Starter guide to Palia cooking parties

Palia cooking parties

If you play Palia and find this post useful, please do show your thanks by voting on my plot (ackadia). Ta.

Full disclosure: I’ve not held a big event – yet – but we do have regular smaller ones every week, sometimes a few times a week. One person in our community was sharing the amounts she was making – up to 750,000g A DAY – and I thought, “Okayyyy, tell me more.”

I’m too introverted to deal with 25 randoms, but at the same time, that’s a lot of gold and there’s an achievement in the game that I considered impossible: to make 100,000,000g. Still near impossible, but it’s in sight, perhaps, with a really REALLY powerful telescope.

Being lazy, and also never having hosted for the great unwashed, I asked Goggle and settled on a /reddit post by Really Good Elle on How to Make Money with Cooking Parties (a guide).

I’d already worked out most of the things she suggested and have no interested in the others (but you may) so her post in worth a read.

I did the maths (below) and some of the popular choices – like bean burgers – are flawed due to high ingredient costs. I concur that fish is best option and cake is OK too.

Elle makes suggestion on how to find and join these, but I’m more interested in impromptu meets, so I’ll let you read her original post, if navigating apps and discord groups is your thing :/

She mentioned “overprep” which is were, for example, you accidently make the meal extra spicy. There is no penalty for this so it can be used (or exploited, perhaps) by having 20 people boiling rice to throw away or, in the case of celebration cake, mixing sweet leaf. As you can see from my layout (below), I added surplus mixing tables just for this.

For crops for attendees to focus on, her suggestions include *rice (sashimi and sushi), garlic (fish stew) and *corn (fish taco). I’d add sweet leaf to that. For the one’s I’d run, just look at the tables and get a feel and you won’t go far wrong.

On the question of “How long does a cooking party last?” I’ve heard quotes of ‘hours’ and Elle suggests an “ideal” of 100 cooks per hour. Am I even reading that right!? That would be way too manic for me, that’s like one every 36 seconds. Hell no! NO!

One I didn’t know – but should have – was this tip below:

One I think she missed thats bear mentioning is that if you don’t participate, you don’t get. (e.g. Being AFK in a party gets you nothing).

Another is that of timing. From our testing, there appears to be a time window to act before the option is closed. If I have the right of this, starting the first rice boiling, or first garlic being chopped, acts as a trigger. Everyone doing that overprep act needs to start at the the same time, in that window, or be frozen out of the option as it’s removed.

Finally – and I think S6 are wrong in this – you can use regular ingredients is a * recipe, but (daft, I think), you can’t use star quality ingredients if you start a regular meal.

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links: finding and hosting cooking parties

Links like this normally go at the end of a post, but if you are included to just in, sooner is better for you, I guess.

: Palia Party app

: Palia party app: Cooking Party Guide, by Seline Moon

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Cooking parties and Profit and Loss projections

If this was a proper business plan you’d have to factor in all the overheads before getting anywhere near ingredients. In many ways you still have some of these overheads – for instance time spent on ranch animals, crops, fishing – but we can let that slide for now.

Most of the quick fish dishes are perceived as all profit as the ingredients can all be had cheap (or free), but are they? Let’s consider my favourite, Fish Stew, which can be cooked at regular or * without worrying about the the quality of the adds.

I covered this in the main page but the games ‘go to’ default of “any fish” can be misleading. For meat-based dishes, all the meat are around 15g, so negligible, but “any fish”? That runs all the way from gillyfin (30g) to Maws (2,980g)

Epic fish are worth 1,045 to 1,220 (1,145 average), and 50% more as *

Rare fish are worth 315 to 450g (394g average)

It makes a difference as the value of the recipe is the cumulative value of the ingredients.

 

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Fish Stew Party

Let’s consider a Fish Stew party:

We can put the garlic and spice at 92g.
Arguably, they are ‘free’ as they can be gathered, but they still have a sell value, and realistically, most people will buy one or both from Zeki because of the time sink needed to gather these in quantity

Example using mutated angler (360g)
The resulting fish stew (x3) is worth 456g (or *684g)

As can be in the spreadsheet seen below, it’s still a profit even solo, but the more people you add the more the cost is shared.

My thinking for this particular recipe is all the epic fish I hoarded while doing various other challenges, like catching all the *fish and helping others. Most parties seem focused on * recipes for maximum profic, plus established players get rid of all their regular crops. As this primarily uses garlic – from Zekis, it’s a great solution.

For an epic fish the profits would be trebled, then compounded by repeat cycles.
So, 4 people fetch 10 epic each, that’s 50,000g each (75,000g if all *) + any party bonuses

In theory!
The model – and parties – assume fairness and social mores. If its agreed that everyone brings one rare fish, it works, but if some people are leeching – joining a leaving when it’s their turn to offer up a rare fish – it falls over.

I’m cynical, but here’s an extreme example. You organise a party, everyone agrees to supply 10 Maws. You start and cook the first ten (of 250). 24 people say, “K’ thanks, bye.” Social contact torn up.

You have to go in (sadly) expecting stuff like this, plan for it, and be able to shrug it off if the party goes to hell.

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Bean burger party

The cooking party favourite – bean burgers – what about that?

A *bean burger sells for 1,020g. Nice, eh!

But if you add up the raw value of gatherable items (e.g crops, ranch, gathering), along with essentials, the actual cost to make it is around 1,072g (600g of which is vinegar).
52g loss is not so appealing – and that assumes you make a * burger!

If you were buying all the ingredients from Zeki and the Daiya farm, the materials cost jumps to 1,646g.

Party cooking does make it more palatable though: with a proper party of 4 the average cost each drops to 268g (412g / 752g profit)

By the time you have 25 in the party, in theory, it drops to just 43g each, but that implies playing musical chairs every batch. If your sole contribution is a dash of milk (15g-30g) you are quids in, but if you are splashing out for one or more vinegar at 200g each, well, still a profit, but not so sweet.

Something to consider in your planning, eh.

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Celebration cake

In contrast to the exorbitant bean burger, the *celebration cake only cost around 545g and, solo, sells for 475g (a small loss) or 713g (a mild profit).

Party of 4, that’s down to 136g each, 54g with 10, 22g with 25 people. Give or take.

The wiki has a good guide to having a celebration cake cooking party.

Fitting them all in…

Of course, you need to cater for any recipe and have stations for every eventuality, so I came up with the layout below, comprising 6 ovens, 9 stove, 21 mixing stations and 25 preparation stations. If I need more, I can easily expand sideways.

Salute to Nenya for the idea of a raised head chef station.

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Best cooking party recipes, arguably

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New players guide to buying and gathering supplies

You should be using seed collectors are early as possibly to avoid outrageous seed profits eating into your time and profits. The recipe for crafting this can be purchased from Badruu once you reach level 5 in gardening.

Zeki’s store:

Badruu’s open-air stand on the Daiya farm:

Other:

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