Cooking in Beast of Reincarnation is how you bank permanent stat gains for Emma and Koo between hunts. The whole system runs through Kagura aboard the Cleanse Walker, and it stays locked until she joins your journey. Once it opens up, every meal you eat during a rest sticks with you for good.
Quick answer: Progress the main story until Kagura joins the Cleanse Walker, then use “Cooking Research” to teach her a recipe you’ve found, gather its ingredients from the Grow Chamber, Incubator, or exploration, and select “Rest Until Departure” (or “Rest Until Morning”) at your bed to eat the dish and lock in its permanent stat increase.
Unlock cooking by reaching Kagura
You cannot cook prepared meals from the start. The mechanic is tied to Kagura, who becomes available a few hours into the main story after a flashback that shows how she and Emma met, and why Emma is on this journey.
Once that flashback wraps up, cooking is introduced. From then on you can prepare stat-boosting meals aboard the Cleanse Walker, and you can also cook simple food at campfires while exploring. Campfire cooking is limited to satisfying hunger, so it does not grant permanent stat gains.
Emma doesn’t do the cooking herself. Kagura handles all meal preparation aboard the Walker, so the workflow is about finding recipes and ingredients for her, then choosing which dish she makes before you rest.
Field food vs. prepared meals
Food splits into two systems that share a goal but work differently. Field food keeps the Hunger Gauge full so Emma and Koo passively recover HP outside combat. Prepared meals from Kagura are the ones that raise your stats.
| System | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Field food | Battle Pack or campsite | Refills the Hunger Gauge so HP regenerates passively outside combat |
| Prepared meals | Cleanse Walker (Kagura) | Grants permanent stat increases when eaten during a rest |
Emma and Koo each have their own Hunger Gauge, shown beside their HP bars with a wheat icon. As long as a character’s gauge isn’t too low, that character recovers HP passively while outside combat. Let it run empty and passive regeneration stops entirely, which forces you to lean on Stimpacks and emergency medicine after every scrape.
The gauge drains as you fight and explore, so constant skirmishes eat through it fast. Before you leave the Walker, you automatically receive rations to manage hunger during exploration, with the amount tied to Kagura’s Rapport Rank. Open the Battle Pack with the Down button on a controller or C on a keyboard, then eat any available food to top the gauge back up. Items such as Hard Candy slow the drain, which is handy for long stretches between camps.
Tip: Malefact meat and fish are cooked automatically whenever you rest at a campsite. Malefact Meat drops from monsters like deer, so hunting keeps both hunger gauges filled without a trip back to the Walker.
Do not eat raw cooking ingredients from the Battle Pack. Rice, fish, vegetables, eggs, water, and similar materials are meant for Kagura’s recipes, not for filling the Hunger Gauge in the field.
How to cook a meal for permanent stats
You know it worked when the group eats during the rest cutscene and the dish’s stat gain sticks after waking. The meals raise these stats:
- Attack
- Defense
- HP
- Critical Rate
- Skill Power
Eat new dishes first for the bigger bonus
Eating a recipe for the first time grants a larger, first-time stat bonus than making that same dish again. Repeat servings still add stats, but by much less. To maximize permanent gains, spread out your cooking and eat a variety of new dishes rather than falling back on one easy meal every rest.
Because of this, researching several different recipes and eating each one at least once is worth more than grinding a single dish, especially once you have enough ingredients to complete a few new meals at a time.
Keep ingredients flowing with the Grow Chamber and Incubator
Farming aboard the Walker supplies most of the ingredients Kagura needs. Seeds and seedlings go into the Grow Chamber, where they produce vegetables, fruit, rice, and other materials over time. New seed types turn up while exploring or through merchants, and different crops feed different recipes.
Fertilized eggs go into the Incubator, where they hatch into chickens that then lay eggs for cooking, including rare golden eggs. Production keeps running while you’re away completing quests, exploring regions, and fighting enemies, so collect finished ingredients on each return and immediately plant new seeds or start another egg cycle before heading back out.
Kagura’s research menu also controls how much you harvest. Alongside “Cooking Research,” she can run “Grow Research” using farming guides you find, which increases the yield from a specific crop or poultry. Note that she can only research one item across both categories at a time, so you cannot run Cooking and Grow Research together.
If you want her to stockpile materials for a specific dish, use the “Food Production Setting” and select the meal to prioritize. That can run alongside research, so assign a project and a production target before every departure to keep your favorite meals coming.
Expand farming slots with Facility Modules
The Grow Chamber and Incubator both start with limited space. Facility Modules found while exploring upgrade these facilities and raise how many crops or chickens you can maintain at once. Golem brains likewise expand your available slots as you improve the Walker.
Upgrade both if you cook regularly, but prioritize the Grow Chamber early. Recipes call for a far wider range of crops than animal products, and more slots let you grow several ingredient types at the same time instead of swapping one seed out whenever a new recipe appears. Between raising Kagura’s Rapport and keeping the farm stocked, the Walker should never be sitting idle while Emma and Koo are out fighting.
