How to Farm and 100% Master Chef
Optimal Excursion Time
On average, you get more ingredients with 20 minute excursions. However this isn't realistic for most people. 150 minutes lines up perfectly with the LP regeneration. So if you are using LP the moment it tops off, send out the characters and then use your LP. However, it's more important to pick the time that works best with your schedule.
RNG is a big factor since most locations will have 3+ ingredients and you need to gather from multiple locations for one dish. It's better to do longer excursions on the areas with multiple items and do the shorter excursions on the featured ingredient. When I have to cook a lot of dishes or start charcoaling, this is when I would do the 20 minute excursions cause I'll likely still be cooking by the time the group returns.
Starting to Cook
It is best to start cooking as soon as possible using mainly Bronze and some Silver ingredients if you have an excess. There could be many recipes that need a lot of ingredients from an area you unlock later. If you wanted one of the chef cards, I recommend that you try to purchase the SR key as soon as possible. By sending out the featured chef cards, you can get additional ingredients but this is a small bonus. Only the two featured chef cards have this bonus. You can still complete the event without owning one of the featured chef cards as long as you don't miss too many excursions. The chef cards from the previous master chef events do not have a bonus.
Earning Tokens
Each ingredient quality can be assigned a value. At 100% skill, you can make a 3* dish as long as the sum of the ingredient quality is equal to or greater than the minimum quality score for that recipe.
Ingredient Quality Points
Gold - 3
Silver - 2
Bronze - 1
Minimum Quality Score at 100% to guarantee a 3* dish
2 Ingredient Recipe - 4 points
3 ingredient Recipe - 5 points
4 ingredient Recipe - 7 points
5 ingredient Recipe - 9 points
For example, you can make a 3* dish with 5 ingredients using 3 bronze and 2 gold (9 points).
Credits to @_nono0nono for compiling this information.
Earning Money
Master Chef is the one of the best events to earn money and it only costs you time. You earn more per ingredient in a dish but the most optimal is the 2 ingredient dish. You will end up with a lot of extra ingredients if you are only gathering from two areas. But you can manually select the any two of the extra ingredients to create a failed dish/charcoal. Failed dishes will earn the same amount of thaumarks as successful ones.
For the completionists, this is the most effective way to 100% and 3 star any dish. This is important if you care that everything is complete for your album.
Reruns
All MCs should be reruns from now on for both servers.
You can 3* recipes quicker during reruns following the table below. The reruns create a new entry in your album so you will have to 3* the recipes again.
Credits to Reddu (vilspotato @ Discord)
For posterity, the table below was the strategy for the initial run of a MC event.
Credits to Reddu (vilspotato @ Discord)
~ 👑
