How to Increase Favorability with certain NPCs?

Cooked food is worth a lot, especially if made with rare or valuable ingredients. Materials and crafted items don’t seem to cost that much. Their rarity won’t matter since they’ll be worth the same amount of points. You can send 10 gifts per day. This attempt limit counts towards any NPC in the game. If the NPC you want to increase favorability with is located in the wilderness, it’s better to gather the (infected) ingredients there, cook them, then give it to him/her. You can only gift non-infected food to NPCs, especially those in the wilderness.

The best example for this is the researcher Lina in Scientia’s HQ in Sand Castle. Before she can start a giveto you, you’ll need to be familiar with her first. Strawberries and melons are common in this map, particularly around the oasis. To create a jam, you need to cook four fruits. Just cook three melons and a strawberry to get a blue jam. If you give these cooked food to her, you’ll get a huge amount of favorability points (around 500), compared to food cooked with ordinary (gray) ingredients. The only problem with this is that she won’t accept these if you cooked them in the map since they’ll be infected.

There are five favorability levels as shown in the screenshot below. Once the favorability of an NPC increases, she/he will send you a private message and some rare rewards.

Aside from quests, is there another good reason why you should cook often and give them to NPCs?

Yes, there is. By increasing the favorability of NPCs, they will send you gifts in the form of usually rare or expensive items such as crafting materials or armor/machine materials to upgrade your weapon attachments or armor layers.