Cooking and recipes
Cooking has star ratings and ingredient sizes — most unfinished recipes are a size problem. Large Seafood Stir-fry wants two large seafood plus seasoning. Every first-time dish counts for the catalog, even with low stars.
Cooking is where SCREENSIDE FISHER stops being a screensaver and starts being a game. Every fish you catch can go on a plate: combine ingredients, discover recipes, chase star ratings, and fill the Recipe Catalog alongside your Fish Catalog.
A finished dish pops up as its own little window, with the score in stars and a retry button.
How the cooking minigame works
Cooking is a short minigame with a star rating attached. The better you play, the more stars you earn — and five stars on any dish is its own achievement. The dish is added to your Recipe Catalog the first time you make it, which means your first attempt at any recipe is always worth finishing, even if the stars are low.
- Discover recipes by combining fish and ingredients that have not been tried together yet.
- Star ratings go up to five; "Five Stars!" (earned by 22% of players so far) wants a five-star result.
- "Order Up!" (27.9%) is tied to completing a Special Order — a request for one specific dish.
Ingredient size matters more than you think
The size of what you caught carries into the kitchen. The same basic recipe turns into a different dish — or a different dish size — depending on the ingredients you load in. This is the single most common reason a recipe refuses to complete.
The clearest community case: Large Seafood Stir-fry. The Recipe Catalog will not complete until you produce the large version. Players worked out that it wants two large "other seafood" ingredients plus seasoning — one player landed it with two jellyfish, another finally got it on a sea urchin after four failed attempts with other seafood. Regular octopus gives you the medium version, not the large, which is exactly the trap.
| You use | You get |
|---|---|
| Two large seafood (jellyfish, sea urchin, etc.) + seasoning | Large Seafood Stir-fry |
| One regular octopus | Medium version — not the one the catalog wants |
| Smaller or mixed-size seafood | Small/medium results |
Patch 1.0.5 also "improved Large Seafood Stir-fry recipes," so if you bounced off this one at launch, try it again on the current build.
Special Orders
Special Orders ask for one specific dish rather than letting you cook whatever you like. They are the reason to keep a stocked pantry — when an order lands, you want the ingredients already in the kitchen instead of hunting for a rare fish first. Finishing one is worth the "Order Up!" achievement.
Completing the Recipe Catalog
The catalog milestones mirror the Fish Catalog: 10 dishes, 25 dishes, 50 dishes, then the full book. The last stretch is where the weird stuff lives — the sushi set ("Omakase"), the bread line ("This isn't a baking game..." — yes, there is baking), and star-chasing on the dishes you rushed.
A few habits that make the grind shorter:
- Cook every new recipe once, immediately, even badly. Catalog credit is for the dish existing, not for it being perfect.
- Keep two of everything you catch: one to sell, one for the kitchen.
- When you need a specific size, remember size comes from the catch — see the rods and Luck page for how to fish for bigger hauls.
- Sell your higher-star dishes, keep the failures for snacks. Money from cooking feeds straight back into rods and ingredients — the lottery and money page has the full earning picture.
