Character Making

The following is a "guide" to making a character for toriko.

Step -1: Common Abilities
The following are abilities everyone in the possession of gourmet cells all seem to share even without "awakening" them.
 * Super Strength, Speed and Durability: Self explanatory really, gourmet cells give you a boost to your physical stats.
 * Enhanced Healing: Creatures with gourmet cells have an incredibly high healing ability, this ability is so incredibly high that it can even reverse fatal damage entirely. This healing works by eating either compatible or incredibly nutritious ingredients which will stimulate the gourmet cells and make them forcibly regenerate. Certain wounds however may never heal if the creature which inflicts them is that overwhelmingly stronger, permanently scarring the gourmet cells physically and mentally.
 * Adaptive Physiology: Under certain stimulus the body will slowly but certainly begin to adapt against it up to an extent, this ability is automatic and isn't normally conscious. The adaptations that result from the possession of gourmet cells is varied and can replicate the biological functions of just about every organism but this adaptation isn't omnipotent, it can only give an organism a fighting chance against a dangerous environment or technique and the creature's own ingenuity must provide the second half of the push.
 * Self-Colonialism: This ability isn't obvious to anyone unless they learn Enbu but gourmet cells are capable of "being their own individual organism", in that they each have a personality as well as power and senses. This means that it's possible for one to detect things through their gourmet cells and allow them to make a decision without consulting with the nervous system.

Step 0: Cooking (Optional)
Some character in Toriko do not hunt wild animals (as much) and instead specialize in cooking rather than outright fighting. These characters are incredibly relevant to the attainment of strength since well prepared food is many folds better tasting and nutrient rich than improperly cooked food or uncooked food. While chefs aren't necessary for strict survival they are necessary to grow in strength since eating individually compatible food is the main method of acquiring "statistical increases" in Toriko, it is also for this reason that weak humans have managed to survive in such a dangerous world, because they are able to acquire more nutrients by cooking food, an ability unique to humans.

With all that said, no one needs to make a cook since there will be NPC cooks, and if you wish to make one there is no actual downside to combat ability often times.

Step 1: Hunting Method
While all powerful entities in the world of toriko have gourmet cells and thus share the baseline superhuman increase to their physical stats each individual character tends to specialize in their method of combat in one way or another, the following are various ways a character may specialize:
 * Weapon Use: The simplest and perhaps the most common method of hunting, hunting by use of weapons. While normal real life weapons do exist in the world of Toriko they tend to be ineffective against beasts with capture levels above 1. Instead most relevant weapons in Toriko tend to be either: extremely technologically powerful or a melee weapon (normally in the shape or referred to as a cooking utensil) made out of animal parts. Since the beasts of toriko are so superhumanly powerful and extremely varied one can feasibly acquire any manner of weapon from a creature naturally or craft one using materials from an animal. Flying slashes and the likes are of course possible to use for ranged options other than projectiles.
 * Dark Technique: The Dark Technique is a special family of techniques using Revitalizing Knives which allows one to heal entities by cutting in between their cells and using the revitalizing properties of the revitalizing knives to cause the cells to heal. Its said that mastery of this technique may allow one to heal any injury and eat a live ingredient forever.
 * Chemical Use: Some characters prefer to rely on chemicals rather than conventional weapons to fight, this may also fall under biological mutations if it's generated by the user themselves.
 * Martial Art: A method of fighting which relies only on the user's body, while similar to the use of Biological mutations Martial Arts are different because they can be learned and used by any other hunter as long as they have a body and the appropriate limbs.
 * Gourmet Energy Construct: A technique almost exclusive to martial artists which revolves around using the gourmet energy of gourmet cells and creating constructs out of it. The constructs of gourmet energy will typically be glowing kitchen utensils and are actually solid and not just flying slashes with weird shapes. Gourmet energy is sometimes capable of "eating" and "puking out" that which it ate, making it extremely useful even for non martial artists to add to their arsenal to strengthen their techniques.
 * Symbiosis/"Summoning": Some rare gourmet hunters like to rely on tamed life forms to fight in their stead in place of them fighting themselves. Normally these tend to be insects or plants carried in the form of seeds or eggs although it may be possible for other creatures to be stores and used as "summons". In very few cases one may instead have some symbiosis with another creature, allowing both creatures to become stronger and survive as a whole.
 * Knocking: Knocking is the term used to refer to techniques which paralyze and incapacitate animals without inflicting any harm on them. True masters of knocking are rare however its use is very widespread due to the utility of catching live prey when it comes to special preparation ingredients. Knocking is a mix of medical knowledge and appropriate martial technique coupled with the right type of weapon, it can be used for medicinal purposes or to strengthen oneself and others as well.
 * Biological Mutation: After acquiring Gourmet Cells some people will suffer some kind of biological mutation, in most cases this mutation will be mostly aesthetic but in other cases the mutation may grant their user additional abilities they lacked before, normally those of another creature but sometimes entirely new mutations may arise.
 * Supernatural Mumbo Jumbo: Extremely rare but some characters do seem to simply have supernatural powers with no biological explanation. The confirmed ones seem to be: Spiritual/Ghostly Communion, Divination, Clairvoyance, Gravity Manipulation, "Minority World", energy draining, air pressure manipulation, teleportation. This may be a result of the distinctly different laws of physics in toriko so here are possible explanations:
 * Divination/Clairvoyance, this may simply be a type of extra sense like the Intuition and 6th sense powerful entities seem to possess, and as such can be treated as a kind of lesser mutation by gourmet cells.
 * Gravity Manipulation, and other bizarre gravity related effects seem to be a result of "strange" magnetism and such it may be possible for an organism to produce and emit these strange magnetic waves.

Of course characters may know tricks and techniques of various types of hunting it isn't a rigid system, for example: most powerful characters seem to have an understanding of Knocking on top of their normal hunting method. Additionally because of the weirdness inherent to the biological mutations sometimes their use may "encroach" unto the other kinds of hunting methods.

Step 2: Senses
In toriko your senses are as if not more important to your survival than your actual combat strength. Various characters seem to possess an overall increase to all their senses while others may specialize to an absurd extent or acquire senses humans don't have, the following are a list of possible senses:
 * Touch: This sense is pretty self explanatory, you can sense temperature, pressure, pain and other similar things with it.
 * Smell: This sense allows you to detect chemicals at a distance, it's really quite useful and versatile and it's the only sense which can allow you to "peer into the past" without needing to rely on deductive reasoning.
 * Sight: When this sense is super specialized in canon it mostly broadens to every wavelength of the light spectrum. However one may find it useful to grant greater eyesight in a telescopic or microscopic way, or perhaps increased dynamic vision.
 * Hearing: Pretty self explanatory, radar, lower and higher frequencies than normal, the usual.
 * Proprioception: The ability to perceive the relative position of one's body parts. No one in canon has this sense specialized in any degree so it might be interesting to use.
 * Magnetoception: The ability to perceive electricity or magnetism. Not a normal ability for humans so it might be interesting to have a non human sense but it may fall into super sight.
 * Thermal Vision: The ability to perceive the infrared radiation creatures emit. Like magnetoception it's not normally a human ability but it may fall in super sight.
 * Sixth Sense: An ability mostly manifested in creatures rather than humans, the ability to sense danger institutionally. All of the absolute strongest creatures in the world possess this ability at its utmost potential allowing them to survive for several centuries in the gourmet world.

Step 3: Appetite Demon
In Toriko the possession of gourmet cells almost always leads to the possession of an Appetite Demon. While for most people their Appetite demons will never be relevant they do provide the ability to use of a technique known as Intimidation:
 * Intimidation: A technique where one will impose their will and killing intent on another creature or groups of creature as a means of scaring them into either submission or to make them run away in fear. When this technique is performed an illusion of the appetite demon inside of a creature will almost always manifest. This technique is supremely effective against considerable weaker opponents making them give up on a fight almost always but it is a useless technique against opponents of close level in power and completely ineffectual if the target is outright stronger.
 * "Supreme Routine Intimidation": An improved version of intimidation which requires an impossibly huge amount of concentration and thus calories to perform. This version of intimidation takes the level of the illusion into one that surpasses a lucid dream, the targets of this level of intimidation can suffer permanent psychological damage from their own belief in the illusion projected as an intimidation.

Step 4: Animal Companion
Pretty much everyone in Toriko has an animal companion that doubles as a mount, so go wild.

Step 5: Significant Buffs (Reserved for Stronger Individuals)
This step isn't important to character creation but rather later character development. While characters in toriko gain statistical improvements from eating compatible ingredients there are certain types of training which also increase one's baseline power and are required to fight at the highest levels of power.
 * "Instinct" Honing: This type of "training" can result from simple life experience, it is a kind of training which makes it so things which require active thinking to use become second nature. It crystallizes one's experience into instinct.
 * Concentration Training: Covered by Food Honor and Food Pressure in canon, this type of training is used to raise one's concentration to the max. As a direct result of this training one's movements will become many times more efficient and able to bring out power that far surpasses normal. This training is synergistic with Instinct because it makes one's instinct that much stronger.
 * Spiritual Revelation: An important step in becoming strong enough to survive in the gourmet world, one must suffer a spiritual revelation near deaths door regarding one's relationship towards food, and thus life. Food Immersion is a canon example of a revelation, where one appreciates the ingredients they've eaten for allowing the user to live. The end result of this revelation seems to be enabling one to absorb more energy from food and store it longer as well by awakening the energy storing power of gourmet cells.
 * Full Cellular Use Training: Covered by Enbu in canon, this type of training forces one to use 100% of one's cells for their techniques allowing one to bring out all of the body's power with every action they take. Gourmet cells are essentially independent organisms themselves so this type of training essentially consists in aligning all of the independent gourmet cells desires to match the user's own.

Back Channel
The ability to open a back channel is quite rare and only really available to those which have eaten NEWS. A back channel is essentially a distortion in space time where time passes incredibly slowly or incredibly fast inside depending on the type. It's quite useful for preparing incredibly time consuming ingredients alongside other less time consuming ones but it can also be used for travel to a extent.

Food Luck
Food Luck is an inherent quality that everyone possesses in some capacity but when one possesses it in large numbers it effectively bends the laws of probability, protecting the user and enabling them to perform miraculous feats.