The Sims 4 Cooking Skill Guide
Letting your sims earn the sims 4 cooking skill is a must if you want them to stay alive.
Everyone needs to eat, even your sims, so why not give them the opportunity to eat good food and not burn down their house?
Having a high cooking still is a must-have if you want to keep your home in-tact and complete avoid having your sims die in fire!
What is Cooking Good For?
The cooking skill is a must-have so your sims can have interesting meals that will give them positive moodlets so they can spend more of their time in a great mood. You’ll need your sims to have the cooking skill to enter into the culinary career, of course!
How to Gain The Sims 4 Cooking Skill
There are two ways your sims can earn the cooking skill and the first is through skill books! These books can be purchased by clicking on any bookcase and choosing to purchase books and you’ll find three books for cooking:
- Cooking Vol 1: Let’s Cook!
- Cooking Vol 2: Let’s Keeping Cooking!
- Cooking Vol 3: I’m Here to Cook!
To get your sim to earn skills with these books you’ll want to start with the first book until your sim no longer gains skill, them move onto the next.
The next way to gain the cooking skill is… through…. cooking! How exciting! You can have your sims cook meals one at a time over and over but make sure that you get them to put their leftovers away or drag the food into the fridge so you don’t waste it.
Pro Tip: Start with meals that don’t require any heat so you have less of a chance of your sim setting the house on fire. Garden salads for the win!
You can even gain the skill by cooking meals outside on a grill!
Another fun way to gain the sims 4 cooking skill is by watching TV. If you choose to have your sims watch the cooking channel they can gain the skill while keeping their fun up too!
Best Mood to Practice Cooking
Cooking is a very creative skill so you want your sims to have some creative juices flowing and thankfully that’s pretty easy. Every emotion your sim feels has an impact on their life and using the inspired emotion is the best for cooking because they’ll create higher-quality meals and gain the skill slightly more quickly.
To get your sim to feel inspired they can take a thoughtful shower, that’s definitely the easiest way to get it done!
Best Traits for Culinary Sims
The traits you give your sims can have a big impact on their skill gains and their mood. So, there are certain traits you might want to give a sim if you want them to be big in cooking or the culinary career.
- Creative: Creative sims are great because they are more likely to get inspired moodlets which is the ideal moodlet for your sims to have when cooking.
- Cheerful: A cheerful sim is great because they are more likely to be happy and when you add an inspired moodlet that’ll boost it and make them be even more inspired.
- Foodie: The foodie trait isn’t going to help your sim in cooking too much, but they will get positive moodlets when they eat good food. Plus, they can watch the cooking channel to get more ideas for cooking which can leave an inspired moodlet.
You also want to think through what lot traits you add to your game. There are many to choose from when you start adding DLC but these are the best for cooking:
- Homey: The homey lot trait helps sims master cooking more quickly!
- Chef’s Kitchen: Comes with City Living and will give your sims a boost to skill gains.
If you stack those two traits you’ll see a huge impact on how quickly sims can gain this skill.
How to Cheat The Sims 4 Cooking Skill
If you don’t want to grind through gaining the cooking skill you have the option to cheat it instead (thank goodness) and it’s super easy to do. The cheat you’ll need is stats.set_skill_level Major_homestylecooking 10 which is a great cheat to know so you never burn down the house.
That cheat is going to max out the skill but if you’d like your sims to have a different level you just change the number 10 to whatever number of the skill you want to have, for example, level five would be stats.set_skill_level Major_homestylecooking 5 with just the number changing.
Cooking Skill Levels
| Skill Level | Level Rewards |
|---|---|
| Level 1 | Your sim’s new skill in cooking will allow them to prepare delicious, straight forward classics. Yum! |
| Level 2 | Your sim learned the recipes for Eggs and Toast, BLT, Chips and Salsa, and Fish Tacos. They also learned a cool new combo add trick move. |
| Level 3 | Your sim learned the recipes for Pan Fried Tilapia, Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Pancakes. They can also talk about cooking with other sims. |
| Level 4 | Your sim learned the recipe for spaghetti and strawberry cake. |
| Level 5 | Your sim learned the recipe for French toast and fish and chips. They also unlocked the Gourmet Cooking skill and will receive the competent cook moodlet when cooking. They can also mentor others in homestyle cooking! |
| Level 6 | Your sim learned the recipe for blue confetti cake and chili. They also learned some cool new trick moves. |
| Level 7 | Your sim learned the recipe for blackened bass and omelet. |
| Level 8 | Your sim learned the recipe for apple pie. They can also flavorize a meal to make it higher quality. |
| Level 9 | Your sim learned the recipe for chicken stir fry and cioppino. They can also give cooking tips to other sims. |
| Level 10 | Your sim learned the recipes for Roast Chicken and Tuna Casserole. |
Benefits of Gaining This Skill
There are fun benefits of gaining every skill in the game that unlock new gameplay, make gameplay easier and just make it more fun. There are three big benefits to gaining the cooking skill for me.
1. Unlocking Gourmet Cooking
When your sim reaches level 5 of the cooking skill they are going to unlock the ability to start gaining the gourmet cooking skill which is great! This gives more interesting meals that are harder to make but taste so good.
2. High Quality Meals = Moodlets
When a sim gains the cooking skill they’re going to start creating higher quality meals and when any sim eats a meal of great quality they are going to get some positive moodlets that will keep them in great moods!
3. Fresh Chef Trait
My favourite reward trait in the game is related to cooking and if you’re playing a legacy of many generations it can be life changing. When you finish the master chef aspiration your sim will be rewarded with the fresh chef trait.
What does this trait do? Well, it makes it so the meals cooked by this sim never spoil. This means that you can have a sim spend their entire elder age cooking group meals and putting them in the fridge and their children and grandchildren can eat these for their entire lives.
Cooking Mentorship
When a sim maxes out a skill they are going to unlock the ability to mentor other sims in that skill. The sim who is being mentored will start gaining the skill more quickly which is insane and wonderful. To do this, get the mentee sim to start cooking and when controlling the chef sim you click on them and choose to mentor.
If you have The Sims 4: Business & Hobbies you can even mentor for money. A sim with level 5 of the skill earns 80 per hour and level 10 earns 430!
Upgrading Your Equipment
When you mix skills together you can create magic and mixing cooking with handiness can do just that. You are able to get some great upgrades to your fridges and ovens that will help you have a better time gaining the cooking skill.
The stove upgrades are great because they can help prevent fires which is very important. There are three stove upgrades to choose from, but you should just do them all:
- Coated Exterior: “A dirt resistant coating”
- This prevents your stove from getting dirty as quickly.
- Self-Cleaning: “Install a self-cleaning high density heating element and never clean the stove again”
- Makes Coated Exterior pointless, but whatever, you never need to clean your stove again.
- Heat Sensor: “With a heat sensor, food should come out higher quality”
- This will have your sim’s food coming out high quality which can give sims positive moodlets.
You also have the option to do upgrades on your sim’s fridge which are great too. There are three upgrades you can make:
- Fresh Maker: “Improves the overall quality of food”
- Higher quality food makes sims happy, so this can give them positive moodlets.
- Reinforced Door: “One way to make the fridge break less often”
- Stops your fridge from breaking as easily, is made pointless when you add fridge of steel though.
- Fridge of Steel: “Like the man, the fridge of steel is unbreakable.”
- Stops your fridge from ever breaking again!
Gaining The Sims 4 Cooking Skill With DLC
There are fun ways to gain skills through DLC packs too!
Discover University
Discover University has the most ways to gain so many skills in the game. The first way your sims can gain the sims 4 cooking skill is by taking a skill class.
You’ll find these classes available at a building on both University campuses and it’ll cost your sim 250 simoleons. These classes are available to your sims from 9am to 9pm!
A menu will appear letting you choose which skill you want to try out and your sim will go into the building for a few hours and leave with more of that skill.
The other way you can earn the cooking skill in Discover University is by doing research. Your sim will find a research archive machine at the library or purchase one for their lot and choose cooking for nutrition vs pleasure and your sim will gain both cooking and the research & debate skill at the same time!
