Olvia Academy - Cooking

Introduction

Olvia Academy is a great new player experience helping to learn the Life Skills of Black Desert!

• For completing each Life Skill course you'll gain some decent starting gear and 1000 Cron Stones 
• There's also an Olvia Academy Pass that gives bonus Life Skill Exp for the course you work on
• Cooking is an AFK friendly Life Skill, you can even leave your character cooking overnight 
• The Life Skill courses let you grab a lot of Exp and levels for the Life Skill you're interested in as well!

 

Starting the Cooking Course

If you haven't tried any of the Olvia Academy courses yet, it's really easy to get started. You'll need to have graduated from the Season Server and be at least Level 60 to join the academy's classes. 

 

You'll get rewards just for signing up in the form of an Academy Outfit and some Olvia Academy coins which have some nice rewards as well, for more information on how the Olvia Academy works, you can check out our guide here: 

Now on to Cooking, the Olvia Academy does a great job of introducing the Life Skill and how it functions, but if you're new to Black Desert or its Life Skill systems they might feel a little unfamiliar.

 

Starting the Cooking course is easy, just visit NPC Emma Bartali at the front desk of the academy, or even easier, just click the green Olvia Academy UI in the top right of the screen, you can then auto navigate to the instructor!

 

 

Completing the Cooking Course 

The Cooking course starts out pretty fast, you can get through a few of the objectives just by talking. It's not as information heavy as some of the other courses. You'll meet the instructor NPC Fredelles Herba for the basics. 

 

You can chat to him but compared to the other courses there isn't a great deal that he'll go over as optional content. Learning how to get materials for yourself is a decent read if you're new. 

 

 

After speaking to Fredelles, you can say "I understand everything!" to continue, he'll then give you some more prompts that you can either read or spam through with R if you're only interested in getting your Crons and Olvia coins. 

 

Once you've gotten through enough of the talking, which doesn't take long at all, Fredelles will give ask you about feeding your workers. 

 

 

Just select Grain-brewed Beer. This is what we'll learn to cook first. Fredelles will ask you to go and fetch some materials from Zaaira to craft the beer with, she's over in the main Academy building near Emma Bartali. 

 

Here's her place on the mini-map if you're still getting used to the Academy (sometimes the game won't auto-path you to her since its a secondary quest objective) luckily she's not far away at all, so you should be able to find her easily. 

 

 

Once you've got the materials you can head back to Fredelles and now we'll start actually Cooking. Before we do that, you'll want to open your Olvia Academy UI and go to the Academy Pass and claim all of the Cooking exp from there. 

 

You can then goto the Life Skill rewards section of the Olvia Academy UI in the bottom left corner, look for Cooking and accept the free TRI Roroju Cook's Clothes which will greatly increase your Cooking speed for the next section. 

 

 
To help speed things up a little more you can also grab a Life Spirit Stone from the Central Marketplace, they're cheap and provide a decent bonus to Cooking Speed. You can activate it by equipping it in your inventory. 

 

Once it's equipped you can click the check box in your inventory gear panel to auto use the Alchemy Stone, or just Hit U when you begin Cooking and turn on the auto use in your inventory once you begin. 

 

 

The recipe Fredelles gives you might trip you up at first, since the ingredients they give you are correct multiples of this recipe. What you'll need to do is head over to the Shared Cooking equipment, it's just in the room behind Fredelles. 

 

Here you can interact with the equipment by pressing R, you'll then access the Cooking UI. If you're not sure what to look for since its the first time you're trying Cooking, here's what you're looking for, but the game will lead you there.

 

 

Make sure to equip your TRI Cooking clothes mentioned earlier before you start. Then, when you're ready to cook just interact with the Cooking Untensil to bring up the recipe / cooking UI. 

 

You'll want to put in the Base Cost of the ingredients, not the multiplied amount as if you were trying to cook with all of the ingredients Zaaira gave you. You only put in enough items for one recipe, then click batch cooking like below:

 

This will take a little bit of time but with your Cooking Life Skill Clothes and the Alchemy Stone running it shouldn't be too bad really, definitely not as AFK as the Farming course but you'll need to give it some time. 

 

When you're done, head back to Fredelles and he'll introduce you to Imperial Cuisine or Imperial Cooking, where you'll cook dishes then package them up to be delivered to a trading NPC to sell them for Silver. 

 

 

You can Package the Beer you cooked just now by using Imperial Cuisine (L), this time you don't need to be so accurate with the numbers of the Beer, you can just throw them in and it'll consume them batch by batch. 

 

It won't take long at all for you to have the 5 packages that you need to complete the quest. After that, Fredelles will give you the auto-navigation to the nearest Imperial Cooking Trading NPC which is in Olvia.

 

 

After this, you'll go back to the Cooking instructor, which you can auto-navigate back to. Next up we'll be cooking Fish Fillet Salad, accept the quest then go back to the main building and talk to Zaaira for the ingredients.

 

Once you're done, head back to the Cooking Station, remember to pop your Life Alchemy Stone and equip your Cooking clothing if you've taken them off. Here's the recipe for Fish Fillet Salad. 

Do not throw away the finished cooked meals for the next few courses as they're used later!

 

 

The recipe is 1x Dried Mudskipper, 3x Onions, 2x Cheese and 2x Dressing. You'll need to cook another batch of 300, it doesn't take as long as you'd expect if you have the Fredelles Cheer buff, which you should have from the course.

 

The buff just reduces cooking time by 5 seconds, so paired with your Alch stone and clothes, you'll be done pretty fast. You get the quest from working through the course, so you don't have to do anything special to get it. 

 

 

The last few courses repeat the same process. For the next meal, Meat Pasta, you'll need 5x Pork, 4x Wheat Dough, 2x Garlic, 3x Pepper which you grab from Zaaira, the following quests will all make you visit Zaaira. 

 

 

Next up is Milk Tea, the recipe is 2x Tea With Fine Scent, 3x Milk, 3x Cooking Honey and 2x Wheat Flour. You might also notice you're gaining a byproduct called Witch's Delicacy, this is a good way to increase Contribution Points! 

 

It'll also give you Cooking Exp, all you'll need to do is exchange it to the NPC mentioned in the item tooltip. Make sure you're collecting your Olvia Academy Pass Cooking Exp as well! 

 

 

This quest will work on combining all of the cooked dishes we've previously made with two extra ingredients given by Zaaira. You'll need to use 1x Milk Tea, 1x Meat Pasta, 1x Fish Fillet Salad, 1x Cheese Pie, 2x Soft Bread. 

 

This next quest is a little different, its the final cooking you'll do in the course. You'll get some of the ingredients from Zaaira but not the Balenos Meals that you need. You'll need 270 of them for the 90 Seafood Meals. 

 

 

You can either cook a Balenos Meal using 1x Cheese Gratin, 1x Meat Croquette, 1x Smoked Fish Steak, 2x Stir Fried Vegetables and 2x Beer or do what I did and just buy 270 Balenos Meals from the Market.

 

 

The final recipe is 3x Calpheon Meals, 3x Balenos Meals, 1x Ancient Cron Spice, 1x Magoria Seafood Meal. This is done using Simple Cooking (L) and not by using the cooking utensil, watch out for that. 

Once you're done, head back to the cooking instructor and give them a "Olvium Frontia!" in the general chat and that's the cooking course finished! 

 

What did you think of the cooking course, did it help teach you how cooking in BDO works? Let us know! 

 

 

Why not check out some of our other guides while you're here?