No life sim could possibly be complete without your characters having the ability to cook food. It’s not just that we need to eat food or else we’ll die–it’s that cooking is one of humanity’s most beloved pastimes. So, of course, cooking is a key part of InZoi, as you’ll likely spend a decent portion of your playing time preparing food for yourself and your digital family.
But cooking in InZoi is a little bit quirky compared with cooking in The Sims or, indeed, cooking in real life. And that’s because, the way that it works right now, you can’t scale up any of the meal options. Here’s how to cook for your family in InZoi. Instead, most of the recipes only let you cook a meal for one. So if you want to cook a meal for your whole family, you’ll need to cook one of the recipes listed as “big enough to share with others.”
But when you’re just getting started in InZoi, you won’t be able to cook any of those–none of the group foods becomes available to cook until you level up your cooking skill to level 3, at which point you can make cake and pizza. If you keep leveling your cooking skill up to 5, you’ll get two more group foods you can cook: fried chicken and steak. However, you’ll need an outdoor barbecue grill to cook steak. Anything other than steak, cake, fried chicken, and pizza is strictly a one-person meal.
This way of doing things hypothetically makes sense, but it’s a bit weird in the actual execution. Steak, for one thing, is not really a communal food in our world, but it’s included as one here. On the flip side of things, “tomato pasta” is strictly a one-person meal in InZoi, even though one of the big reasons pasta is popular is because pasta dishes tend to easily scale up for groups of people. So the idea that you can only make a one-person serving of spaghetti at a time is pretty hilarious.
When you’re done cooking these group foods, you’ll want to pay attention and make sure your Zois actually have the chance to partake in the feast. I noticed that my Zois had a nasty habit of autonomously tossing out the rest of the food after eating one portion–they always wash their dishes when they finish eating, and for some reason they include the dish holding still-edible food in that process. So more often than not, any group foods I cooked went to waste because I wasn’t micromanaging my Zois.
It’s pretty clear that, for now, cooking is one of Inzoi’s more barebones features; even though your cooking skill can go all the way up to 10, you only unlock new recipes up through level 5 right now. This sort of corner-cutting is not overly surprising given that InZoi only just launched in Early Access–it’s just the nature of these things. Assuming Krafton sticks with it, InZoi will no doubt have plenty more cooking options over time.
