Mortar and Pestle

Mortar and Pestle is a Mistlands-tier Cauldron improvement that unlocks a large number of new cooking recipes.

How to Craft

• Crafting Pots and Pans requires 8 Black Marble, 6 Finewood, and 4 Corewood
• Finewood and Corewood are easy to obtain in the early biomes, and you might have some left over from your previous adventures
• Black Marble is abundant in the Mistlands

Since the game’s biomes get progressively harder, you will want to keep upgrading your Cauldron to fortify yourself with stronger food buffs. When you reach the Mistlands, you’ll want to create a Mortar and Pestle as soon as possible to upgrade your Cauldron to level 5, provided you already have a Spice Rack, Butcher’s Table, and Pots and Pans.

• Black Marble is the precious stone of the Mistlands mined from abandoned structures and Petrified Bones with a Black Metal Pickaxe
• Finewood is gathered by chopping down Birch and Oak trees that grow in the Meadows and Plains biomes
• Corewood is contained in the Pine trees that grow in the Black Forest

The key ingredient to crafting a Mortar and Pestle is Black Marble. You’ll find plenty of this stone in the Mistlands. It’s contained in the biome’s abandoned structures that you can dismantle. You’ll also get it by “mining” the large Petrified Bones scattered throughout the biome. These bones can be found all over, but a lot of the time, you’ll find some inside Dvergr settlements. The dwarves won’t like you mining their bones, so if you plan on doing so, be ready for a fight.

In order to mine Black Marble, you will need at least a Black Metal Pickaxe. Despite using a metal from the Plains, crafting this pickaxe will require some Mistlands-specific ingredients (Yggdrasil Wood), and to get that, you’ll need a Black Metal Axe, so make sure you have one when venturing into the Mistlands.

The wood you’ll need for your Mortar and Pestle is much easier to get, and chances are, you’ll have some lying around. To get some Finewood, you’ll be chopping down Birch and Oak trees in the Meadows and Plains biomes. And for Corewood, you’ll be visiting the Black Forest and cutting down its Pines.

How to Place

• Mortar and Pestle needs to be placed close to a Cauldron
• You’ll want to have a Workbench ready when placing down a Mortar and Pestle

After acquiring all the necessary ingredients, head over to your Cauldron and open your Hammer crafting menu. Make sure you have a Workbench placed nearby, then navigate to the Crafting tab.

Mortar and Pestle is not too picky about where it can go. It simply needs a relatively flat surface to be placed. If you try to place your Mortar and Pestle in an unacceptable spot, the game will tell you what you’re doing wrong, like if you’re too far away from the Cauldron.

Upon successfully placing Mortar and Pestle, you’ll see the number in the star in the upper right part of the Cauldron cooking menu go up by one. This will unlock a great deal of new recipes.

Helpful Tips

• The intended way to upgrade your Cauldron is to build a new improvement after reaching a new biome. However, it doesn’t actually matter in which order you build these improvements – each of them raises your Cauldron level by 1
• Even when you have the correct Cauldron level, you’ll often need to find the actual ingredients before you can see the new recipes
• Scrolling your mouse wheel rotates Mortar and Pestle when you’re placing it, allowing you to find a good spot for it