One of the key survival traits you will need to satisfy in the horror survival game Sons of the Forest is to eat food to satiate your hunger. The game does not offer much help or advice on all the ways you can satisfy your hunger meter, so follow this brief guide to ensure you stay well-fed and ready to take on cannibals.
Ways To Get Food in Sons of the Forest
There are several ways to obtain food, available even early in your adventure, these include:
- Killing Animals and Eating Raw Meat
- Finding and picking wild Berries and Mushrooms
- Cooking Meat to Consume
- Trapping Animals
- Eating Food Rations
- Growing Food in Planters
How To Catch and Kill Animals
It can be very difficult to catch up to a squirrel or rabbit when you are only wielding your starting kit’s hatchet or tactical knife. Crafting a spear and using it to hunt down animals will make for a much easier task than your starter gear.
Spears can easily be crafted with just a few ingredients that are readily available in the wild:
- 2 Sticks
- 1 Tape
- Tactical Knife (Included in your starting survival kit)
Once you have your spear crafted, you can equip it within your inventory. The spear has a much farther reach than the other tools, which will aid in your accuracy against fast animals. It can also be used to catch fish in the water. You can eat the meat raw by opening your inventory and consuming it, or you can now cook the meat.
Hold the right mouse button to aim, then tap the left mouse button to launch and throw the spear. If you do this from afar, you should be able to easily take down an animal and take its meat.
How To Cook Meat To Fill Hunger Meter
If you’ve successfully hunted animals and now have raw meat, you will fill your hunger meter much more efficiently by cooking the meat before eating it. Go to your campfire and aim the camera at the fire. Hold the interact key and a subset of your inventory will come up.
Select the raw meat from the inventory and it will become cooked after about 30 seconds. See the image above for an example of a rabbit’s cooked (browned) meat on the fire. You can press the interact key once to put the cooked food into your inventory, or you can hold the interact key to consume it to satisfy your hunger by a large amount.
Craft a Drying Rack and place the meat on it to make Dried Meat. It won’t become rotten meat for a much longer time than raw or cooked meat!
How To Trap Animals
Set up a trap to trap animals. You will need to gather some essential items before you can create the trap. There are several different types of traps you can make:
|
Trap Type |
Materials |
|---|---|
|
Small Animal Trap |
14x Sticks |
|
Fish Trap |
25x Sticks |
|
Bone Maker Trap |
2x Sticks, 3x Leaves, 3x Rocks, 1x Rope, 1x Bottle, |
|
Fly Swatter Trap |
10x Sticks 3x Rocks 1x Rope |
Placing the trap near areas where critters are frequently traversing is the best way to catch them rather than open areas.
How To Find Food in Sons of the Forest
You can sometimes find food rations within camps scattered around the island, including at the starting camp. If you find a cannibal camp, you can usually quickly run in and try to pick up as many items as you can. After you quickly grab items, get out of there, especially if you are in the very early game, or you will have a very hard time with the cannibals that are in the area. This food is quick to gather and offers large health regeneration, but comes at the cost of a potential run-in with the cannibals.
Don’t forget to look for drying racks that may have dried meat hanging from them.
You can also gather berries in bushes all over the island. They will restore both your hunger and your thirst bar, but only by a very small amount.
Growing Food in Planters
Finally, you can also eventually create your own garden to grow your own food using planters. This will allow sustainability and ensure you always have enough to eat. The planters available in gardening are:
- Standing Planter: 18x Sticks
- Wall Planter: 16x Sticks
Now that you’ve explored all the main ways to get food and fill your hunger meter, you can be confident you won’t starve to death in Sons of the Forest!