Cooking thresholds
Three achievements mark the cooking ladder: Apprentice Chef at 240, Feast at 1,000, and Head Chef at 1,800. Global unlock rates are 22.0%, 7.8% and 5.7%.
Cooking is the only system in the game with published numbers attached, and those numbers are achievement thresholds: 240, 1,000 and 1,800.
Every figure below is checked against Pequi studios announcements or Steam's own endpoints on 2026-11-09.
Cooking is the one system in Mayday: The Survival Island with published numbers attached to it, and those numbers double as the game's travel economy. Three achievements mark the ladder, and their global unlock rates tell you exactly where the player base stops climbing.
240, 1,000, 1,800
| Achievement | Requirement | Global unlock | Byte position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apprentice Chef | Cook a meal worth more than 240 | 22.0% | First real meal |
| Feast | Cook a meal worth more than 1,000 | 7.8% | Multi-ingredient cooking |
| Head Chef | Cook a meal worth more than 1,800 | 5.7% | Late-game kitchen |
Those three numbers are the only food values the game states anywhere. No in-game nutrition table lists each ingredient's contribution, and the developer has not published one. What the game does show is the resulting value of a meal, which is why the achievements can be phrased as "worth more than X" rather than "made with Y".
The rates are the useful part. 22% of players have made a 240 meal, which is roughly everyone who cooked at all. 7.8% have made a 1,000 meal and 5.7% have made an 1,800 one. Between those two figures the drop is small, which suggests that once a player can make a four-digit meal, the top band is not a separate skill, just a matter of better ingredients.
Six crops and a flower
Six crops appear in the achievement list, which is the best available inventory of what the farm produces: carrots, beets, tomatoes, pumpkins, white flowers and hay. Carrots, beets and seeds are also named in the 9 November patch as resources whose respawn had to be fixed, which confirms they are foraged as well as farmed.
| Ingredient | Evidence it exists | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Carrot | Respawn fix, 9 Nov patch | Cooking |
| Beet | Respawn fix, 9 Nov patch | Cooking |
| Tomato | 50-tomato achievement, 7.9% | Cooking |
| Pumpkin | 80-pumpkin achievement, 21.7% | Cooking |
| White flower | Planting achievement, 11.4% | Alchemy, decoration |
| Hay | Craft 50 hay, 7.8% | Animal feed |
The white flower is not a cooking ingredient. It appears in two places in the achievement list — planting one, and the hidden Rare Flower achievement — and both point at the alchemy line rather than the kitchen. Hay is animal feed, listed separately at the same rate as the Feast achievement, which is probably why so few players have made hay: it competes for the same farm space as cooking crops.
Reaching 240
This is the band that matters for the first week, because 240 is the working travel ration. A meal at that value will fuel a crossing; a raw fish will not.
Two things push a meal over 240. Cooking rather than eating raw, which the game makes obvious, and combining ingredients, which it does not. The 24 October patch note about slimes being removed from the centre of the island mentions nothing about food, but the same patch also introduced automatic stacking for dropped items, which is a small quality-of-life change that makes gathering cooking ingredients much less tedious than it was in the demo.
Short of the 240 mark? Almost always, single ingredients are the reason. Cooking two things together in a pot produces a meal, not two meals, and the value of that meal is what the achievement checks.
Reaching 1,000
Four-digit meals require a farm rather than a forage trip. Getting there means: several crop types growing at once, a pot rather than a campfire, and enough surplus that you can afford to experiment rather than eat everything you grow.
7.8% of players have done it. For scale, that is fewer than the 10.3% who have planted 200 crops and slightly more than the 7.9% who have harvested 50 tomatoes. The Feast achievement sits in the same band of player commitment as running a serious farm, which makes sense: a meal that large is what a serious farm is for.
Reaching 1,800
The top band is held by 5.7% of players, the same rate as the Copper Age achievement and slightly below the 6.5% who have crafted 50 gold ingots. That clustering is informative. Players who have hit 1,800 are in roughly the same cohort as players who have done late-game metalwork, which suggests the 1,800 meal is a late-game kitchen rather than an early one that happens to be well stocked.
No recipe is published. What the achievement data supports is that the top band exists and that reaching it correlates with the late game. A guide claiming "the 1,800 recipe is three pumpkins and a tomato" is making up a formula the game does not document.
Food is the travel budget
Because food is travel fuel. The raft will not cross without food in your inventory, so whatever you can produce reliably is what you can afford to spend on a crossing. Better meals are the cheapest way to make each trip carry more of its own cost, and unlike metal or building material, food is the one resource a crossing will not let you skip.
The single most useful connection to make in the early game. Cooking looks like a side system for the first few hours and turns out to be the tech tree that unlocks distance.
Two food fixes
Two entries are relevant. The 7 November patch fixed "an issue that could cause the inventory to become invisible or appear out of position after dying while it was open", which matters here because a lost inventory on a cooking run means lost ingredients. The 6 November patch fixed food-related achievement issues, which is why some players had meals that qualified and no achievement.
A qualifying meal made before 7 November needs the save loaded on the current build before it grants. The 7 November announcement states that achievements already earned but not unlocked will be granted retroactively when you load your save.