Difficulty (medium-hard); Land requirement (small); Versatility (medium)
Having a good chef on a server can quickly turn a long and painful game into a light and fun sandbox party. Compared to the best diet without him (which includes charred meat), the mere presence of a chef with campfire salads often double the XP bonus on a new server. This boost further helps to reduce resources gathering for other specialists soon after. Food will always be needed and players tend to relax and collaborate more if they believe there will be a cheap and endless source of food. Food is also a motivational tool for roads, government buildings and other community projects.
However, this profession is a bit tricky since it has both very easy and difficult components. To explain the easy side, you need to know that any player can, in 10 to 15 minutes, get about 400 wood (clean and replant) or 750 stones alone. This amount of resources only requires 10 to 14 campfire salad and is enough to make a small/medium size room. In the same amount of time, a chef can gather enough wild crops to make about 200 to 250 campfire salads. If they buy all their ingredients from others and are lucky, well, they can fill their role in few seconds. In other words, even if you take into account the time to get wood or coal and produce few campfires, the cost price of campfire salads is less than 1.5 times the price of wood logs without any upgrade module. Briefly, chefs fulfill their role as cheap food providers easily.
The hard part comes when chefs realize they have extra time, but no other advantages in terms of logging and mining skills to help the industrial development. Contracts are not always abundant or even designed for this profession. Thus, chef often find themselves crafting basic things less efficiently (the easy but boring route), are easy prey for greedy carpenters and masons, or must convince others to collaborate in ways that are less straightforward and more risky than the basic trade approach. Moreover, a good amount of player don't get the advantages of food and stick to a charred diet for a long time (the isolated blacksmith or the house points carpenter syndrome).
Chefs and farmers share this time characteristic and are great candidate for non-specialized tasks (ex.: place roads, assist in stone gathering or tree planting) as well as government and overview tasks of the world.
In some cases, this problem is often a justification for chefs to adopt a “role-play” approach where chefs attempt to get all their furniture and house blocks by selling food. Naturally, they must increase the price of food to do so and it can rise up to a point where the server’s dynamic slowly chokes to death. For example, I seldom see food in the range of 5 to 10 times it's cost value.
Also, the responsibility to feed a large amount of people can be tricky around the time cooking is available due to the sudden demand for crops and the length of some recipes. Once things are better, chefs have little to do again while engineers and related players enjoy new projects with their industrial machines. In fact, it is quite common to see chefs abandon the game during the later stage if they have not reached a high level of collaboration with other players and feel left behind.
Chefs is the profession that requires the least land. In fact, you can even attempt to claim lands for agriculture and offer access to nearby farmers. I don't like the idea to sell your personal land papers, but if anyone can do it without too much risk, it's the chefs. Otherwise, the availability of land papers is another good reason to involve a chef in early governmental developments.
Chefs can also settle anywhere, as long as it is close to other players and not too far from farmlands. Invite other players to settle nearby and you just might start a town.
Chefs should pick campfire cooking from the start to get the most of their profession as fast as possible. After that, chefs will need a lot of meat and crops so you could do "real work" and fill one of the two sources yourself. Since you need at least 2 food producers to unlock the best diet on medium settings, I strongly encourage you to plan your next skills with other players.
The meat part is interesting as butchery goes well with the ability to make tallow from raw meat. It is a source of material for tailors as well. You may also take the farming route with gathering and farming. However, you'll have to find a source of fertilizers or pick this skill yourself : land nutrients tend to go fast and your harvest will go down. If you want to know more about this path, I made a guide for farmers.
On big maps of 2 km and more, some chefs will simply take the gathering skill and roam the world. Farmers and chef do not always time perfectly harvest and recipes and taking skills from both professions can bring you some comfort... often at the expense of opportunities for cooperation.
Cooking and baking skills comes a bit later. What experience told me with this game is that collaboration and allowing everyone to craft is best. The chef profession is only made of crafting skills: there are no skill where the chef actually do the real work of getting ressources. The best games I had is when we abandoned this middle-man-profit-leech pattern and split skills from the chef profession between 2 or 3 players. This way, every player was responsible for bringing resources and it was essential to make a fair trade system, which in turn allowed us to see "economy" differently.
There is another skill pattern that seems more common with novice players who played the game a few times and are still focusing on their individual needs. Basically, you first pick campfire cooking and work on your infrastructure to reach about 66 XP from food alone (medium settings). Some will sell overpriced food, so that other players will get free crops for them. Once this part is done, you can pick other skills and begin your "real" profession. The idea behind is to maximize your own XP gain early on at the expense of collaboration and a skill point. Some worlds in Eco are hard and this is a valid strategy to survive. However, you can't have too many chefs in the same region and you might just spook the "real" chef away and loose the chance to get 92 XP and even 130 XP from fair trade later.
You will find here few ideas about your role at each era. Of course, Eco is a simulation and a sandbox game, so I encourage you to experiment other paths.
Your role is to make food available as fast as possible and in abundance. Players with access to your products will spend less time on survival charring and more on resource gathering and crafting. This should help make wealthier and better servers. Once food is available in large amount, you have free time. Finding a way to assist other specialists (with a fair compensation of course) can set an example for new players, work you up the collaboration tech tree and is more efficient than working alone. You may also help hunters or gatherers since you need at least 2 players in the food industry if you have any hope of offering the best diet on a server with medium settings. Finally, you may focus heavily on food XP and hunt for fish and animals that yield tallow when cooked on a fire. This brings you to the general vicinity of 66 XP on medium settings. You can buy tallow and carcasses to speed this up and allow more players to reach this level too.
Speaking of butchery, campfire cooking is a mandatory skill for butchery research so don’t forget to contribute.
Stone age is pretty much of the same as you only need to keep your stocks of salad and stew at a steady level. It could be interesting to expect more of tallow. Lightning from candles was a bigger thing in real life than what you see in Eco : most players just fill braziers with coals and it's done. But all the recipes are there for candle light and you may be lucky and provide tallow to improve the house of the richest players. I totally agree here with the farming guide in Maiestashaven blog that there should be a market for oil lightning in Eco.
In all cases, don't get too comfortable, since you are expected to research cooking and build a tier 2 room big enough for an iron cast oven (one is not enough). Building such a room is a challenge. Cooking recipes are quite long and require a big supply of resources: I strongly advise you refrain from cooking without upgrade modules. Long term planning is essential to avoid food shortage. You should keep a reserve of old campfire food at all time.
The iron age is often a difficult period for a server : some players realize how long this game is and how difficult collaboration can be. Economic inequity is likely to take it's toll too. Food shortage at this time can discourage players beyond repair, so make sure you always have food for more than one day. Note the daily consumption if necessary.
By the time a mechanic finish the first assembly line, hopefully, you will have a cast iron stove and the transition to cooking will be over. Sadly, this is where many servers quickly loose citizens, most likely because some players have not found a way to let others contribute fairly and the remaining clusters of players see no hope of contributing to the late game. Therefore, expect a drastic fall in food trade.
Next, you need to plan for research and other crafting stations (ex: kitchen and stove) for the end game. However, you will see gradual drop in food demand as players use trucks, better tools and skid steer. There is a time-sensitive period where you can contribute with biodiesel for a while, using your massive tallow stockpile. But frankly at this point, your role is often to find a way to keep the game fun for you and stay engaged. Hopefully, some industrial player will take you under his wing and find you jobs that don't require skills, such as operating a skid steer. If you have a good food partner, you can challenge him/her to reach the highest recipes or just pick a skill that is directly useful for the growing industry.
Chefs can offer food to anyone interested in community work such as leveling ground for the town hall. You may create contracts and work party to that end, giving your credits (food credits) as reward. Such "waste of profits" should be seen as investment since a well-organized and nice community is likely to retain more players and lower the usual loss of new players during the first days. The more people, the more food needed.
Crops availability and changes in cooking recipes can easily cause food shortage and unavailability of menus. Farmer’s exchange are early bartering stores that both buy and sell crops, meat products and fully cooked meals at the same price. This neutral place made wonders on some servers and nothing on others, however.
Workshop with public worktables such as FabLabs allow more complex and versatile exchanges in a community while saving on space and resources. Players who use the public space bring their own resources and make contracts so that players with specific skills add their work. The interesting part of this is you can easily use the average price of calories in the chef’s store to compensate the work done. Therefore, your currency becomes common food money.
One original (or not) way to design your main store is to turn it into a restaurant. The dining place could be your general room and the kitchen upstairs. While this is not a real community project, it can be a nice touch to your town.
There are many good reasons to make a downtown area. Chefs can settle everywhere and only need a little space. Every other player needs food as well. Try to settle somewhere flat and close to desert, mountains, jungle and a good source of food. Since you don’t need much land and are not expected to expand much, invite people to settle next to you.
If you log on day 1 and there is no other chef around, what you may have is a world with many already built campfires. Quick, offer every close neighbor to start a small amount of campfire salads on their campfire. What you need for this trick is access to their campfire and a small container for 15 minutes. Link the container to the campfire and start 15 salads.
You can offer this for free or ask for crops, carcasses, stone or wood. The amount of resources is not important. What really is important is that your fellow citizens have access to better food as quick as possible. At the same time, you will get free XP without having to supply crops and fuel. Interestingly, players who choose to get back to a survival diet will see their XP go down and understand how useful a chef is.
Bad food yield low XP and stays in your stomach for a whole day. As a chef, you should minimize caloric spending and make a root campfire salad as soon as possible. If you play this well, you’ll stay above 45 XP all the time and quickly get to lvl3 and your next star.
Eco is a cooperative game and you have little chance to provide the best food on medium settings without at least one good partner with complementary skills (farmer or butcher). Be open to this opportunity by not taking every skill and aim for fair prices.
Offer to bring food to another player (ex.: logging expert) and spend time picking up logs and rocks in exchange for half the resources you gather together. You can also work on transport and support tasks while the expert focus on his main skill.
You can make a quick visit to the wet land biome and dig about 10 blocks down to find coal. There might be coal on the surface too. One visit can fill 4 campfire for several hours of cooking each and you won’t need to cut extra wood again.
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