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GameBrief · General
This beastro flavor guide covers the part that takes most players too long to figure out. The cooking loop is obvious. What isn't obvious is that every dish you cook is already deciding how the fight goes tonight. What the five tastes do, how they interact in combat, and why your secondary flavor choice matters more than anything else you'll do in the kitchen.
TL;DR: Beastro has five flavors: Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter, and Umami. (Some sources claim six. That's wrong.) Each flavor is a card suit in combat. Cooking dishes creates the cards your Caretaker fights with. Sour and Umami enhance each other; Bitter balances Umami, reducing its peak output. Start with two complementary flavors, not one or five. Oyshi the Umami Caretaker is the easiest starting point. The goal isn't to counter enemies. It's to build a deck so strong in its own flavor lane that it wins regardless.
The five flavors in Beastro are Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter, and Umami. They function simultaneously as the game's worldbuilding (the five regions Panko's Caretakers explore) and as card suits in combat (the type of card each dish ingredient produces).
A few sources online list six flavors. There are five. The confusion probably comes from Spicy ingredients appearing in later chapters, but Spicy is an effect modifier on cards, not a sixth suit.
Each flavor maps to a color code in the cooking interface:
These colors show up on both the ingredient UI and the combat cards. Once you internalize the color coding, identifying what a dish will produce becomes fast. You don't need to read ingredient names mid-service.
The cooking system creates your Caretaker's deck directly. There's no separate card collection screen, no purchasing, no draft. What you cook is what they fight with.
The process: each ingredient carries a flavor. When you cook that ingredient in a dish, it generates one or more cards of that flavor for your Caretaker's combat run that night. Cook five Umami ingredients and your Caretaker walks into the puppet theater with a heavy Umami deck. Cook a mixed plate of Sour and Umami and the deck reflects that balance.
Card quality scales with cooking technique. The cooking mini-games (chopping, tenderizing, and boiling) each have quality thresholds. Landing better execution ratings produces stronger versions of the same card. A "Fantastic" boiling result generates a higher-power Umami card than a basic pass. This is why the cooking station upgrades matter: not just for throughput, but for the card quality ceiling.
Two things the tutorial does a poor job of explaining:
Every Caretaker has preferred flavor combinations. Cook toward those preferences and their spirits improve, which unlocks stronger combat abilities. Oyshi responds best to Umami-heavy meals with Sour mixed in. Kalan wants Bitter-forward dishes. Feed Oyshi a plate of Sweet ingredients and he eats fine but his best cards stay locked. The flavor request system during service is your signal: when a Caretaker sits down, their order tells you what to prioritize.
Monster parts are time-sensitive. When Caretakers return from runs with monster parts, cook them in the next session. Monster parts generate cards with special effects that standard crops can't produce. Holding them for three days while other cooks go by is a common mistake. The right time to use a monster part is the day after you get it.
The puppet theater combat uses trick-taking rules: monsters lead with a card type and you respond from your Caretaker's deck. Flavor enhancement pairs determine whether your cards play above or below their printed values.
GODEEPER: For a full breakdown of which specific cards to build toward in each chapter, the deck building guide covers the strongest card effects by Caretaker type. Beastro Deck Building Guide: Best Cards and Combos →
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This is the part most guides skip, including Into Indie Games and Katkat's Caretaker article. The combat cards don't just compete on raw number values. Specific flavor pairs interact with each other.
Enhancement: Sour cards enhance Umami cards and vice versa. When both are in play in the same encounter, each flavor increases the effective output of the other. This is why Oyshi's Umami deck pairs so naturally with Sour secondary cards, and the combination pushes both above their printed ceilings. Enhancement is how you win fights that your raw numbers shouldn't win.
Balance: Bitter flavor balances Umami. Balanced cards perform at reduced effectiveness (neither below their floor nor above their ceiling). Against an enemy whose strategy involves suppressing your deck output, balance can be a defensive tool. Against an enemy you need to overwhelm, balance is a liability.
The implication for deck building: if you're running Oyshi, mixing in Bitter cards actively weakens your Umami cards' enhancement synergy. Mixing in Sour actively amplifies it. The choice of secondary flavor is not neutral.
Enhancement pairs confirmed:
Balance interactions confirmed:
The Sweet and Salty flavor interactions weren't fully documented at launch. The community is still mapping the full chart. Based on structural patterns, Sweet likely enhances Salty in some capacity, but this should be confirmed in-game before building around it.
GODEEPER: The tips guide covers caretaker food preferences and how the cooking station upgrades change card output quality. Beastro Tips: Cooking, Caretakers, and What the Game Doesn't Tell You →
The three playable Caretakers each come from a flavor region, and their origin defines what they need from your kitchen.
Oyshi (Umami Caretaker) is the starting Caretaker and the most forgiving for new players. His combat style is defense-forward, with high healing, survivable even when tricks don't go your way. Feeding him Umami-heavy meals with Sour mixed in activates his strongest abilities and builds the Umami/Sour enhancement pair that makes his deck competitive in chapter two and beyond. Players on Reddit have called him "the sweet one" who becomes the go-to once unlocked, which causes some confusion; Oyshi is Umami, not Sweet. The nickname comes from his personality, not his flavor suit.
Kalan (Bitter Caretaker) is the second unlock, harder to earn. He shows up in the wilds and resists your restaurant initially; you have to figure out his preferred dishes through story progression and experimentation. Kalan's Bitter-forward deck has a different combat rhythm than Oyshi's: fewer sustained healing effects, more encounter-specific disruption. His Bitter/Sour pairing works differently than Oyshi's Umami/Sour path, and adapting your cooking strategy to him is part of the chapter two challenge.
Third Caretaker: unlocked later in the story (referenced in the community as "Azur"). Full details on this Caretaker's flavor region and preferences weren't fully documented at launch. Approach with the same principle of reading what they request during service.
The Salty and Sour denizens who appear as vendors in Palo Pori are NOT playable Caretakers. This is a frequent point of confusion among new players, particularly those who expected Salty and Sour to become combat characters after the early chapters. They remain NPCs.
Meeting a Caretaker's flavor request during service unlocks stronger combat abilities for that night's run. Ignoring it doesn't hurt service quality, but it caps what the Caretaker can do in the puppet theater.
The deck you build is a byproduct of what you cook. Since you can't curate cards directly, deck building in Beastro is really ingredient selection discipline.
Two complementary flavors is the baseline that holds up through chapters one and two. For Oyshi, that means Umami primary and Sour secondary. The enhancement pair covers both flavors' cards and gives you tools for most encounter types. You're not spreading thin, and you're not brittle to flavor counters.
Mono-flavor decks clear the early hours without trouble. Chapter two is where they break. Enemy encounters start introducing flavor-specific defenses and encounter modifiers that punish decks without response options. A pure Umami deck with no Sour will still work against Umami-neutral enemies, but you lose the enhancement advantage and have nothing when an encounter suppresses your main suit.
Three-flavor decks work once you understand the enhancement chart. Adding a third complementary flavor extends your response options without creating balance liabilities. The risk is diluting your primary enhancement pair if you pick the wrong third.
Five flavors is not a strategy. It looks like coverage. What it actually produces is a deck with no coherent enhancement pairs that can't win by overwhelming any single combat track. You're covering everything and winning nothing.
When your Caretaker makes a flavor request during service, fill it even if it costs you a better dish by raw quality. The request isn't random. It's the game telling you what your deck needs before the next encounter. I've skipped these requests to optimize service flow and regretted it consistently in chapter two fights.
Cooking station upgrades matter more for secondary flavor cards than primary ones. Primary flavors are easy to hit Fantastic ratings on by volume. Secondary flavors come up less often during prep, so a lower-ceiling station caps those cards at mediocre quality. Upgrade toward your secondary flavor station early.
Check the skill tree after your first combat run, not your third. Several cooking upgrades are available earlier than players expect and compound across every session. The game doesn't surface them aggressively.
Foraged ingredients provide Sour and Umami that farming doesn't produce in chapter one. Even a short forage run on days when your garden is full keeps flavor variety healthy and stops the deck from drifting entirely into whatever your farm produces most.
What are the 5 flavors in Beastro? Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter, and Umami. Each acts as both a card suit in combat and a flavor region in the world. Some sources list six. That's incorrect. There are five.
How does cooking affect combat in Beastro? Every ingredient in your dish produces a corresponding flavor card for your Caretaker. Cook Umami ingredients and the deck has more Umami cards. Cook a mixed dish and the deck reflects that. Cooking quality affects card strength. Better execution ratings at the cooking stations produce higher-power versions of the same cards.
What caretaker should I start with? Oyshi, the Umami Caretaker. His deck is defense-forward with good healing, which means early mistakes are survivable while you learn the trick-taking system. Pair his dishes toward Umami and Sour for the enhancement synergy.
What does enhancement mean in Beastro combat? Sour and Umami enhance each other: when both are in the same deck, each flavor's cards perform above their printed values. Enhancement is how you win encounters that raw numbers shouldn't win. Building your deck to activate an enhancement pair is the core mid-game skill.
How many flavor types should my deck have? Two for the first two chapters: one primary flavor matching your Caretaker's preference, one secondary that forms an enhancement pair with the primary. Mono-flavor decks break in chapter two against flavor-specific enemy modifiers. Five-flavor spread produces a deck that does nothing well.
Is Beastro on Game Pass? Yes. Beastro launched day-one on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass on June 11, 2026. It's included with any active Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass subscription.
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