Sons of the Forest Food and Cooking Guide

Sons of the Forest is here, and it completely exploded onto Steam with an insanely big launch. It's not hard to see why, with this game being the follow-up to an insanely popular horror-survival title from 2014. Well, this time, we're crash-landing into the dangerous and creepy woods, and once again, we'll need to learn how to fend for ourselves in the wilderness if we have any hope of surviving.

We've got a guide for you if you're just getting started in Sons of the Forest, a full map with every location, and item guides for important items such as the pistol, shovel, and flashlight! We'll also teach you how to farm and grow food!

With that in mind, we present our Sons of the Forest Food and Cooking Guide. Read on to discover how to get your hands on food and cook it to make it safe in the early hours of the game, and check back for frequent updates. 

How to Get Food in Sons of The Forest

When you first start out, your first source of food might be the randomly-spawning items in the cases around the crash site, so much sure you’ve checked all of them thoroughly.  At that point, you’ll need to rely on foraging and hunting for your first few meals at least. Eventually, you’ll be able to grow your own food to supplement your calories, but hunting, foraging, and trapping are all going to play a large part in your food plans, at least in the immediate term. Of those options, hunting is the simplest way to get your hunger meter satisfied in a hurry. 

One of the best early options for food is the small animals running around the ground of the forest itself. You could randomly run around swiping at squirrels and rabbits until you manage to clip one since they die in one hit of your axe, but it’s much better to at least start by putting down some traps. If you’ve got a campsite, make sure to leave them just a little bit away from the area that you plan on working from. You don’t want to keep disturbing animals before they trigger your trap.

If you've spawned near the beach, then check the immediate coastline for turtles crawling on the beach or swimming in the shallows. They're not very fast, and provide a turtle shell and two raw meat for each one you can get your greasy hands on. You can also find meat by exploring the map and entering caves, though you should be careful about doing so before you're properly equipped to deal with what you find inside. 

Sons of the Forest Food and Cooking Guide - Building a Trap

Follow these steps to put together a small animal trap: 

1. Press B to open the guide.
2. Hold X to swap modes.
3. Select the bottom tab 
4. Select Small Animal Trap
5. Place the Wireframe
6. Gather 14 sticks, and tap E to build the trap

Once your trap is in place, leave it for a while, and you can come back to check it in a while. You might want to put a few traps down across an area to catch enough food for a while at once. You can also place some fish traps in bodies of water, though you’ll have to keep a close eye on the wireframe, as they become nearly invisible while they’re underwater. If you're struggling with this, make sure you already have a few sticks when you place the wireframe, as the floating sticks do make the traps a bit easier to see. 

While you’re waiting for your traps, you can work towards building up a simple farm or even hunt small creatures manually if you’re immediate hunger needs haven’t been met yet. Just make sure you return to check your traps often, as they sometimes need resetting when they misfire. Just be careful that you or your human friends don't accidentally knock the traps while you or they are stumbling around the forest. 

How to Cook Food in Sons of the Forest

Now you’ve got your hands on some meat and fish, and sure, you could go Gollum and just chow down on raw flesh, but if you want to be safe, you’re better of cooking it first. The simplest food to cook is roasted meat, which you can achieve by lying strips of meat on any campfire, whether it's one that you've built yourself as part of your base or one that you've come across while exploring. Thanks to simple campfires being easy to produce, you can almost always cook food if you're stuck somewhere with little to no resources at your disposal. 

Sons of the Forest Food and Cooking Guide - How to Build a Fire

You can build a campfire with as little as two sticks and some leaves, though you can construct fancier fires if you plan on sticking around in one place for a while. More complex construction requires extra resources, like rocks to construct, but for now, you can follow these instructions to build a basic version:  

1. Gather at least two sticks and two leaves
2. Equip your sticks
3. Look at a suitable spot on the ground
4. Left-click to break a couple of sticks into a pile on the ground
5. Hold E to use your lighter and some lives to get the fire going

Once your fire is up and running, you can hold E while looking at it to find a selection of things to put on the fire. You can put on more leaves to keep the fire going or lay down any pieces of meat you have to cook them. 

Sons of the Forest Food and Cooking Guide - How to Cook Meat

1. While looking at a lit fire, hold E to open the fire menu
2. Select Your Pieces of meat
3. Press G to close the fire menu
4. Wait for your meat to change color 
5. Tap E on cooked meat to pick it up. Hold E on cooked meat to eat it immediately. 

Sons of the Forest Food and Cooking Guide - Other Food Preparations

As well as roasting your meat over an open fire, you can also elect to turn it into jerky. This foodstuff is great if you intend on long-term storage for your food, which you probably should plan on doing if you want to live very long. To do this, you'll need to build a drying rack, which you can find on page 7 of the furniture section of the guide, and requires you to gather 13 sticks. Once it's complete, you can hold E while looking at the rack, and place any meat you have on you onto the rack to dry. The process takes quite a while, but once done the food never seems to go off. 

Best Foods in Sons of the Forest

When you start out in the game, you’ll be limited to a few key foods; that said, there are certainly some bad options that need to be avoided. Below is a list of some of the top foods you should try to get your hands on early on and some details on how you get them. We'll expand the list as we discover even more food items in the world, so make sure you check back often. 

Good Early-Game Foods

• MRE (Random-Spawn in Chests/Bags)
• Ramen Noodles (Random-Spawn in Chests/Bags)
• Energy Bar (Random-Spawn in Chests/Bags)
• Chocolate Bar/Candy bar (Random-Spawn in Chests/Bags)
• Cooked Meat (Hunting/Trapping and Cooking)
• Cooked Fish (Fishing/Trapping and Cooking)
• Shiitake Mushrooms (Foraging/Farming)
• Blueberries (Foraging/Farming) 
• King Oyster Mushroom (Foraging/Farming)

Foods to Avoid

• Twinberries
• Devil’s Club
• Fly Amanita

Thanks for reading our Sons of the Forest Food and Cooking Guide. Make sure to check out our other guides below!