Pet Chefs: Cooking Up a Storm in Pet Society

A new feature was added today in Pet Society.  Our pets can now cook.  I think Pet Society is becoming a mesh of all the other Playfish games (Country Story/gardening, Restaurant City/cooking).   I wanted to see how the new cooking feature worked because it seemed interesting.

Here’s the letter Momo received from the Mayor:

Then I clicked on the recipe book, which is the leftmost icon on the bottom of the playing screen (circled below).  I wish there wasn’t so much screen clutter!

Here’s a screencap from the recipe book.  As you cook recipes, you gain cooking points and unlock harder recipes.  To start, we can all cook vegetable soup.  The recipe book explains how to begin and warns us that we have to collect the cooked food after the cooking time is over to prevent the food from burning.

Here’s the second page of recipes.  It’s nice that we can cook foods that are not available in the stores.  However, it costs coins to “learn” how to perform new recipes, and we also have to pay for the ingredients. That means, we can’t make a profit immediately because of the investment to “learn” the recipes.

After learning the recipes, you can eventually make a profit if you sell the items you cook. Unfortunately, the profit information is only visible after you learn to cook the recipe.  I assume (and would hope) that the profits will continue to grow if we spend a lot of time using this feature, but I’m can’t tell for sure yet.  The profit for making vegetable soup is 1 coin, the profit for the giant hotdog is 9 coins, and the profit for the king burger is 40 coins.

Momo was given this cooking stove.

I started by cooking the vegetable soup.  To cook a recipe, just click on “cook” under an available recipe in your cooking book.  The vegetable soup takes 10 minutes to cook.

Here’s my finished soup.  My husband’s pet made some soup too, and he was annoyed at the girlish pink bowl, which didn’t match his house.  Too bad more things in Pet Society aren’t gender neutral.  It’s not like women are the only ones who cook!

Next, I cooked a giant hot dog. It took two hours to cook, and I was given two hours to collect the food before it would burn in the oven.

It’s important to note that the collecting time is generally equal to the cooking time.  For example, if the food takes 10 minutes to cook, then you’ll have 10 minutes to collect the food.  If the food takes two hours to cook, then you’ll have two hours to collect the food.

In case you’re wondering, the giant hotdog really is giant!  Just look at the size of it.  The soup gives off little puffs of smoke.

Also, in case you’re wondering, yes, your pet can eat the foods. You’d think I starved Momo by her behavior, but she was fed earlier today!  heehee!

I like aspects of the new feature so far.  I like that we don’t have to monitor the cooking and that we can get some new foods.  I hope that some of the later recipes are more profitable too because it might be a good way to make some money in the game, though it’s unclear how profitable it will be right now, considering the costs of ingredients and learning the recipes.  It’s definitely a smart move by Playfish to make sure we log into the game multiple times a day.

What do you think of it?  Has your pet tried it out?  Are there recipes you can’t wait to try?