How to Unlock My Time at Portia Cooking Set Quickly

In My Time at Portia, I spent a lot of time carrying out manual labor. These actions result in huge losses in stamina, especially during the early game. Buying food from shops is costly, but wouldn’t it be better if you could cook your own recipes? This is where the My Time at Portia Cooking Set comes into play. It enables you to cook recipes that you have unlocked. You can get more recipes from Django as well as by completing quests. But how do you unlock the set, and how quickly can you get it?

The short answer is that you need to provide the Research Center with five data discs to unlock the cooking set. Once they have completed their research, you are awarded one of four diagrams. If it isn’t the cooking set, try again, and the chance will increase every time until you’ve unlocked all four.

Unlocking The Cooking Set 

I’m going to assume that you are just starting the game. On Day 3, you unlock the mine and spend time here digging up artefacts (these are yellow spheres when viewing the relic visor). You should receive data discs for your efforts. Spend all your stamina that day getting relics and more data discs. The next day (or the same day if you spent all your energy before 18:00), go to the Research Center and give five data discs to Petra. She will then ask you if you want to speed up the process. If you have the required discs, you can reduce the turnaround to one day.

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The cooking set is one of four diagrams that you can get for supplying five discs to Petra. Two days later, you should receive a diagram in your mailbox. If it isn’t the cooking set, go back to the Research Center and supply Petra with five more data discs. If you are really unlucky, it could take up to three more tries before you are awarded the cooking set.

Icon	Diagram	Data Discs	Comments
	Civil Furnace	5	Needed to smelt the required ores for the cooking set.
	Cooking Set	5
	Blender	5
	Fish Display	5

Building a Cooking Set

The cooking set requires only three materials: six Stone Bricks, one Iron pan, and three marble planks. Stone bricks can be made using any furnace and eight stones.

For a beginner’s guide to My Time at Portia check out this guide

The iron pan requires a level 2 worktable, five iron bars, and five rubber fruits. Iron bars can be smelted using a Civil furnace and three iron ores, which can be mined from Abandoned Ruins #2. Rubber fruits can be obtained by kicking trees and are quite common.

The Marble planks can be made using three marbles and a civil cutter. Marble can be obtained by mining stones in the fields, but it cannot be obtained by picking up rocks.

Cooking Set Usage

Unlike other machines, rather than selecting an end result and automatically consuming the required materials, the player must equip the materials first and drop them into the cooking set. Very similar to the most recent Legend of Zelda titles. Recipes can be learned either by successfully cooking the dish, or by purchasing recipes from Django.

My Time at Portia Cooking Set

Now that you have unlocked and built a cooking set, you can create various dishes. Which can be used to buff the player in various ways. Or can be gifted to other characters to improve their relationship with the player. And if you are tight on Gols you can always sell the finished dishes for profit. Unlike most of the other starter machines, it is unfortunate that the cooking set isn’t awarded in an early-game quest. Or that it was made clear that using specific amounts of data discs limits you to a group of diagrams.