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Kitchen Quest – the Stats


by gardener3

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With speculation of Battledome involvement in the current plot, many Neopians are trying to raise their pets’ stats, and some are taking a second look at Kitchen Quests. I’ll be looking at the statistics of Kitchen Quest, both for the sake of curiosity and for the effectiveness of training your pet’s stats, with tips added to help make your quests run smoothly. The quest statistics were derived from the records I maintained of over 1000 of the Kitchen Quests I completed this year. While that is not a large enough representation to qualify the figures as 100% accurate, they should be fairly close.

Introduction

Located on Mystery Island, Kitchen Quest is run by the Underwater Chef. The Chef previously served the Royal Family of Maraqua, and now feeds the never-satiated Mumbo Pango. Click here to read the lament of the Underwater Chef in a Neopedia article.

Statistic #1: Gender. The Chef is a he. Don’t go calling him a girl just because he is so cute.

The Quest

Upon your arrival at the Kitchen, the Chef urgently requests your help. He already has a recipe listed, and if you click “Sure, I will help!” you will be given a time limit and a list of three or four food items needed for the recipe.

Statistic #2: The recipe consists of five words, randomly selected, one from each of five lists, thus giving rise to such recipes as Baked Anenome and Beef Mash, and Pesto Neggs with Chervil Sprouts. With 18, 16, 2, 10 and 10 words, that permutes to 18x16x2x10x10 = 57,600 different recipes. Possibly more – I may have missed a word. If you refresh the page before accepting the quest, the Chef will list a different recipe, though I am 99.9% sure it won’t make any difference in your quest.

1. Baked, Boiled, Broiled, Caramelised, Cheesy, Creamy, Curdled, Eggy, Fried, Frothy, Lumpy, Pesto, Pureed, Runny, Spiced, Steamed, Stuffed, Whisked

2. Anenome, Aubergines, Avocado, Chicken, Cress, Eggs, Eyeballs, Kippers, Melons, Neggs, Octopus, Olives, Potatoes, Seaweed, Spinach, Tomatoes

3. and, with

4. Beef, Chervil, Curried, Custard, Fishy, Lime, Mustard, Scallion, Spicy, Yeast

5. Mash, Meatballs, Omelettes, Pancakes, Pie, Samosas, Sauce, Sprouts, Tortillas, Wraps

Statistic #3: The time limit is an average of 2 hours 30 minutes. My maximum time limit was 3 hours 28 minutes; minimum was 1 hour 11 minutes.

Statistic #4: In my quests, the number of items requested was three, 47% of the time, and four, 53% of the time, which is pretty close to 50/50 odds of getting three or four items.

Statistic #5: The items requested are of rarity 20 to rarity 80 inclusive. These range in price from 1 neopoint to 300,000 neopoints. Excluding quests which would cost over 15,000 neopoints, the average price per item is 1685 NP (neopoints), with the average cost per quest being 5914 NP.

Regarding cost of the quest, my most inexpensive quest was 3 neopoints (three cheap spooky/gross foods), and the most expensive ones, which I didn’t do of course, asked for Bag of Peanuts and Snorkle Snout; which, being rarity 80 shouldn’t be unbuyable (meaning there are usually none sold in users’ shops) but of course they are unbuyable because they are consumed in the pursuit of certain avatars. There are also quite a few spooky foods which were in particularly high demand in October by all those wishing to complete Esophagor and Brain Tree Quests. The lowest price on the shop wizard for Mint Ice Cream Apple Lantern, which is only rarity 76, soared from its usual already high price of 13,000 neopoints to a probable all-time high of 87,000 neopoints that month. Some foods are very high priced because they have been recently released, and are still quite rare, even though they have a rarity index of less than 80. On the other end of the scale, it is nice to be asked for ingredients which were recently given away as prizes and are thus very inexpensive, such as Baked Intesteen given out by Key Quest in October.

Statistic #6: The items requested are from the following categories: Altadorian Food, Baked, Brightvale Fruit, Candy, Coffee, Desert Food, Exotic Foods, Faerie Food, Food, Gross Food, Healthy Food, Hot Dog, Jelly Food, Kiko Lake Food, Kreludan Food, Medieval Food, Neovian Pastries, Pizza, Qasalan Food, Slushie, Smoothie, Snow Food, Space Food, Spooky Food, Tropical Food, and Tyrannian Food. The only edible category missing from this list is Aquatic Foods, because those items are all rarity 180.

When you look at the images of the ingredients, often it is the ones you are most familiar with that will be the cheapest, and the ones you’ve never seen before which will be most expensive. I like to open a separate tab on my browser to the most inexpensive shop I can find on the Shop Wizard for each item, starting with the item I think will be most expensive. If you are pressed for time, and can afford it, the Premium Neopets Super Shop Wizard makes the job much quicker. With each item, though, I will stop and go no further on the quest if the total up to that point is above my limit. I will explain methods for determining your limit after I detail the rewards. Unless the item is priced far enough below the others that you are sure you could profit from reselling it, and you are afraid someone else will buy it quickly, you should wait until you have found all of your ingredients, and then buy them if their total is below your limit. This saves you the trouble of having to resell expensive foods.

Another decision you will have to make when calculating the cost of your quest is what to attribute as the item cost: what you paid for it, or what you could sell it for. I sometimes find some very good deals, but I figure that I wouldn’t have found them if I hadn’t been doing the Kitchen Quest, so I use the amount I paid-- usually. If it is a very expensive item that sells for 10k (10,000) NP, and I find it for 5k NP, and the other items on the quest total 4,500 NP, and my limit is 10,000 NP; then using actual cost I am under my limit, but I will not complete the quest. I will sell my snipe. I mean, if you sniped a Snorkle Snout for 1k, you really would not want to give it to a Kitchen Quest which might return only 738 NP, would you?

I usually try to speed through my ingredient purchases, keeping the above advice in mind, of course. Once while buying Beef Stew Pie, I clicked the cheapest at 987 and got "Error: You can't buy from yourself!" Lol, I just bought the next one for 988 and let someone else buy mine. Be sure to use "Identical to my phrase" on the Shop Wiz, so you don't wind up with a Deluxe Kyrii Cracker for 13k (13,000 NP) when what you really needed was a Kyrii Cracker for 800 NP.

If the quest is too expensive, set a timer for the time limit displayed on the previous page of the quest, or calculate the time it will be when the time is up, and come back to the Kitchen Quest page at that time. If you can’t go back to see your time limit, you can just wait a full 3.5 hours, or go on to the next step (see the next paragraph) to see the time remaining – but be very careful to not click “I have the ingredients” in case you did buy some of them but are planning on reselling. If you did click that, the Underwater Chef would take the ingredients you had bought, which would be your loss since you had decided the quest was too expensive to complete. If this happened and the quest wasn’t excessively over my limit, I would probably buy the rest of the ingredients and finish the quest – and then kick myself when I received a puny reward.

Statistic #7: Uncompleted quests. Because they were over my 15,000 NP limit, 15% of the quests I accepted were uncompleted.

When you return to Kitchen Quests after the time is up, the Underwater Chef will say that you should leave. Do that, and then come back (or just refresh the page), and he will be eager to start another recipe.

Statistic #8: There is a limit of ten quests per day, which is a combined limit for Kitchen Quest, Edna's Tower and Snow Faerie Quests. So you could do 3 Kitchen, 2 Edna and 5 Snow Faerie quests in a day, and then you would be prevented from doing any more of any of them until the next day, with your limit being reset at midnight Neopian Time. Faerie quests (other than Taelia’s), Employment Agency jobs, and Esophagor and Brain Tree quests will not be affected by your Kitchen Quests. Also, the quests which you don’t complete do not count towards your daily limit of ten. So if you let two of the quests expire because they were too expensive, you can still complete ten others.

The Reward

If the quest falls within your budgeted limit, and you have all the ingredients, you may continue. Go back to Mystery Island, and click on Kitchen Quest again, or take the 2 out of kitchen2.phtml on your browser address bar and press enter while still in that bar, or just refresh the Kitchen Quest page and click on “here” when it displays “Click here to go back to the Kitchen!” Whichever way you do it, you should now be able to click “I have the ingredients!” and have the underwater Chef say “Thanks!” for each item you brought, in addition to displaying your reward. For stats, which are randomly awarded to one of your pets, that pet is displayed, sans customisation. There are some exceptions. When my pet was a Spotted Nimmo he displayed normally, but when he was a Glowing Nimmo, he did not appear on the reward page.

Statistic #9: Rewards. For 29% of my completed quests, I received items, 29% neopoints, 12% hit points (endurance), 8% defence, 8% levels, 7% strength (attack) and 7% agility (movement), for a total of 42% of rewards as pet stats. The average neopoint reward was 1018, with the minimum 663 and the maximum 1385. The average item reward value was 4212 neopoints, with the minimum 10 and the maximum 97888 (a new item).

Statistic #10: Item Rewards usually have a rarity of 70 up to 87, as far as I’ve seen; which is a fair bit higher than the highest rarity for requested ingredients, which is 80. I have received one each of rarity 66, 68, and 20 rewards, but everything else was 70 to 87. I believe the item rewards can come from any category. I have received rewards from the categories Battle Magic, Book, Collectable Card, Clothes (including wearable), Faerie Book, Faerie Petpet, Furniture (both original Neohome and Neohome II), Gardening, Gift, Grooming, Instrument, Kiko Lake Carpentry, Medicine, Petpet Supplies, Plushies, School, Stamp, Toy, Tyrannian Weaponry, Usuki Doll, and all of the food categories listed above for the ingredients in statistic #6.

Training

Training costs have greatly subsided on account of Key Quest. Codestones are half the price they used to be, so Kitchen Quest used to be a much better deal with the training rewards worth so much more, but they are still an affordable - and quick - method of training. Kitchen Quest is much faster than the 24 hours per stat at the top end of Mystery Island Training School, though not as quick as the four hour training at the Secret Ninja Training School - but still a good complement to it - using your codestone training to even things out or to build stats in the proportions you like them to be.

Speed of training will be affected by the limit you set, and your limit will be determined by how you value your training. When I was a neophyte Neopian, and received one level as a reward for my first Kitchen Quest, I thought that was a paltry reward for the 10,000 neopoints it had cost me. I could have trained that level for only 3000 NP! I didn’t realize that some quests would be cheaper, and that I could cancel the expensive quests! However, the more quests you cancel, the more often you will have to come back to Neopets during the day, and the less likely you will be able to complete all ten quests during the day.

Here are some options for using Kitchen Quest at various stages of training. At Swashbucklers Academy, Mystery Island Training School, and the Secret Ninja Training School, you will need to maintain strength, defence and hit points at no more than twice the pet’s level. You can go to three times level with hit points, but I found it hard to get caught up in defence and strength after that. Many people don’t train agility at all, so I will set the reward value for that at zero. The chance of getting one of the other four stats as your Kitchen Quest reward is 35%. For every hundred quests, you will get 29 item and 29 neopoint rewards, valued at 4212 and 1018 neopoints each. Average value per quest, before training value, is ((29 x 4212) + (29 x 1018)) /100 = 1517 neopoints. In the paragraphs and table below I will add the training value to determine what the quests are worth to various levels of pets. This will be the maximum you should spend on a quest, unless you are uber rich, and neopoints are no object to you; then go ahead and do whatever you want. Or if you are super cheap, you can stop at the free training maximum, or at any maximum quest cost below your average reward value.

An important consideration in your calculation will be how many pets you have. To get the most benefit from the stats provided by the Kitchen Quests, you should keep just one pet on your account, your main battle pet, and put the rest on your sides. Then all the training stats will go to that one pet. If you do keep more than one pet, and only want to train one of them, then you will need to divide the Average Training Value Per Quest, as shown in the calculations below, by the number of pets in your account. This is demonstrated below for the level 21 to 40 pet, and included in the table of maximum quest costs. If you value the training equally on all of your pets, then you can just use the “1 pet” figures.

1. Free Training! This would be pretty hard to do, but eight per cent of the quests were under the 1517 average reward value for neopoint and item rewards. Most of us aren’t awake enough hours each day or at our computer enough to be able to refuse ten quests in an effort to get the almost one in ten that costs less than 1517 NP, but if you want free training and you try one or more times a day, then over the long run it won’t cost you a thing and you will get some free training!

2. Pet level 1 to 20. The Academy. Cost: One Dubloon Coin or Two Dubloon Coin = 2800 NP. Average Training Value Per Quest is (35 x 2800)/100 = 980. Your rewards will average 1517 + 980 = 2497 NP in value, so you could spend up to that much (2497) on each quest. You will have to refuse most quests, but it wouldn’t hurt to try it a couple of times each day, as eighteen per cent of quests cost less than 2497, or almost two out of ten.

3. Pet level 21 to 40. The average cost for the 9 Mystery Island Training School codestones is currently only 3180, times two equals 6360 NP cost per stat. Using the same calculations as above, ATVPQ (Average Training Value Per Quest) is 2226, plus the 1517 average from other rewards means you should set 3743 as the maximum you will spend on a quest. If you have more than one pet but only value the training of one of them, you should divide the ATVPQ by the number of pets. So if I have three pets, the quest value is 2226/3 + 1517 = 2259, which should be my maximum quest cost.

4. I have laid out the maximum quest costs for various levels in the table below. Once I reached level 300, however, I kept my quest maximum at 15,000, since I usually only get one quest per day that is over that. And even though the average price of the six red codestones has come back down to 31,000 NP, Kitchen Quests can still be a better deal for the high level pet.

Table of maximum neopoints to spend per quest

Level1 pet2 pets3 pets4 pets
1-202497200718431762
21-403743263022592073
41-8048563187 26302351
81-1005969374330012630
101-1207082429933722908
121-1508195485637433186
151-2009308541241143464
201-25010421596944853743
25012367694251334229
300232171236787506942
4003406717792123679654
50044917232171598312367
60055767286421960015079
75066617340672321717792

Conclusion

The Neopian economy is constantly changing, but unless TNT makes major modifications to Kitchen Quest, these stats should remain reasonably reliable. The result: a battle pet with great stats, trained at a price of your choosing!

 
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