Sons Of The Forest: How to Cook Food

Learn the ins and outs of cooking food in Sons Of The Forest

Cooking systems are critically important in survival games like Sons Of The Forest. They often emphasize cooking your food to get the most out of it, whether it’s health, vitality, stamina, or some other core stat you’re responsible for monitoring.

They can also serve as methods to prolong the food you’ve collected so it doesn’t spoil and rot away. In Sons Of The Forest, the cooking process isn’t exactly clear from the get-go, so we’ve put together this guide to show you how to cook food and provide insightful tips.

In Sons Of The Forest, numerous food sources are available, from berries, mushrooms, wild game, manufactured MREs, noodles, and more that can be found as random ground loot. But there may come a time when you run out of these valuable supplies, and this is when you’ll need to know how to cook and start cooking and eating meat to sustain and fill up your hunger bar.

How to cook in Sons Of The Forest

You will first need to find something to cook before you can start. Hunting for smaller animals like squirrels, rabbits, and birds is a quick way to get your hands on some meat early in the game. If you’re near a river, you can also try fishing with a spear or sending Kelvin, the AI companion, to do your bidding. If you find yourself on a beach, you can look around for sea turtles.

Once you’ve got your food source, you can start cooking it with a simple campfire. Don’t wait too long to cook it – meat and fish can spoil in your inventory and become worthless.

Seeing as how you will need a campfire to start, here are some steps that you can follow to set up your own campfire for cooking food:

1. Gather two sticks and put one into your hands (equip)
2. Find clear ground and look down whilst holding that stick
3. A small icon indicating that you can break it will appear on the ground
4. Proceed to break both sticks in half and light the cluster of sticks on fire with your lighter (default E key) 
5. Approach the campfire and interact with it (default E key) to open up a sheet of your inventory 
6. This compartment of your inventory should contain the raw food that you gathered
7. Transfer your raw food onto the campfire 
8. Wait for the meat to turn brown in color; this will tell you that it’s cooked and ready to eat

There are a couple of things to note when cooking meat. The amount of food you can cook is limited to 6 pieces. You can’t cook more than that at one time. Furthermore, food items like meat or fish can overcook/burn if you don’t take them off the fire in time. You can eat burned meat, but it’s practically like eating charcoal, and your character will not appreciate having to gobble that down.

Small campfires like this may do the job initially, but they fizzle out quickly. However, if you want a lasting campfire for your home, you should consider getting something more permanent and reliable. Reinforcing your campfire will do the trick. 

Reinforcing your campfire

Small campfires do the job alright, but as previously mentioned, they aren’t secure options. Luckily, there is a way to craft reinforced campfires that you can use for your home base.

You should be able to get a reinforced campfire built in no time if you follow these steps:

1. Break two sticks in half on the ground and light them on fire to create a small fire (read the previous section for more details)
2. Gather about 7 large stones. 
3. Equip one in your hands and approach the fire.
4. An outline will appear to guide you in placing each stone
5. Place the stones around the fire in a circle

A common misconception surrounding reinforced campfires is that it increases the food you can cook. This is not true; the only thing it does is increase the durability of a given campfire. That may not seem like a huge advantage in the grand scheme, but it ensures you won’t lose your campfire during a cannibal or mutant raid.

Some choose to dry their food with a drying rack instead of cooking it. This can be a game-changer, depending on how you play Sons Of The Forest.

Should you cook or dry food?

You’ll always want to set up a drying rack in your home base. It dries your raw food to the point of edibility and preserves it. The only catch with this is the time it takes for your food to dry. This is why we recommend cooking your food to satisfy your hunger quickly or if you don’t have a stockpile of edible food.

Drying food should be a passive activity you forget about and eventually use to amass a large amount of edible food. Drying food is a long-term investment. Conversely, cooking will get you by early on in your playthrough before you can set up a network of drying racks. 

Final thoughts on cooking food

Now you know how to start cooking food in Sons Of The Forest. Cooking is a valuable skill; it should be one of the first things you learn when playing a survival horror game. We hope this guide helped you learn more about cooking in general.