How ingredients work in Beastro
Every Beastro ingredient carries a flavour and a strength, and those two values decide what it is worth at the table. Flavour sets which venture cards the dish hands your Caretakers, and strength decides how hard it pushes that flavour onto the ingredients sitting next to it on the Mise en Place grid.
The six Beastro flavours are spread unevenly: sweet is the widest with 22 ingredients, then umami with 20, bitter and sour with 19 each, salty with 18, and spicy trailing on 9. A spicy menu in Beastro is harder to build simply because there is less to build it from.
Beastro cooking techniques and grid shapes
Most Beastro ingredients want a specific technique before they are worth cooking: 38 are sautéed, 23 boiled, 17 roasted, 9 chopped and 2 tenderized, while 18 need no preparation at all. Each one also takes up a footprint on the prep grid, and eleven of them are irregular shapes rather than neat rectangles, which is what turns a full Beastro pantry into a packing puzzle.
Where Beastro ingredients come from
Beastro ingredients arrive from the farm, from foraging, from the sea and from monsters. Beating a monster in a venture drops its meat or parts, which is why the bestiary and the pantry are the same planning problem: the card you want in a fight often comes from the thing you fought last time.