I've been slowly figuring things out with my friends, we have one person going down each skill tree on a private server.
I've finally gotten far enough in procuration to be able to start cooking, and I have been completely unable to gain any skill levels.
Here are the details.
I was, at first, using an oven and a primitive cooking pot.
I thought, after 2 successful meals with no gains, that I might need to upgrade my pot, so I got our blacksmith to make me a cooking pot.
After two more meals, I searched around online and found someone saying that you needed a big cauldron to get gains. I then convinced our blacksmith to waste the 18 ingots to give it a shot.
The big cauldron was showing about twice as many options for cooking as the oven, so I got excited and gave it a shot. Two meals later with no gains, I got pissed off and moved my charcoal back to the oven to find that now the oven was showing those extra cooking options. I tried cooking another meal there and still got no gains.
I then tried cooking one of the 5 ingredient meals, but was unable to. The bar filled like I was cooking something, but when it finished nothing happened, no pop up error or anything.
My clan is trying to rush me into tailoring so I can get the stuff we need together to make training dummies, but I can't get there without cooking gains, and I don't know what's going on.