How to unlock new recipes in Tales of the Shire

Five hobbits sat around the table in Bywater having a meal in the rain

(Image credit: Private Division)

It's no surprise that cooking plays a significant role in Tales of the Shire. While you wander around Bywater, you'll gather a tonne of different ingredients, but when it comes to cooking, your meal options start off incredibly limited. This is where knowing how to unlock new recipes comes in very handy. Especially as each time you host a meal, you'll need to satisfy everyone's cravings, and a limited selection of dishes may be detrimental to your dinner party.

Unfortunately, unlocking recipes is not as simple as cobbling a bunch of vaguely edible ingredients together in a pan. You won't be able to cook unless you have the recipe already unlocked, and the correct ingredients, of course, to hand. So, here's what you need to do if you want to offer a variety of meals to your visitors.

How to unlock new recipes in Tales of the Shire

There are three main ways to get new recipes in Tales of the Shire:

Hosting meals to level up your friendship with villagers
Via the mail, following successful hosted meals
Completing tales

The most efficient way to unlock new recipes is by hosting meals for Hobbits (and dwarves, sorry Nari) and levelling up your friendship. When you start out, this is very easy to do. One meal, whether they liked it or not, will level up your friendship incredibly quickly. Later in the game it's more important to listen to what sort of meal they're craving, which they will let you know via the post the morning of your hosted meal, to get those all-important experience points.

Once you've successfully hit the next level, you'll need to speak to the character you've hosted and ask them if they have a gift for you, which is when you'll usually be given a new dish to try out. They won't always give you a recipe, though. Sometimes you'll receive household decor or table decorations as a reward. So, it's a bit of a gamble as to whether or not they're feeling generous enough to share their secret ingredients.

There's also a chance you'll receive a recipe as a thank you in your mailbox if you've hosted a successful meal. If you've correctly served a dish corresponding to the requests of your guests, such as something spicy, sour, or sweet, they are more likely to have a good time and send you a little something in the post the next day so you can continue your culinary journey.

You'll also unlock recipes by completing tales, but these recipes are a lot more specific, such as the Bywater Dish. You'll still be able to prepare and serve these meals outside of the quest, and a lot of the time they are more universally liked than some of the meals you'll randomly prepare for the sake of it. But, they also tend to rely on more premium ingredients which you can't farm or forage for yourself, like meat, cream, cheese, and butter.

Kara is an evergreen writer. Having spent four years as a games journalist guiding, reviewing, or generally waffling about the weird and wonderful, she’s more than happy to tell you all about which obscure indie games she’s managed to sink hours into this week. When she’s not raising a dodo army in Ark: Survival Evolved or taking huge losses in Tekken, you’ll find her helplessly trawling the internet for the next best birdwatching game because who wants to step outside and experience the real thing when you can so easily do it from the comfort of your living room. Right?

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