Cooking Country Beginner’s Guide: 15 Tips, Cheats & Strategies Every Player Should Know

Restaurant simulation and farming are two of the most popular genres in casual gaming. What happens when these two giants collide? Flowmotion tried it out and came up with a wonderful mashup called Cooking Country. This multi-simulation game for Android and iOS devices lets you manage your own café, but that’s not all. You won’t just be buying decorations and tapping tables. You need to grow your very own fresh ingredients if you want to get ahead in the business. Luckily, you will also have a small farm in your backyard. It is now your job to expand both your farm and café in order to accommodate more customers and offer more menu items. It is time to build the café of your dreams. You are in charge of everything, from tending to farm animals, to clearing tables after the customers leave. It’s a good thing you have our exclusive Cooking Country guide to help you out!

1. Log In Daily For Rewards

Practically all mobile games these days have some kind of daily login reward, and Cooking Country is no exception. The good thing about this game, though, is that you don’t lose the entire week if you miss a day or two. Cooking Country relies on a reward calendar that pre-assigns prizes for each day of the current month. Of course, it is still ideal if you claim your freebies daily, but you won’t have to worry too much if you are really busy once in a while. Just make sure you don’t miss any weekend because the rewards are always gems on these days!

2. Speed Up Production For Free

If you are a veteran player of simulation games like this, you would be familiar with the timer system when it comes to production. It can be a hassle at times when you want to keep playing but you have to wait for products to finish. Most games will have you coughing up infinite amounts of gems just to keep things going. While that is also applicable here, the game is nice enough to offer an alternative. You can also speed up production by watching an advertisement. Just tap on the item you want to speed up, then look for the button with a film icon to watch the ad.

3. Rush Your Levels

When you start out, it is natural if you want to explore, or start customizing your shop. We recommend, however, that you focus your first few hours rushing your levels. A lot of the game’s features are locked behind level requirements. It is best if you start customizing once you have everything unlocked so you don’t have to keep readjusting whenever a new feature comes up. If you play your cards right, you should be able to unlock everything within a day, so it should not be too much of a problem for you to wait a bit.

4. Keep On Producing

As part of your strategy in leveling up quickly, it is a good idea to always have items queued up for production. Every item you harvest or produce in Cooking Country will reward you with experience, regardless if there is an order for it or not. That means the more items you make, the more experience you will get. When you log in for the day, try to focus on making quick items first. This will allow you to queue up more items right after. You can then start queueing up items with long wait times when you are about to log off, to ensure that your production does not stop even while you sleep.

Another good reason to keep production going is to get more building materials. These materials are required for expanding your property, which you will need to do after just a few levels. Materials for expanding your farm will randomly drop as you harvest crops. The ones for your café, on the other hand, will be left behind by random customers who are happy with the food.

5. Manage Your Storage

Since you will be producing a lot of items, you need to keep an eye on your storage. Your barn stores items from your farm while your showcases keep food items from your café. Your barn can easily fill up with crops and animal products. Always check the stocks in your barn before planting more. Try to have a good supply of different items, so that you won’t have any problems with order.

Since your café will constantly have customers, it will be a rare occurrence for you to run out of storage space. The management part here is to make sure you have at least one of each menu item in stock as much as possible. Food items can take a while to produce, so you could end up holding up your entire café because you don’t have certain items on hand.

Make sure you also upgrade the storage for both your café and your farm as soon as the option becomes available. Your café storage is easy to upgrade because you just need to buy another showcase as soon as it is available in the store. Your barn, on the other hand, requires specific items that will drop from harvesting crops.

6. Add A Lot of Friends

Cooking Country has a social system that allows you to add your Facebook friends as well as random players from the game. By default, your first friend is the NPC Chef named Bocuse. He has a huge café, but what you are really after is his sidewalk store. This is where he sells a few items that refreshes every day. Make sure you always check it out because he just might be selling that one ingredient that you are short on. You should also visit the sidewalk stores of your other friends to see if they have anything useful on sale.

7. Check The Market

Aside from scouring the sidewalk stalls of your friends, you could also check out the Market for the products of random players. This one refreshes every few minutes, so it gives you more chances of finding the items you need. Just make sure you take note of the refresh times. Items in the Market tend to get sold out very quickly. If you are not fast enough, you could miss out on some great bargains. Market items are not limited to food and ingredients, either. You could also find building materials on sale, so keep checking!

8. Keep Your Customers Waiting

It may sound counterproductive, but when you progress in the game, you will find that managing both a farm and a café can keep you very busy. There is just so much to do that you will get flustered if you try to keep up with the endless flow of customers on top of everything else. Do not feel pressured to spend gems just to get food for the customer who has been waiting since yesterday for his order. Customers in Cooking Country are surprisingly mellow. You won’t get penalized at all for making customers wait for hours, or even days. Just do what you need to do and serve a customer when you are ready.

9. Check Your Daily Tasks

At the upper left side of your screen, you will see a calendar icon. Tap on it to see your daily tasks. The game gives you 15 tasks to accomplish within the day. Don’t worry because these are normally routine stuff like planting a number of crops or serving a number of customers. Each task you complete will reward you with coins and activity points. When you collect a certain amount of activity points for the day, you get to open a chest for ever more rewards. Complete all 15 tasks and you will be able to open a gem-filled chest!

10. Movie’s Night Is The Best

When you head over to your farm, you will notice a guy hanging out nearby who is carrying a filmstrip. Tap on him to go to the Movie’s Night screen. Here, you will be given the option to watch a video advertisement in exchange for random rewards. Rewards could be gems, building materials, food items, or ingredients. You can watch as many ads as you want in order to gain a lot of freebies. If you have some free time, we recommend that you take advantage of Movie’s Night and give yourself a great boost in resources!

11. Watch Your Experience Bar

At the top left of your screen, you will find a bar that indicates your level and experience. The bar indicates how close you are to the next level. This is important because your water reserve will fill up when you level up. Water works like energy in this game. You won’t be able to plant any more crops if you run out, and you will have to wait for it to regenerate over time. That is why if you are close to leveling up, try to avoid getting more experience from other sources until you deplete your current water reserve. Plant as many crops as you can, so that you don’t waste the free water refill.

12. Claim Your Level Up Rewards

While you are looking at the experience bar, you might as well look for the treasure box icon that is just underneath it. This icon is for your level up rewards. You will see a level indicated under the treasure box. This means you will receive your next reward when you reach that level. Make sure you keep an eye on it and collect your reward as soon as you are eligible. Rewards range from food items to fertilizer, so you can get a lot of advantage by claiming these regularly.

13. Manage Your Café Space

Most players like to group their production machines together as tightly as possible to leave plenty of space for customers and decorations. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of machines in Cooking Country can be a little tricky. If you pack your production machines too close together, you will end up getting frustrated at tapping the wrong things all the time. You will also run the risk of accidentally tapping the gem speed up button which does not have a confirmation. Make sure you leave at least one box of space between items to keep things working smoothly.

14. Hold Off On Decorations

One of the most fun things about games like this is the ability to remodel your café according to your dream. It might be best, however, if you wait before you go shopping for décor. Similarly to other games in this genre, in Cooking Country better decoration items will be unlocked in later levels. On top of that, you will find yourself short on space in the earlier levels. There is also no real gameplay benefit from buying decorations. It is essentially a cosmetic investment that is best done when you have progressed through many levels of the game.

15. How To Spend Your Gems

After watching all those speed up ads just to save on gems, you are probably wondering what you can spend them on. If you are really into decorating your café, a lot of beautiful premium pieces are only available through gem purchase. You can save up all your gems until you have enough to buy the premium items you want to decorate your final café with.

There is a practical way to spend your gems, though. The best use for your gems is to unlock production slots. As you progress in the game, you will realize that the production slots are never really enough. Even just one additional slot for each production machine can help you out a lot in managing the steady flow of orders from your customers. Since these are permanent purchases, you will be benefiting from them a lot longer than when you spend the gems on speeding up certain items.

Are you ready to build and manage the café of your dreams? Just stick to our list of Cooking Country tips and tricks in order to make your dream a reality!