Sons of the Forest Cooking Recipes

How cooking works in Sons of the Forest

Cooking pot meals arrived in Patch 05 in May 2023 and were last rebalanced in the 1.0 release on February 22, 2024. Nothing about the recipes has changed since, so the 13 recipes on this page (Clean Water plus 12 dishes) are the full current list.

1. Find a pot. You cannot craft one; they sit at campsites and in the residential bunker.
2. Fill it at a lake or river and set it on a lit fire with E.
3. Drop the ingredients in from your inventory. Hold E and a gear icon lists every recipe the pot can make right now.
4. Wait for it to finish. One pot gives 4 servings, and the cooking screen shows what the whole pot restores, not one serving.

Every dish refills thirst, nearly all of them refill hunger too, and most add a buff that lasts 4 in-game hours. Two rules catch people out. Rotten ingredients are refused since 1.0, and if the fire is destroyed while the pot is still cooking, the pot goes back to plain water.

Which dish to cook for what you are about to do

• Clearing trees for a base: Lumberjack Juice or Greg, both with the strongest chopping buff. Kelvin Special adds a smaller one if all you have is fish and an oyster.
• Raiding a cave or camp: Greg for stealth plus strength in one pot. Cream of Mushroom if you only want stealth and have the four mushrooms.
• Heading into the snow: Egg Nog has the highest warmth level. Jam is the berry option.
• A long day with no sleep: Kitchen Sink tops up every meter including stamina and rest, and Liquid Battery refills stamina and rest from berries alone.
• Just need food fast: Boiled Meat takes two pieces of raw meat and still adds a strength buff.

Using the ingredient lookup and the pot simulator

1. Tap each ingredient once for every one you are carrying, so two pieces of meat means two taps. Tapped one too many? Use the minus button next to it.
2. A one-line summary sits at the bottom of the ingredient grid (on a phone it stays pinned to the bottom of the screen): how many dishes you can cook now and how many are close. Tap it to jump to the results.
3. The results list the dishes you have enough of everything for, then the ones that are almost there, with what is missing and how many. The closest come first, and dishes that need more are tucked under an expandable list.
4. The pot simulator uses the same counts, so there is nothing to enter twice. It tells you which dish comes out if everything goes into one pot, and what to leave out if you want a different one. You can also open it and adjust the amounts yourself.
5. Each recipe card shows how many you have against how many it needs. Filter by an effect such as Strength or Chopping and the dishes you are closest to move to the top.
6. Your ingredients and counts are saved in this browser, so they are still there the next time you load the page mid-session.

Why the pot sometimes cooks a different dish

The pot does not ask what you want. When the contents satisfy several recipes, it cooks the one with the most ingredients. That rule is stated in the Patch 07 notes, which fixed a bug where it did not always happen. Lumberjack Juice contains everything Boiled Meat needs, so a pot loaded for Lumberjack Juice never turns into Boiled Meat, and a pot with two meat plus a few extras may cook something bigger than you planned.

The patch notes do not say whether "most ingredients" means kinds or individual items. Most of the time both readings pick the same dish. A few pairs clash, such as Lumberjack Juice against Kitchen Sink and Liquid Battery against Jam. For those, the simulator does not guess. It tells you which ingredient to take out so the dish you want is the one that cooks. The safest move is still to put in only what that dish calls for, and you can take ingredients back out of the pot.

Before you rely on it

• The data matches the game from 1.0 onward and was last checked on 2026-10-22. The game has had no recipe changes since 1.0, and Endnight has moved on to developing its next game.
• Restores are described as full or partial, not as percentages. Only one guide lists percentages and none of the others back them up, so exact numbers would be more misleading than helpful.
• For a few dishes the guides list different amounts. Those cards carry a Sources disagree tag and show what most guides say. If a dish will not cook, the note inside the card tells you what to top up.
• The icons on this page are generic symbols, not the in-game art. The game shows its own buff icons when a dish is active.
• Sons of the Forest is a trademark of Endnight Games. This page is an independent fan tool and is not affiliated with Endnight Games.