The best recipes in Dragon’s Dogma 2

Recipes in Dragon’s Dogma 2 are contingent on combining items — usually to produce other, more useful items. Fresh food becomes a healing salve, rotten food becomes travel supplies, and the dismembered body parts of monsters become... well, a whole bunch of stuff.

But combining items in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is way less of an art than it is a science. In this Dragon’s Dogma 2 guide, we’ll show you how to combine items, plus offer a list of the best recipes for combining items.

To combine items in Dragon’s Dogma 2, open the items menu, which will show you a rundown of every held item by every character in your party — including your character, your main pawn, and any pawns you’ve hired.

Press “X” (Xbox) or Square (PS5), and you’ll be presented with two menus. The first is more experimental (literally called “Experiment”) letting you combine any items that you’ve already got in your inventory without necessarily knowing the predetermined outcome of the combination.

The second menu option (“Use Recipe”) allows you to use recipes to combine items. It’s basically coming at the item combination from a result-first approach, telling you which items you need to combine to create a specific result.

You can also stop by any inn or the storage chest at any house you own to combine items. Either choose the “combine” dialogue option when talking to an innkeeper or interact with the chest in your house to combine items.

The benefit of storing items is that doing so is essentially a fridge, preserving them in pristine condition. Say you’ve got Apples or Grapes in your inventory — they’ll end up rotten after a few in-game days pass, as will any meat or fish you acquire. But if you store them in an inn or in your house, you’ll stop them from turning rotten, so you can use them for crafting recipes whenever you want.

In the table just below, we’ve laid out our picks for the best recipes from item combinations in Dragon’s Dogma 2, including the name of the recipe, the effects of the item you create, and the ingredients you’ll need to create it.

Keep in mind that a lot of items can be created from multiple item combinations. The table above points out some combinations that allow you to create the intended item. With this in mind, you should be able to put together some vital items through plenty of acquired items while you’re exploring Dragon’s Dogma 2.

We’ll update this list if we discover better item combination recipes in Dragon’s Dogma 2.

For more Dragon’s Dogma 2 explainers, see how to unlock all vocations and see all riftstone locations, check out our lists of the best augments and best portcrystal locations, or poke around our interactive Dragon’s Dogma 2 map.