So in my practice run, I decided that the best strategy to approach this challenge was to focus on gathering the ingredients first. I kept all my fish in fish tanks so that they were fresh, and had one of each necessary plant in my back yard. The locusts were a pain to find. I actually found that for me, Tilapia were more common at the Magnolia Promenade than the Sylvan Glade, so that saved time. The main issue was finding salmon. These took forever to catch, so I didn't end up making more than 2-3 renditions of each salmon dish. I also extensively tested the factors that go into making a yummy (and expensive) meal, which should interest you,
@christinal3106 since you were curious about variables. Here's what I found:
1 - After you hit level 10 of any cooking skill, you are pretty much guaranteed to make the top value of that dish every time. Ex. when I maxed out gourmet cooking, my Baked Alaska was almost always the full $702, regardless of whether it was "Good" or "Excellent." The exception here is cupcakes, which are hit or miss, I'm not sure why.
2 - Finishing the cooking aspiration has no effect on the quality or price of your dishes. Your food never spoils, which is nice. But since we could put them in the household inventory to prevent spoiling, this wasn't a necessary achievement.
3 - From what I could tell, being in the cooking career didn't provide a boost either (except maybe in speed - I didn't think of that till now though, so I'm not sure). Even maxing the career didn't provide a boost in value, so I didn't even join this career during the actual run.
4 - Quality of ingredients does not affect the price of the meal (although I only used Average freshness and above for fish and Good quality and above for plants).
5 - At this point, I was desperately trying to figure out what I was missing. And then I looked through the aspiration rewards and wondered if Marketable would apply to food. And as it turns out, it does. But you still have to cook most dishes several times because the multiplier is random. By the end of the run, I was able to get most meals at 260% or above of their original value. The maximum multiplier I got was 299% with the Monte Cristo Sandwich.
Timeline-wise, I finished collecting all ingredients by the 2nd Monday, cooked one of each meal before aging to Adult, and then used the rest of the time cooking meals over and over again for maximum multiplier. I also got lots of aspiration rewards along the way, which cut down on the time it took to fill my sim's needs.
Thanks to
@LenaLJ for the spreadsheet! I love spreadsheets, and this one was perfect - it really made the challenge easier to tackle. Towards the end, I added a column for maximum value (assuming a 299% multiplier) and subtracted my best value from the maximum to determine what was most profitable to spend time on, so this was extremely helpful.
And of course, congrats to
@Nutella on another win! This was lots of fun.
