BDO Imperial Cooking Guide

What Imperial Crafting Delivery is

Imperial Crafting Delivery is a fixed-price buyback program: specific NPCs around the world permanently buy certain crafted goods at prices set by the game, not by players. It has two branches — Imperial Cuisine for cooking and Imperial Alchemy for elixirs — and both work the same way, so everything here applies to the alchemy side too.

Three properties make it unlike any other way of selling food:

• The price is fixed. No undercutting, no waiting for a buyer, no watching the market.
• The sale is instant. Hand the boxes over and the silver lands in your wallet on the spot — no Marketplace queue and no Marketplace tax.
• The amount is capped daily. You cannot dump unlimited stock, which is exactly why the income is steady rather than spiky.

In short: predictable, bounded, daily silver. That profile makes Imperial Cooking a routine you run alongside everything else, not a jackpot you chase.

How Imperial Cooking boxes work

You cannot hand the NPC loose food. Eligible dishes first have to be packaged into an Imperial Cooking Box: open the processing window, pick the Imperial Cuisine option, and combine a fixed number of copies of one dish into one box. (Verify the per-dish count in-game; it varies by recipe.) Only a curated list of dishes is boxable, and each box type is tied to exactly one dish — so "can I box this?" is the first thing to check before you commit to a big batch.

Boxes come in tiers named after the cooking ranks — Apprentice, Skilled, Professional, Artisan, Master and Guru — and you unlock a tier's boxes as your own cooking rank reaches it. Higher tiers pay more per box, which means your cooking rank is not just about unlocking recipes: it directly raises your income ceiling. On top of that, Cooking Mastery adds a percentage bonus to every imperial payout, and deliveries also award imperial seals you can save up and exchange for extra rewards. (Verify the current Mastery bonus values and the seal exchange list in-game; both have been retuned over the years.)

Where and how to deliver

Boxes are sold to the Imperial Crafting Delivery NPCs stationed in major cities. The quickest way to find one is the NPC search button at the top of the screen — search for the imperial delivery entry and the game path-finds you there; the world map also marks these NPCs with their own icon. (Verify which towns have one in-game; the set of locations has grown over time.)

Two practical notes. First, boxes are heavy — package near your storage and check your weight limit before you fill your inventory. Second, the sale itself is a simple dialogue: talk to the NPC, hand over the boxes, and the silver is paid immediately. No listing, no waiting, no fee.

The daily limit, and why it shapes everything

You can only deliver a limited number of boxes per day, and the cap scales with your account's progression. The long-standing community rule of thumb is roughly half your character level in boxes per day, shared across your whole family — and, by most accounts, shared with Imperial Alchemy deliveries too — but the exact formula and the reset time have been adjusted more than once. (Verify in-game; check your remaining allowance before planning a big batch.)

The right mental model is a renewable daily budget: capacity you either use or lose, because unused allowance does not roll over to tomorrow. That has one big consequence for how you play: consistency beats bursts. A modest stack of boxes delivered every day out-earns a giant pile delivered once a week, because the pile slams into the cap while the daily habit never wastes allowance.

Which dishes are worth boxing

Because the payout side is fixed and the cost side floats with the Marketplace, boxing is a margin game. For any candidate dish, ask three questions:

• What does one box cost me? Ingredient price multiplied by the copies each box consumes — cheap grain- and vegetable-heavy dishes usually fill boxes cheapest.
• Can I supply it in volume? A great margin is worthless if you can only source enough materials for a handful of boxes. Workers on nodes, your farm and Marketplace pre-orders are the usual pipelines.
• Does it overlap with what I already cook? If your leveling recipe is also boxable, the same batch pays twice.

This is also why you should distrust static "best imperial box" lists: payouts are fixed but ingredient prices move daily, so the most profitable box changes with the market. Compute your own margin — cost per box versus the payout shown at delivery (verify payouts in-game; they differ per dish and tier) — and re-check it whenever ingredient prices shift.

Imperial Cooking while you level

Leveling cooking already produces far more food than you can use, and Imperial Cooking turns that surplus into the thing that funds the grind. The practical rule: when two recipes give similar EXP per hour, pick the one that can be boxed — you lose nothing on the leveling side and gain a daily income stream on the other. How to weigh EXP per cook against throughput is covered in Best Cooking EXP Recipes, and the gear that makes huge batches possible is in the cooking leveling guide — this section is just the bridge: cook for EXP, box the output, deliver daily.

A practical daily routine

Once set up, the whole system runs on a short loop:

• Stock in bulk. Keep your boxable dish's ingredients flowing from workers, your farm and Marketplace pre-orders.
• Check what your stock can become. Add your inventory to BDO Craft Helper and sort by Max Amount to see which boxable dish you can mass-cook in the highest volume — the how-to-use guide covers the screenshot scanner and the recursive panel.
• Mass-cook while AFK. Start the batch and let it run while you play or step away.
• Package up to your cap. There is no point boxing more than today's limit — dishes store fine unboxed.
• Deliver on your daily rounds. Fold the NPC visit into your daily loop.

Ten minutes of attention a day, and the food your leveling produces anyway becomes a silver stream that never depends on the Marketplace's mood.

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