If you’re a big Pokemon fan, you might’ve tried out the company’s free-to-play game Pokemon Quest on the Nintendo Switch. This adorable game is loads of fun but requires you to master its strange catching system. We’ve cooked you up a complete guide to Pokemon Quest recipes so you can have the ultimate Quest team in no time.
Catching Pokemon in Pokémon Quest
In Pokemon Quest, you won’t be catching pokemon with pokeballs. In fact, you don’t even really ‘catch’ pokemon in this Minecraft-styled side game. Instead, you cook food in cooking pots and pokemon show up at your camp.
Making it through the tutorial of the game will teach you how to make your first recipe but, in case you’re like us and enjoy mashing the ‘a’ button through cutscenes, we’ll give you a quick explanation.
Your base camp is the area of the game where you can set up decorations, watch your befriended pokemon run around, and gear up for new expeditions. In the base camp, you’ll find a cooking pot that you can use to whip up some delicious food and attract new pokemon.
Doing this requires you to put a number of ingredients (depending on the pot’s quality) into the pot. Then, you hit the start cooking button and wait for your recipe to finish. This will either take a number of expeditions, shown above the pot when looking at your base camp, or some PM tickets, a resource that’s better spent elsewhere in-game.
Once you’ve finished some expeditions, you’ll see that your food is done cooking, at which point a few pokemon will show up at the base for you to immediately befriend.
With the basics out of the way, there are a few things you need to know. Each of the cooking pots can attract different levels of pokemon and each recipe attracts different types of pokemon. Let’s start by looking at the cooking pots.
Cooking Pots in Pokemon Quest
A cooking pot is your most important resource in Pokemon Quest since the only way you’ll catch new pokemon is by using them effectively. Each pot has five slots for you to place different ingredients but each pot works slightly differently.
You’ll start off with the Normal Pot, which uses three of each ingredient you place in a slot. In other words, to finish a recipe you’ll need 15 items altogether, three of each type required by the recipe.
As you progress through the game, you’ll get a total of four different types of pots. You’ll receive the normal pot during the tutorial, the bronze pot when you clear Backforth Brook, the silver pot when you clear Pincushion Plain, and the gold pot when you clear Chamber of Legends.
The different cooking pots require different amounts of ingredients, provide different IV yields and stat bonuses, and attract different levels of pokemon, as shown below.
Number of Ingredients
This is the number of ingredients required for each slot, so technically you can multiply this by five for the total amount of ingredients required.
Normal Pot – 3
Bronze Pot – 10
Silver Pot – 15
Gold Pot – 20
Maximum IV Yields
A pokemon’s total IVs can be anywhere from 0 to the number listed. Better pots don’t necessarily mean a higher IV total, they just mean you can have a higher IV total.
Normal Pot – 10
Bronze Pot – 50
Silver Pot – 100
Gold Pot – 100
Stat Bonuses
Pokemon receive better bonuses to their stats depending on which pot you use to attract them.
Normal Pot – 0
Bronze Pot – 50
Silver Pot – 100
Gold Pot – 300
Pokemon Level
Your cooking pots will also help you attract different level ranges of pokemon.
Normal Pot – 1-15
Bronze Pot – 16-30
Silver Pot – 31-70
Gold Pot – 71-100
Expeditions Until Complete
Lastly, the quality of your cooking pot changes the number of expeditions needed to complete a recipe. The quality of your recipe is also factored into this. We’ll explain recipe qualities in just a bit, but for now, we’re listing the number of expeditions in the format of Standard/Good/Very Good/Special.
Normal Pot – 2/4/5/6
Bronze Pot – 2/4/5/6
Silver Pot – 3/5/6/7
Gold Pot – 4/6/7/8
Pokemon Quest Recipe Guide
Cooking recipes require you to place five types of ingredients in the cooking pot of your choice. As we discussed above, the quantity is determined by the pot you’re using. The types of ingredients, however, are determined by the recipe type you’re trying to achieve.
There are ten total ingredients in the game, which we’ve listed below:
Tiny Mushroom
Big Root
Bluk Berry
Icy Rock
Apricorn
Honey
Fossil
Balm Mushroom
Rainbow Matter
Mystical Shell
Each ingredient has a different set of qualities, which you’ll need to know in order to craft recipes. Below, we list each ingredient’s different qualities.
Tiny Mushroom
Soft
Small
Mushroom
Red
Big Root
Soft
Precious
Plant
Red
Bluk Berry
Soft
Small
Sweet
Blue
Icy Rock
Hard
Precious
Mineral
Blue
Apricorn
Hard
Small
Plant
Yellow
Honey
Soft
Precious
Sweet
Yellow
Fossil
Hard
Small
Mineral
Gray
Balm Mushroom
Soft
Precious
Mushroom
Gray
Rainbow Matter
Very Precious
Substitutes other ingredients
Mystical Shell
Special Ingredient
Mystical
When a recipe calls for a whole lot of red you’ll need to use red ingredients, when it calls for minerals and soft things you’ll have to mix those types of ingredients, and so on.
As we alluded to earlier, your recipe can be standard, good, very good, or special. This is determined by the overall point total of your dish. Small ingredients provide one point, precious ingredients provide two points, very precious ingredients provide three points, and special ingredients provide two points.
It’s a lot of information to absorb for a simple, cutesy pokemon game, but don’t worry, we’re about to break down the different recipes you can make one by one.
Pokemon Quest Recipes
Below, we’ve compiled the easiest way to make every single Pokemon Quest Recipe receive any rarity and type of pokemon you desire. The different quest recipe ingredients are listed with the number of times you’ll add them to the dish, not the overall quantity since that is determined by your cooking pot.
Each type of food has the ingredients that are required listed at the top. This tells you how to form a recipe by outlining which ingredient qualities are required. If the total number there is over five that just means you’ll have to overlap qualities in a single ingredient (like using a soft, blue ingredient when making a Mouth Watering Dip a la cube).
Then, we have an example of each type of recipe (standard, good, very good, and special) which attracts different rarities of pokemon within the recipes category.
You can always craft your own unique recipes, but the ones we have listed are generally the easiest to obtain for each type.
Mulligan Stew a la Cube
Ingredients Required: Any 5 (that don’t match another recipe)
Very Good Recipe: 3x Fossil, 1x Rainbow Matter, 1x Mystical Shell
Special Recipe: 2x Big Root, 1x Rainbow Matter, 1x Mystical Shell
Final Thoughts
As far as side games go in the Pokemon series, Pokemon Quest is definitely one of the stranger ones. What, with cube pokemon running all over the place, it’s sure to be an experience unlike any other.
Now, armed with a working knowledge of how cooking works and every Pokemon Quest recipe you could ever desire, it’ll not only be a fun time, it’ll be a breeze. With befriending new pokemon out of the way, all you have to worry about is getting out there and conquering as many expeditions as you can!
Dane started off gaming at the tender age of 3 with the first Atari console. His favorite video game genres are turn-based RPGs (can I get a shout out for Tactics Ogre?) and fighting games. Read more...
