Cooking and Potions in Albion Online: What to Make and How to Profit

You cook food at a Cook and brew potions at an Alchemist's Lab, after unlocking the recipes on the Destiny Board through Chef and Alchemist. Craft food in Caerleon and potions in Brecilien: each city has a 15% bonus for its category, which raises your resource return rate from 15.3% to 24.8% without Focus, and from 43.5% to 47.9% with it.

Food and potions sell every day because players use them up, but the margins are thin. Most of the profit comes from Focus and from ingredients you grow yourself, so check a recipe in a calculator before you craft a batch.

Unlocking recipes

Cooking and alchemy share one branch of the Destiny Board:

1. Trainee Farmer unlocks Bean Salad, Shallowshore Squid Salad and the Minor Healing and Minor Energy Potions.
2. Sous Chef unlocks the tier 3 food and potions. You level it by crafting tier 1 and 2 food and potions.
3. Chef (food) and Alchemist (potions) unlock the higher tiers as they level: tier 4 at level 1, tier 5 at level 10, tier 6 at level 30, tier 7 at level 60 and tier 8 at level 100.
4. Below them, every family has its own specialization: Soup, Salad, Pie, Omelette, Stew, Sandwich and Roast Chef for food, Ingredient Chef for flour, butter and bread, Butcher for meat, one Brewer per potion (Heal Brewer, Poison Brewer and so on) and Bootlegger for the alcohols. Specializations lower the Focus cost of their recipes; the Focus cost guide explains by how much.

Crafting gives fame to Chef or Alchemist and to the recipe's specialization. Food and potions can also be studied: the Study Calculator ranks the items that level a node for the least silver per fame, and the Destiny Calculator shows the fame every level needs.

Where to cook and brew

The station must be at least the tier of the recipe: a tier 8 dish such as Beef Stew needs an Elder's Cook. You can use the stations in the cities for a usage fee, or place your own on your island.

Food list

Every dish lasts 30 minutes, except salads, which last 2 minutes. You have one food buff at a time: eating another dish replaces it. The values are for the .0 dish of each tier.

Values from the game's item and spell data.

In short: stews for damage, sandwiches for more health, omelettes for faster casts and cooldowns, pies for carrying and gathering more, salads right before a batch of crafts, and soups to heal up between fights.

Fish, Avalonian and special dishes

• Fish dishes (Greenriver Eel Stew, Stonestream Lurcher Sandwich and the rest) are made one at a time from one rare fish and a few ingredients. They usually give a weaker version of the family's buff plus a second effect: eel stews add Cooldown Rate, lurcher sandwiches add Healing Received, crab omelettes lower Energy Costs, snapper roasts add Max Health, coldeye pies add Crowd Control Resistance and clam soups add Energy Regeneration. Squid, octopus and kraken salads give a stronger crafting buff than the normal salads.
• Avalonian dishes (Avalonian Goat Stew, Avalonian Beef Sandwich and others) need Avalonian Energy, which drops from Avalonian enemies. The main buff is weaker than the normal dish, but stews add Health Regeneration outside combat, sandwiches add Crowd Control duration and omelettes add Defense.
• Leyfin omelettes use fish from the Ancient Lands and add Healing Cast.
• Grilled Fish (Cooldown Rate) and Seaweed Salad (+10% Fishing Speed) are tier 1 snacks made from your catch.
• Drake Egg Biscuits give +5% combat and gathering fame for 25 hours and do not replace your combat food buff.

Enchanted food: Fish Sauce

Adding Fish Sauce to a recipe makes an enchanted dish: Basic Fish Sauce for .1, Fancy for .2 and Special for .3. A craft of 10 Goat Stew takes 10 sauce, Mutton Stew 30 and Beef Stew 90. You make the sauce at the Cook from Chopped Fish and Seaweed (15, 45 or 135 Chopped Fish with 1, 3 or 9 Seaweed), and the Chopped Fish at the Butcher from any fish you catch.

Each enchantment level moves the buff one step up, so a .2 dish gives the same buff as the .0 dish two tiers higher:

The same holds for every family. Before you buy Beef Stew, check the price of Mutton Stew .2: it gives the same +13.5% damage and weighs 3.4 kg instead of 8.17 kg.

Potion list

Most potions come in three tiers, Minor, normal and Major.

The extra ingredients come in three grades that match the potion tiers, such as Rugged, Fine and Excellent Shadow Claws. All but Dragon Blood drop from creatures you hunt with Tracking; Dragon Blood comes from the Ancient Lands. A craft makes 5 potions, or 10 for the potions with an extra ingredient.

Enchanted potions work like food. Add Arcane Extract (Basic for .1, Refined for .2, Pure for .3), which you make at the Alchemist's Lab from 1, 3 or 9 Rare Animal Remains, another Tracking drop. Each level is one step stronger, so a Healing Potion .2 has the effect of a Major Healing Potion.

Where to craft: Caerleon for food, Brecilien for potions

Every royal city gives an 18% production bonus to all crafting. Caerleon adds 15% for food and Brecilien adds 15% for potions:

Flour, butter, bread and the three alcohols count as food in the game data, so Caerleon's bonus applies to them too, even to the alcohols you brew at the Alchemist's Lab.

Food and potions can also be the Daily Production Bonus (+10% or +20%), which adds to the city bonus. The party hat icon in the top bar of albionfreemarket.com shows today's bonus, and the Resource Return Rate Calculator ranks every place you can craft an item, with or without Focus and the daily bonus.

Ingredients

• Crops (Carrots, Beans, Sheaf of Wheat, Turnips, Cabbage, Potatoes, Bundle of Corn, Pumpkin) go into food. Herbs (Arcane Agaric up to Ghoul Yarrow) go into potions and some fish dishes.
• Animals give milk, eggs and, at the Butcher, meat. The farming guide covers growing and breeding.
• Fish and Seaweed come from fishing; rare fish go into fish dishes, the rest into Chopped Fish for Fish Sauce.

Soups are the simplest way to turn a harvest into food: Carrot Soup takes only Carrots, Wheat Soup only Sheaf of Wheat and Cabbage Soup only Cabbage. The Farming and Breeding Calculator compares selling your harvest or animals with crafting them once at the Mill, Butcher, Cook or Alchemist's Lab, and the Island guide covers the island itself.

How to make a profit

The Simple Crafting Calculator above shows a typical case. On the Americas server on 3 November 2026, 100 Beef Stew crafted in Caerleon with Premium, buying every ingredient at sell orders and selling at the 14-day average price:

Prices change every day, so run your own numbers. A few rules hold most of the time:

1. Use Focus. The returned ingredients are where the profit is. Compare the silver per Focus with your other uses of Focus; the Focus guide explains how.
2. Craft in the bonus city. Without Focus you get back 24.8% of your ingredients instead of 15.3%, so the same batch uses about 11% fewer.
3. Grow or buy cheap ingredients. Ingredients you farm cost you seeds, food for the animals and time, not market prices. Buy orders instead of sell orders also lower your costs.
4. Count the station fee. It depends on Item Value, not price: 100 Beef Stew use 6,480 nutrition, which costs 19,440 silver at a rate of 300 per 100 nutrition. Tier 1 and 2 recipes pay no fee. The station fee guide has the formula.
5. Check enchanted versions. A .2 dish or potion competes with the next tier up, and its price can be higher or lower.

Profitable Crafts ranks the food and potion recipes that make silver on your server and shows the Extra Profit / Focus of each craft (its results are a Masterpiece feature). The Crafting Calculator plans whole batches with the ingredients you craft yourself, such as Bread, butter and Fish Sauce.

Food for your own stations

Crafting stations run on nutrition, and every craft uses Item Value × 0.1125 nutrition per item. If you own a station on your island or for your guild, you fill it with food. Each food item has a nutrition value: Beef Stew 817, Cabbage Soup 756, Goose Pie 266, and raw crops, milk and eggs 48 each. Potions have none. So crafting 100 Beef Stew uses about eight Beef Stews' worth of nutrition.

Each station type also has a favorite dish that counts for more:

Simple Crafting Calculator · Profitable Crafts · Resource Return Rate Calculator · Farming and Breeding Calculator · Study Calculator