This guide introduces the RUST Cooking Workbench and Advanced Cooking system, which were added to the game with the March update in 2025. The Cooking Workbench is a player-deployable crafting station that integrates the features of two existing deployables, the Mixing Table and Barbeque, and its crafting station for an assortment of ability-augmenting food types. Because we already have guides describing the function and descriptions of both the mixing table and barbeque, this guide will strictly stick to its exclusive functions.
In addition to the Cooking Workbench, players must track down and gather a host of new items used with the workbench to craft these new foods.
In this RUST cooking guide, we will cover the following topics:
- How to Find Wheat
- How to Find Eggs
- How to Find Jars of Honey
- How to Get Started with the RUST Cooking Workbench
- How to Make Food in RUST
- Advanced Food Recipes List
How to Find Wheat
Wheat is a new type of food and collectible added to RUST. It may be consumed directly on its own, resulting in +6 healing, +75 calories, and +10 hydration being gained, or used as fish food with a bait value of 1 and a maximum bait stack size of 1. Its most significant utility, however, is as a component used in cooking other more advanced foods.
You can find Wheat stalks growing in grassy areas, chiefly near rivers, much in the same way one would find Corn. When picked, you also receive Wheat Seeds, which players may grow as part of the farming system, which may then be harvested or cloned to increase production and decrease growth time. These seeds and clones can be planted in planter boxes or on the ground.
How to Find Eggs
Like Wheat, Eggs are also a new food and cooking component type. They may be consumed directly, resulting in +2 healing, +40 calories, and +15 hydration being gained, but aren’t currently used in fishing. Just like Wheat, they too are used in advanced cooking, or as a relatively efficient Horse food due to the speed at which a healthy Chicken Coop can produce them.
Finding an Egg is amongst the most interesting gathering metrics added to RUST to date. There’s no glamorous way of explaining this; find a wild chicken clucking about in a field, chase him down, and wait for him to ‘discharge’ an Egg. You could also trade another player for one or harvest them yourself once you have a starter Egg / Chicken Coop setup, which is described in greater detail in our Chicken Husbandry guide.
How to Find Jars of Honey
Jars of Honey will round off new introductory cooking components, becoming the first ‘Extracted’ items available in the game. They may be consumed directly, resulting in +3 healing, -15 radiation, and +50 calories, with fishing stats the same as Wheat, with 1 bait value and 1 bait stack size. Just like Wheat, they too are used in advanced cooking or as a relatively efficient Horse food due to the speed at which a healthy Beehive can produce the components to extract them.
To “find” a Jar of Honey is relatively impossible, given that they don’t exist unless created by players through the extraction process. Players must first gather Honeycomb, either naturally from the side of Oak trees they spawn on or through the Beekeeping process from a Beehive. Once collected, inspect the item in your inventory. From here, pressing Extract will result in precisely 1 Jar of Honey being produced, along with a slight chance to create a Bee Nucleus. Be sure to check out our Beekeeping System guide for more information.
Getting Started with the RUST Cooking Workbench
As a baseline item, the Cooking Workbench has an assortment of utilities. In its current iteration, it functions as a cooking surface similar in every way to the barbeque and a Mixing Table. Much like the mixing table, it also comes with unique recipes from the aforementioned new cooking components. While we will go over all of the recipes available by default later, the one with probably the most remarkable simplicity and a Scrap-making utility that will change the game has to be discussed on its own; the Bread Loaf.
This simple item requires only 5 Wheat to produce but increases the Horse Dung output of any animal that eats it by a whopping 250%. Not only but also, since Wheat can be grown so quickly in such great amounts, the Bread Loaf may act as a non-spoiling staple in player bases sure to keep calories and hydration up.
How to Make Food in RUST
In the Advanced Cooking system, Food, chiefly the Pies that the Cooking Workbench is capable of crafting, are nothing more than combinations of existing game foods and those components mentioned above. To begin, open up the Cooking Workbench (the left side of the table) to display the recipe list and ingredient combination inventory. Each recipe will show the ingredients, their quantities, and, most importantly, the required order for the ingredients to be placed into the Cooking Workbench. Adding stacks of ingredients works fine as long as you have the correct items in the proper order, as the recipe depicts.
With the Armed and Animated update, you can now auto-add ingredients for the Cooking Workbench recipe by clicking on the recipe’s name in the recipe list. If you have the required components in your inventory, the recipe name will display in white, and you can click the name to add the ingredients to the combination inventory. Repeated clicking of the recipe name will add another combination to the stack of teas to craft.
Pressing the ‘Shift’ key and clicking the recipe name will automatically add the maximum number of combinations you have ingredients to produce up to the stack size maximum. If you do not have all the required components for a given recipe in your inventory, that recipe name will be grayed out.
You will know that you have achieved the correct recipe combination when the green “Start Cooking” button becomes active. Click to begin combining the ingredients and creating as many items as you have stacked ingredients for. If you are crafting a stack of something, you must wait until the end of the crafting period before being able to loot the items from the workbench. Mixing a large stack (up to 20 is the max) will take around 1.5 mins to complete.
RUST Advanced Food Recipes List
There are currently nine different assorted food varieties available to craft. Except for the Bread Loaf, all of the other creations come in the form of Pies, each with its subsection of benefits, crafting costs, and specifics. The complete list of Food Recipes can be found below:
| Recipe Name | Ingredients | Calory / Hydration | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bread Loaf | 5 Wheat | +8 Instant Health +150 Calories +10 Hydration | Digestion Buff (Horse Only) |
| Chicken Pie | 3 Cooked Chicken 3 Corn 3 Eggs 3 Wheat | +2 Instant Health +80 Calories +15 Hydration | +5% Better Genes Chance 5 Minute Duration |
| Apple Pie | 2 Apples 3 Wheat 2 Jar of Honey | +2 Instant Health +80 Calories +15 Hydration | +100% Vision Care 15 Minute Duration |
| Pumpkin Pie | 3 Eggs 3 Wheat 1 Pumpkin | +2 Instant Health +80 Calories +15 Hydration | 10% Max Health 10 Minute Duration |
| Hunters Pie | 2 Cooked Deer Meat 3 Eggs 3 Wheat 2 Potatoes 2 Mushrooms | +2 Instant Health +80 Calories +15 Hydration | +75% Clotting 15 Minute Duration |
| Fish Pie | 1 Cooked Fish 3 Eggs 3 Wheat 2 Potatoes 2 Mushrooms | +2 Instant Health +80 Calories +15 Hydration | +25% Comfort 10 Minute Duration |
| Survivor’s Pie (Currently Disabled) | 3 Eggs 3 Wheat 1 Cooked Human Meat 2 Potatoes 2 Mushrooms | +2 Instant Health +80 Calories +15 Hydration | +50% Harvesting 5 Minute Duration |
| Pork Pie | 2 Cooked Pork 3 Eggs 3 Wheat | +2 Instant Health +80 Calories +15 Hydration | +200% Metabolism Booster 15 Minute Duration |
| Bear Pie | 3 Cooked Bear Meat 3 Wheat 2 Mushrooms 2 Eggs | +2 Instant Health +80 Calories +15 Hydration | +50% Yield Boost-50% Tea Duration 15 Minute Duration |
Final Thoughts on RUST Advanced Cooking
We hope this guide has answered your questions about the new RUST Advanced Cooking system. While these commands, components, and values have made their way onto live servers, it is important to remember that everything exists at the whim of the game developer and can be altered or removed at any time. We will do our best to keep up with these changes, but the struggle is real.
As always, join us on Discord and share the exciting creations you are piecing together in mad scientist style. We’d love to hear them and try some out ourselves.
