As far as famous cooking games go, Cooking Diary is in the top tier of the list. This free-to-play Time Management game from MyTona was only launched in 2018, but has seen the type of success that most mobile games can only dream of. Cooking Diary has already been downloaded 10 million times worldwide and won multiple players-voted awards.
Cooking Diary thrives on its lively concept, addicting gameplay, and rich features. This popular game takes its players on a culinary tour of international cuisines and exotic tastes. Given its numerous features, Cooking Diary might be simple to play, but not so easy to master. This Cooking Diary strategy guide contains all the must-know tips that are best to keep in mind if you want to master this cooking extravaganza!
7 Must-Know Cooking Diary Tips and Strategies
1. Prepare dishes in advance
One quality that distinguishes an expert player from a beginner is the ability to plan ahead. If you are familiar with other popular cooking games such as Cooking Craze or Diner Dash Adventures, then you can employ a similar strategy to prepare dishes in advance here. Considering the restaurant layout and the structure of the recipes, this strategy might be even more important in Cooking Diary.
Multiple recipes in Cooking Diary require several steps to complete and each step takes time. Being able to think ahead and prepare these multiple-steps dishes in advance will save you significant time when customers actually order them. This minimizes hearts loss and maximizes money that you will then earn from these customers. My advice is to prepare a wide variety of dishes if possible just to cover all bases and place them on the standby trays until you receive the matching customer order.
2. Upgrade appliances whenever you can
There are three categories of upgrades in Cooking Diary; kitchen, interior, and decor. These upgrades are specific to each restaurant and cannot be carried over to other restaurants. Upgrading these appliances allows you to increase the amount of money you earn on each level, speed up your cooking process, or increase your customer’s patience and tips. It is important for you to identify your current bottleneck when you play each level and choose your next upgrade wisely to address that obstacle.
In Cooking Diary, upgrades are not delivered instantly. Instead, some upgrades take time to be delivered after you hit the purchase button. Of course, you can watch free advertisement videos or spend your precious rubies to speed up this delivery time. Thus, it’s often a good idea to time your upgrades, perhaps at the end of your gaming session, so the next time you enter the game, the upgrades are already delivered, ready to be used.
3. Prioritize one-step dishes
As previously mentioned, some dishes in Cooking Diary require multiple steps to complete. However, there are also plenty of dishes that require only one-step. In other words, you can simply pick up the item and serve to your customer. These one-step dishes often come in the form of snacks and they are in extremely high demand from the customers.
The reason to prioritize these types of dishes is not only because they are easy to serve, but also because this is an easy task for you to complete while waiting for those multiple-steps order to complete. The next time you see customers asking for these dishes, go ahead and save them immediately.
4. Be an active guild member
The social features in Cooking Diary are quite extensive. Like in most free-to-play casual games, you can add friends, visit them, and exchange gifts. The special thing about this game is that its guild system is quite sophisticated and well-thoughtout.
With guilds, you can either join an existing guild or create a new one. Once you are in a guild, you can chat with fellow guild members and participate in group events together. These events are regularly occurring and the event quests change from event to event. You can work with your guild to achieve more collective event quest points and advance to the next league. Even if you don’t end up upgrading your guild league, your guild will still receive generous rewards by the end of the event.
Outside of events, you can also ask your guild members for help. If your guild members choose to help, they come in the form of kitchen assistants and let you earn 10% more coins on the level you choose to use them. In turn, you can also help other guild members and receive 10 coins as reward.
5. Perform combos
There is no reason not to perform this next strategy as its benefits greatly outweigh the hassle of perfuming it – that is to create combos. Combos in Cooking Diary are super easy to perform, as they basically only require you to serve multiple items back to back – one item counts as one step in the combo. Achieving five steps or serve five items back to back quickly will grant you a combo coin bonus, which is particularly helpful in harder levels where coin goals can be fairly challenging.
Moreover, combos are also often an event quest. Performing combos doesn’t take much time and effort and has great benefits, so why not make it a habit so that you can advance through the game with ease!
6. Keep an eye out for special customers
Some customers require your special attention as they behave differently from a regular customer. There are different types of special customers in Cooking Diary and they are noticeable by their yellow order speech bubble. For example, forgetful customer only remembers their order for a brief few seconds before it disappears (and slowly pops back up dish by dish). A good strategy would be to remember their order the second they come into the restaurant and serve them first, no need to wait for their order to reappear as that would mean wasting your time and the customer’s patience.
Another type of special customer is indecisive customer. These customers take a relatively long time to decide what to order. In the case of this, remember the first strategy of preparing common dishes in advance, and serve other customers first while they are still deciding.
7. Spend rubies wisely
The two main currencies in Cooking Diary are coins and rubies. Coins are easy to come by, but rubies are more difficult. Rubies can be used to purchase a wide variety of different things from upgrades to power-ups. Therefore, they are very valuable.
There are multiple ways to earn free rubies such as completing events, spinning the daily wheel of fortune, earning smile points, and connecting with friends. If you are still in need of more rubies, you can purchase them in the store. I don’t generally recommend purchasing full-priced rubies or coins because there are almost always limited-time offers for you to purchase rubies and other in-game items at crazy cheap prices. Remember to look out for these deals if you want to purchase some rubis and accelerate your progress in the game.
Download and play Cooking Diary for free on iOS, Android, Microsoft and Amazon. For more mobile games tips and tricks, click here.
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