneck you. The high-value lines lean on Fresh Milk and Creature Eggs, which mean feeding creatures, and on flour and sugar, which mean farming.
The chains are long. A single pie takes two or three processing steps before you even start.
In practice cooking earns its keep through nanites and frigate feeding rather than Units. If money is the goal, other routes pay far better per hour.
Cronus and nanites
Submit a dish to Cronus on the Space Anomaly and you get Nanite Clusters scaled to the rating. Many sources put the top tier at 129, but the same references contradict themselves, so the ceiling is unconfirmed.
There’s also a daily donation window: hand over large amounts of whatever edible item is requested that day for nanites and esteem. What esteem actually does, however, has never been established — players who filled the bar completely report no visible change.
What food does
Eating gives a short buff: jetpack boost for 8 seconds, sprint stamina for 15, 50% hazard protection, health restoration, and so on. None of it is decisive for combat or survival.
One use is genuinely worthwhile, though. Feeding an organic frigate changes its stats, and the same dish always produces the same result — so once you find a combination that pushes the direction you want, you can repeat it.
Common confusions
- There is no pizza. There’s no standalone “Jam” or “Custard” item either, only variants (Peculiar Jam, Very Thick Custard, and so on).
- Kelp Sac and Marrow Bulb can’t be farmed, so you can’t build a production line around them.
- Sac Venom is a trade good, not a cooking ingredient.
- “Silky Fibres”, which appears in some English guides, is not an item in this game.
Related
- Resource Classes and Refiners — where ingredients come from
- Refining Recipes — the refiner side
- Nanite Clusters — other ways to earn nanites