Sons of the Forest has taken the gaming world by storm, captivating players with its intense survival horror gameplay. As you crash-land into a dangerous and eerie forest, it’s essential to learn how to fend for yourself and stay alive. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll show you how to obtain food and cook it to ensure your survival in the early hours of the game.
How to Get Food in Sons of The Forest
Traps can be surprisingly effective when gathering a decent amount of food.
When starting out, your initial source of food might come from the randomly-spawning items near the crash site. Be sure to search all the cases thoroughly. After that, you’ll need to rely on foraging, hunting, and trapping to secure your meals. While you will eventually be able to grow your own food, hunting is the simplest way to satisfy your hunger quickly.
One effective method is to set traps for small animals found in the forest. Rather than aimlessly chasing squirrels and rabbits, place your traps strategically near your campsite, slightly away from your working area. This ensures you don’t disturb the animals before they trigger the trap.
If you’re lucky enough to start near the beach, keep an eye out for turtles crawling on the sand or swimming in shallow waters. These slow creatures provide a turtle shell and two raw meat each. You can also find meat by exploring the map and entering caves, but exercise caution until you are properly equipped to handle the dangers within.
Building a Trap
Follow these steps to assemble a small animal trap:
- Press B to open the guide.
- Hold X to swap modes.
- Select the bottom tab.
- Choose the Small Animal Trap.
- Place the Wireframe.
- Gather 14 sticks and tap E to build the trap.
Leave your trap for a while and return later to check it. You may want to set multiple traps across an area to gather enough food for an extended period. Additionally, you can place fish traps in bodies of water, but keep a close eye on the wireframe since they become nearly invisible when submerged. If you find it challenging to spot the traps, ensure you have a few sticks in your possession when placing the wireframe. The floating sticks make the traps more visible.
While waiting for your traps, consider building a simple farm or hunting small creatures manually if you still have immediate hunger needs. Just remember to check your traps frequently as they may need resetting if they misfire. Be cautious not to accidentally dislodge the traps when moving around the forest.
How to Cook Food in Sons of the Forest
Before you: a smorgasbord of things it makes sense to burn. Leaves, rabbit flesh, actual, literal cash money.
Now that you have acquired some meat and fish, you might be tempted to consume them raw. However, for safety reasons, it’s best to cook them first. The easiest food to prepare is roasted meat, achieved by laying strips of meat on any campfire. Whether you’ve built your own campfire as part of your base or stumbled upon one while exploring, simple campfires are easy to produce, allowing you to cook food even when resources are scarce.
How to Build a Fire
You can construct a campfire with as little as two sticks and some leaves. However, for more elaborate fires, additional resources like rocks are required. To build a basic version, follow these instructions:
- Gather at least two sticks and two leaves.
- Equip your sticks.
- Choose a suitable spot on the ground.
- Left-click to break a couple of sticks into a pile on the ground.
- Hold E to use your lighter and some leaves to ignite the fire.
Once your fire is burning, you can hold E while looking at it to access a selection of items to place on the fire. You can add more leaves to keep the fire burning or lay down pieces of meat to cook them.
How to Cook Meat
- While looking at a lit fire, hold E to open the fire menu.
- Select your pieces of meat.
- Press G to close the fire menu.
- Wait for the meat to change color.
- Tap E to pick up the cooked meat. Hold E to eat it immediately.
Other Food Preparations
In addition to roasting meat over an open fire, you can opt to make jerky for long-term food storage, which is crucial for your survival. To accomplish this, you’ll need to build a drying rack, found on page 7 of the furniture section in the guide. The process requires 13 sticks. Once the rack is complete, hold E while looking at it and place any meat you have onto the rack to dry. The drying process takes some time, but the food never seems to spoil once it’s done.
It might not look like it, but there’s actually enough food here for several days right now.
Best Foods in Sons of the Forest
In the early stages of the game, you’ll have limited access to specific foods. However, it’s important to avoid certain items. Here’s a list of top foods you should try to obtain early on, along with instructions on how to acquire them. Remember to check back frequently as we update this list with new discoveries.
Good Early-Game Foods
- MRE (Randomly spawn in chests/bags)
- Ramen Noodles (Randomly spawn in chests/bags)
- Energy Bar (Randomly spawn in chests/bags)
- Chocolate Bar/Candy bar (Randomly 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
Thank you for reading the Ekilove Ultimate Sons of the Forest Food and Cooking Guide. For more helpful guides, visit Ekilove. Stay safe and well-fed in the forest!
