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The Cooking skill was quite different before Jagex released Cook-X on 12 September 2005. Before Cook-X, we had to use each individual raw food item with the fire or range in order to cook it, rather than doing this only once, having the Cook-X menu appear, and then, with a few clicks, having your character automatically cook the rest of that type of raw food in your inventory. If, for example, you had 28 raw lobsters in your inventory, before the release of Cook-X you would have to click twice to cook each one (one click on the lobster to select it, and another click on the fire or range to cook it), for a total of 56 clicks to cook all 28; after Cook-X, this was reduced to only four clicks of the mouse (two to use the lobster with the fire or range, then a right-click to open the Cook-X menu, then a left-click to select Cook-X) and two keystrokes (entering 28 into the prompt), after which you could sit back for a little while and let your character take care of the rest.
It should be obvious that this update made the Cooking skill significantly easier, because it was now much less demanding of the player's attention while still giving the same experience rates. What it really did, though, was turn Cooking into a joke: whereas before the skill already gave experience quickly and was relatively cheap to train, now the demand on the player's attention was also seriously reduced. When skillcapes were released later on, the Cooking skillcape was hardly considered an accomplishment, and those who had an untrimmed Cooking skillcape were even mocked for choosing the easiest skill to level to 99 and then thinking that they had achieved something noteworthy. I can recall that, throughout 2007, when I looked at the Hiscores, several people had gotten 200M experience in Cooking, whereas very few to none had done so in each of the other skills. (If you aren't satisfied with my memories, there is also a YouTube video showing the Hiscores on 1 August 2006, in which you can see that Cooking has the most players with 200M experience, as well as the highest average number of experience points among the players listed on the first page for any of the individual skills.)
It was (I think) the first in the series of Do-X updates (like Fletch-X, Smelt-X, Spin-X, etc.) that took out some of the repetitive clicking from the game. While I certainly wouldn't say these sort of updates ruined
the game, or even any individual skill, perhaps they were still the beginnings of a lazy, impatient attitude towards the game that would really become apparent starting in the late 2000s, as well as in Old School RuneScape as a whole—the quality of life
updates that the EasyScapers push at every turn.
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This page last modified on 2 May 2021.