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Kitchen Advanced Guide

This page is for players who've run the Quickstart loop a few times and want to understand how the mid-to-late-game systems actually work under the hood. Everything here is plain-English; the underlying spec lives in workers/docs/superpowers/specs/2026-05-20-kitchen-stats-point-system.md for the math-curious.

The three stat axes​

Every cook is decided by three numbers your kitchen accumulates. Each is measured in points (not percentages):

AxisPlain-English nameWhat it controls
Skill"Will this cook succeed?"The success-rate curve. Higher = more likely to succeed.
Speed"How fast does it cook?"Linearly shortens cook time. 1 Speed point = 0.25% time reduction, floored at 50% of base cook time (and never below a 60-second minimum).
Elegance"How rare is the output?"Drives the rarity-upgrade roll, hard-capped at 75%. Elegance is the rarest meaningful stat to stack.

Where the points come from​

Tune-In level contributes a flat base to every axis:

tune_pts(TL) = 5 + 2 × TL     (per axis)

Kitchen Level contributes on top (Skill and Elegance only — Speed is gear-only):

kitchen_pts(kL) = 4 × kL      (per axis, 2× the Tune-In coefficient)
LevelTune-In contributionKitchen Level contributionCombined per axis
17411
10254065
173968107
3575140215
69143276419
100205400605

Kitchen Level is the primary progression lever; Tune-In is a secondary stacking axis. A high-Kitchen-Level / low-Tune-In player is still well-positioned for most cooks; the inverse (high TL / no kL) is the punishing combination.

Equipment stacks additively on top. Each equipped piece has 1–3 stat lines (rolled at mint within its tier band — see Equipment for the 2026-05-20 ranges). Those numbers are flat points, not percentages — a Singularity Skillet showing "+18 Speed / +17 Skill / +14 Elegance" literally adds those points to your kitchen total. A fully maxed Mythical 6/6 rack totals around ~120 points across the three axes.

Variant Elegance bonus (same-family ingredient substitution) adds flat Elegance points (+5 per Rare sub, +10 per Mythic sub, per tier step) for that cook — combined with your Elegance gear through the same curve. See Variant Elegance below.

How recipe success is computed​

Every recipe has a points threshold equal to 5 + 6 × recipe.Level — the recipe expects both your Tune-In and Kitchen Level to be at the recipe's level for a 50% par cook. So a Level 17 recipe has a threshold of 107 points; matching that with TL=17 + kL=17 (no gear) sits exactly at par.

The success-rate curve is generous in the early band, steep in the late band:

Your Skill vs. thresholdSuccess rate
0× threshold (no points)5% (floor)
0.5×~28% (linear interp from floor to par)
1.0× (par)50%
1.5× (gear = ½ threshold above par)~75%
2.0× (gear = 1× threshold above par)95%
Beyond 2×asymptote toward 99.99% (never 100%)

The 50% → 95% band is closed when your gear contribution equals the full threshold. An L17 player at par (Skill = 107) needs about 53 gear points to hit 75% and a full 107 gear points to hit 95% — first gear points carry the most weight, then diminishing returns into the asymptote band.

Early-recipe floor lift (2026-05-27)​

To soften the under-threshold band for new players, recipes at Level < 20 receive an additive bonus on the under-threshold curve. The bonus:

  • vanishes at the par anchor (Skill = threshold) so 50% par stays exact
  • vanishes at zero Skill so the 5% absolute floor holds
  • decays to zero by recipe Level 20 so the high-level curve is unchanged
  • is concentrated in the mid-ratio region where most newcomers actually sit

Sample lift (kL = recipe Level, TL = 0, no gear):

Recipe LevelOld rateNew rate
125.5%~47%
537.1%~52%
1036.2%~49%
1535.8%~45%
20+unchangedunchanged

The over-threshold band (50% → 75% → 95% → asymptote) is not touched. All operator-locked anchors at L17/kL=17 — 50% par, +53.5 gear → 75%, +107 gear → 95% — remain exact.

Why a hard 99.99% cap?

Cooks always carry a structural 0.01% random failure floor. Even a fully maxed kitchen with no Tune-In and pure gear stacking can approach 99.99% but cannot guarantee a cook. This keeps Mythical-tier recipes meaningful and prevents perfect farming.

How rarity-upgrade rolls (Elegance) are computed​

The rarity-upgrade chance starts at a 5% base and climbs with your Elegance relative to the recipe's baseline, hard-capped at 75% (reached when your Elegance is 3× the recipe's baseline). The curve is concave: 5% + 70% × (r/3)^1.5, where r is your Elegance-over-baseline ratio, clamped to 3. There is no "90% upgrade" — 75% is the ceiling.

Elegance acts on the output — a successful roll bumps the output one rarity tier up (Standard → Rare → Mythical). On ceiling-tier recipes (where there's no higher tier), Elegance instead yields a 2× bonus piece of the same target tier. More on that in Recipe Chaining.

Variant Elegance substitution​

A quiet-but-powerful mid-game lever: when a recipe asks for an ingredient, you can substitute a higher-tier same-family ingredient. The substitution adds flat Elegance points to the cook, which then feed the rarity-upgrade curve above:

SubstitutionElegance points added
Rare instead of Standard (same family)+5
Mythic instead of Standard (same family)+10
Mythic instead of Rare (same family)+5

Stack across multiple ingredients in the same cook — but the rarity-upgrade chance those points feed is still capped at 75%, so substitutions can't trivially guarantee an upgrade.

Example: Pulse Bread normally takes 4 Pulse Eggs + 6 Harmonic Herbs (both Standard). Sub in Mythic Photon Fish (same Protein family as Pulse Eggs) + Mythic Harmonic Herbs and you've added a sizeable Elegance bump to the cook.

Recipe chaining​

Once you hit Tune-In L20, recipes themselves become inputs to higher-tier recipes. This is "chaining" — using your own outputs to climb the kitchen ladder. The full design lives at workers/docs/superpowers/specs/2026-05-18-recipe-chaining.md.

Refine (L16–19) — Standard → Rare ingredients​

Five recipes, one per family. Each consumes 8× Standard ingredients of that family → 1× Rare ingredient.

  • 85% base success, 1h cook time
  • No RSNC cost; the cost is the 8:1 burn ratio + the 15% failure risk
  • Eligible for the rarity-upgrade roll — a high-Elegance kitchen can occasionally roll a Mythic instead of the target Rare

Refine is the supply backbone for everything above. Your cultivators will out-produce your Refine throughput at high Tune-In levels — that's by design.

L40 — Crystallise + Tier-Up Crafting​

Two branches:

Branch A: Crystallise (Rare → Mythic ingredient)

  • 6× Rare ingredients → 1× Mythic of the same family
  • 70% base success, 4h cook
  • Mythic is the ingredient ceiling — a successful Elegance roll yields 2× Mythic (a "bonus piece") instead of upgrading further

Branch B: Equipment Tier-Up (Rare → Mythic equipment)

  • 3× Rare slot piece + 1× any-family Mythic ingredient (catalyst) → 1× Mythic slot piece
  • 55% base success, 6h cook
  • Same ceiling-bonus mechanic: an Elegance proc yields 2× Mythic slot piece with independent stat-line rolls

L60+ — Apotheosis (Legendary equipment)​

The endgame craft. Six recipes (one per equipment slot). Each consumes 3× Mythic slot pieces + 5× Mythic ingredient + 1× cooked Mythic food → 1× Legendary slot piece.

  • 40% base success, 24h cook time
  • Soft stat-gate: you need ≥+30 Skill points and ≥+20 Elegance points from your equipped gear to attempt. Standard gear with the right rolls can clear the gate; all-Mythic with the wrong axes cannot.
  • Ceiling-bonus on Elegance proc: 2× Legendary pieces with independent stat-line rolls (each piece runs its own RNG — both could roll god-tier, neither, or one each)
  • +25% Activity Score bonus when the Elegance mechanic fires (tier-up OR ceiling-bonus)

There's also an Apotheosis Gacha Pack for whales: 50K RSNC / $50 USDSC, yields one random Legendary piece. Skips the chain time + variance, doesn't replace the chain.

Why chain at all?​

  • Scarcity engine. L20 turns ingredient glut into Rare supply. L40 turns Rare supply into the Mythic bottleneck. L60+ turns the Mythic bottleneck into Legendary terminal items.
  • Crafting Activity Score. Successful chain cooks emit AS into a separate 5,000-per-week bucket (independent of the 10K chat bucket). Failed cooks emit zero — burn is the cost.
  • Active Effects (see below). Chain successes grant timed buffs.

Active effects​

Some chain successes grant perk-like timed effects that show up in your active-effects panel (in Settings and on the Kitchen view — there's no separate Alchemy tab anymore):

SourceEffectDuration
L40 Crystallise successRefinery — +15% Standard ingredient drop rate from all cultivators7 days
L60+ Apotheosis successAscendance — +25% Result Rarity on all cooks14 days

Effects stack with your equipped equipment and your Tune-In contribution. They're the reason a successful Apotheosis pays back into the next two weeks of cooking, not just the one Legendary it minted.

Sub-slot system (cultivator optimization)​

A cultivator's sub-slot count comes from its tier plus its level on the merge ladder: the L4 "no-nerf" anchor is Standard 10 / Rare 11 / Mythical 12, then +2 per level (one seed slot + one avatar slot, in lockstep) up to Standard 22 / Rare 23 / Mythical 24 at L10. Leveling is the only thing that adds sub-slots. Each sub-slot holds either an ingredient seed or a committed avatar worker.

Cultivators v3 — avatars set the quality

Output rarity is driven by your committed avatars — nothing else (not seed tier, not cultivator level, not Elegance). The old per-sub-slot Quality / Frequency / Rarity stat picks were scrapped in the v3 rebuild. For the full model — avatar-driven rarity, seed lifespan, the bonus-unit count-proc, and harvest math — see Cultivators and Sub-Slots, the canonical page.

Same-family rule. All ingredient sub-slots within one cultivator must hold the same family. Swapping is free — move seeds around without cost.

Harvest accumulation and the RSNC drip​

Cultivators fire on a continuous timer (Standard: 7–12h, Rare: 5–9h, Mythical: 4–7h — higher tiers tick faster). When you don't claim immediately, harvests accumulate into a pending bucket on the cultivator card.

  • 24-hour accumulation ceiling. Older drops fall off the back as new drops arrive, so a cultivator that hasn't been claimed in a week still tops out at roughly one day's worth.
  • No RSNC drip from food cultivators (2026-08-15). They paid 5 RSNC per ingredient minted (13 from 2026-05-21, 5 from 2026-05-20, 10 prior); that faucet was removed so a cultivator does one job — growing ingredients. RSNC generation moves to a dedicated producer in a later batch. Mines and Wells still pay 5 RSNC per unit produced.
  • Per-harvest RSNC cap: 15,000 RSNC. Still live for the Mines and Wells that do pay. Raised 2026-05-21 from 2K so it binds only at the supply-runaway tail; typical builds sit well under it.
  • Bonus-unit proc from avatars. On top of the flat 1 unit per producing slot, committed avatar power adds a bonus-unit chance — about +5% per 28 aligned avatar stats (guaranteed double at ~560). This is the v3 replacement for the scrapped Quality sub-slot pick.

If you log in daily, neither cap will bind. If you take a week off, you'll lose some accumulation — that's intentional supply discipline.

Seeds and the FIFO queue​

A sub-slot holds a queue of seeds (consumable inventory) — or a committed avatar worker.

  • Standard seeds last 3 harvests before they burn up.
  • Rare seeds last 6 harvests.
  • Mythical seeds last 10 harvests.

Re-anchored 2026-08-15 from 1 / 2 / 3. Seed tier had stopped affecting output quality (that moved to committed avatars), which left a Mythical seed returning just 3 Standard ingredients — strictly worse than the item it spent. Longer lifespans mean fewer replanting trips, not bigger harvests: the 24-hour accumulation ceiling still governs throughput.

When you plant a seed in a sub-slot, it joins the queue. The head seed is what's actively producing on each harvest tick. When the head seed's remaining-harvest counter hits 0, it burns and the queue's next entry promotes to head. When the queue is empty, the sub-slot stops yielding (the cultivator card shows a Plant seed CTA).

You can multi-select plant multiple same-family seeds into a sub-slot at once. The seeds stack into the queue in the order added. A stack indicator on the cultivator card shows "head seed + N queued" so you can see at a glance how many harvests of headroom you've got.

You can also swap the head seed without losing levels — same-family swaps are one-click side-by-side compare; cross-family swaps route through a "Switch family?" confirm because they affect what the whole cultivator can hold.

Tier-up recipes (Equipment crafting beyond mint)​

Most players' first Mythic equipment comes from the marketplace, the Limited recipe Quasar Quiche, or the Apotheosis Gacha Pack. There's a fourth path: the L40 Tier-Up chain branch (see above), which lets you assemble a Mythic slot piece from 3 Rare slot pieces of the same slot + a Mythic ingredient catalyst.

This is the only path that lets you choose which slot your Mythic piece is for. Recipe drops and gacha rolls are random across the 6 slots.

Strategy notes​

  • Chase Skill first, then Speed, then Elegance. Skill closes the success-rate gap from 50% to 95% fastest. Speed compounds across every cook. Elegance is the rarest stat to stack — save it for once your success rate is already comfortable.
  • A full rack of cheap Standard pieces (6/6) is cheap insurance. Equipment has no set bonus — each piece just adds its own stat lines — so filling all six slots stacks those flat points into a meaningful Skill floor under every cook.
  • Don't over-equip Skill. Once you're past the 95% mark on the recipes you actually run, additional Skill points enter the asymptotic upper band. Rotate those slot rolls into Speed or Elegance.
  • Stack Elegance for Limited / Apotheosis recipes. The rarity-roll matters most where the output ceiling is highest — Mythic food, Mythic equipment, Legendary equipment.
  • Watch the AS-from-crafting bucket. Above 5,000 AS/week from crafting, recipes still produce outputs — they just stop adding to the bounty leaderboard for the rest of the week.

See also​

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