Chefs for Blockheads

Chefs for Blockheads is a companion mod for Cooking for Blockheads by BlayTheNinth. It is an unofficial companion, not affiliated with its author. It contains none of that mod's code or assets and needs it to run.

Supported versions

All three versions have the same features. Pick the file that matches your game version and loader.

What it adds

A new Chef villager who lives in villages, can be hired, and cooks for you. Put him in your kitchen, open his menu, pick a dish and an amount, and he works out how to make it from whatever your Cooking for Blockheads kitchen holds, including every step in between. He starts as a humble Line Cook and learns harder recipes the more he cooks.

The short version

1. Find a village with a chef (look for a chef's house).
2. Trade cooked food to chefs for Chef's Tokens. A Master-level chef sells the Chef's Spoon.
3. Craft the Master Chef's Cookbook.
4. Hire a chef: hold the cookbook, carry his price in Chef's Tokens (every chef asks a different amount) and right-click him.
5. Pick him up with the Chef's Spoon (sneak + right-click) and put him down in your kitchen (sneak + right-click any Cooking for Blockheads block).
6. Hang your utensils on Tool Racks, stock the fridge, right-click him and order.

Find a chef

• Chefs appear in new villages in the plains, desert, savanna, snowy and taiga styles. Each style has its own Chef's House in matching materials.
• Each house is a working kitchen built from Cooking for Blockheads blocks: cooking table, oven, two-high fridge, sink, counters, cabinets, toaster, two tool racks, spice rack, cutting board and fruit basket, plus a bed and a table.
• A chef takes a Cooking Table as his job block, like any villager profession.
• Don't break the house's kitchen. Blocks in a generated chef house vanish with no drops, and every chef nearby grabs a kitchen knife and comes after you. (Server owners can switch this off.)

Trade with chefs

Chefs level from Novice to Master like any villager. Hand them cooked food (porkchop, chicken, pumpkin pie, mushroom stew, cake, rabbit stew) and earn Chef's Tokens. At Master level a chef sells the Chef's Spoon.

Hire your own

1. Craft the Master Chef's Cookbook from Cooking for Blockheads II, a Nether Star and a Dragon Head.
2. Hold the cookbook, right-click a chef and pay his own price in Chef's Tokens. Every chef asks a different price (32 to 64 by default). The cookbook is handed over to him and used up.
3. Use the Chef's Spoon to pick him up (sneak + right-click him) and put him down in your kitchen (sneak + right-click any Cooking for Blockheads block). That links him to the kitchen. He strolls near it and never sleeps.

Order food

Right-click your chef to open his menu: a searchable list of every dish your kitchen can make right now, with the most he can make and an amount selector. He cooks one craft every 3 seconds, with a progress bar over his head showing the dish, the amount and the time left. Finished food goes into your kitchen's storage, or to a delivery spot you choose.

• Full recipe chains. He works out multi-step recipes (wheat to flour to dough to bread, bread and steak to a burger) and uses what is in your storage first.
• Only real food. The menu lists dishes that give hunger or saturation, and never seeds. Sort it by name, hunger or saturation.
• Delivery spot. Ctrl + right-click a chest, barrel or fridge with the Chef's Spoon to choose where his finished food goes. Click it again to clear.
• Utensils must hang on a Tool Rack. Knives and other tools (Pam's HarvestCraft cutting boards, pots, skillets, saucepans, bakeware, mixing bowls, grinders and more) are needed but never used up. A chef carries no tools of his own, so you craft the equipment and hang it on a Cooking for Blockheads Tool Rack. A rack holds two items, so a big Pam's kitchen wants several racks next to the cooking table.

Cooking ranks

A hired chef starts as a Line Cook and works his way up: Prep Cook, Sous Chef, Chef de Cuisine and finally Master Chef.

• How hard a dish is depends on how many crafts deep its recipe chain goes. Cooked beef is one craft; a dish made from a dough made from a flour is three.
• What each rank can cook (default): Line Cook depth 1, Prep Cook 2, Sous Chef 3, Chef de Cuisine 4, Master Chef anything.
• Experience comes from every dish he cooks and equals the dish's difficulty, so a depth-1 dish gives 1 and a depth-4 dish gives 4. An order of 10 depth-2 dishes is worth 20. The first time he cooks a dish he has never made, he earns a small bonus.
• Ranks cost 100, 400, 1,200 and 3,000 experience (defaults). Harder dishes need more ingredients, so the top ranks take real work.
• In the menu, dishes above his rank are greyed out with the rank they need. The Master Chef's Cookbook shows the rank every dish requires, and his rank appears in his name.
• All the numbers are in the config, and the whole system can be switched off.

Recipe browser and Cookbook Stand

Right-click the Master Chef's Cookbook anywhere except on a chef to browse every food in your pack that gives hunger or saturation. It is searchable and can be sorted by name, hunger or saturation. Click a dish to see how much hunger and saturation it gives, how many it makes, the base ingredients it comes down to, the utensils it needs and the chef rank it requires. An ingredient that accepts several items shows a star; hover to see them all.

Hiring a chef uses the book up, so craft a Cookbook Stand (a lectern, a gold ingot and an emerald) to keep a book in the world: right-click it with a cookbook to place the book, then right-click the stand to browse without carrying anything. Sneak + right-click with an empty hand takes the book back, and breaking the stand drops it.

Advancements

A short chain guides new players: Hello, Chef!, Tip Jar, A Cookbook Worth a Dragon, Personal Chef, Kitchen Staff, Order Up! and the challenge Banquet (have a chef cook 10 different dishes). There is also one hidden advancement for upsetting a chef.

Creative

Everything the mod adds is in its own Chefs for Blockheads creative tab: the Chef's Token, Chef's Spoon, Master Chef's Cookbook, Cookbook Stand and the Village Compass, a creative-only compass that points at the nearest village.

Servers and modpacks

• Hired chefs are protected. A hired chef takes no damage from mobs, players, fire, lava, drowning, falling or lightning, and is put back at his kitchen if he falls out of the world. /kill still works. Can be turned off.
• Shared kitchens with FTB Teams (optional, on by default). Members of the owner's FTB Teams team can open the chef's menu and order food; nobody else can. Operators can too. Storing, linking and choosing the delivery spot stay with the owner. Without FTB Teams, only the owner and operators can order.
• Config file (serverconfig/chefsforblockheads-server.toml in the world folder): hire price range, seconds per craft, how far a chef strolls and is pulled back, the protection switch, sharing, the cooking ranks (depth and experience per rank, the new-dish bonus), and the kitchen guard (on/off, how long chefs stay angry, damage on each difficulty).
• Item tag chefsforblockheads:utensils: add any item that should count as a kitchen utensil.
• Item tag chefsforblockheads:cannot_cook: add any item the chef must never make. Recipes that produce it are ignored.
• The server decides what he can cook. Dishes come from the recipes of the mods the server has loaded, so a mod's dishes only appear if it is installed on the server too.

Compatibility

• Requires: Cooking for Blockheads (with its library, Balm) for your version, as in the table above.
• Lithostitched is recommended: it is what adds the Chef's House to village generation. Without it the mod works but chefs will not appear in new villages.
• Farmer's Delight, its addons, and Pam's HarvestCraft 2 with its companion mods work out of the box. Recipes are read from the game's normal crafting, smelting, smoking, campfire, Farmer's Delight cooking pot and cutting board recipe types.
• FTB Teams is optional, for shared kitchens.
• Only newly generated village chunks get chef houses.

Credits

Cooking for Blockheads and Balm by BlayTheNinth. Farmer's Delight by vectorwing. Lithostitched by Apollo.

License

All Rights Reserved. Copyright (c) 2026 Pavilon.