Content Type: Gaming Guides
Crafting your way from the stone age to rifles and carbon-composite armor is hungry work, and you’ll need to make sure you keep your belly full while prospecting. In this guide, we’ll go over the basics of finding and processing food, and list all of the foods currently available in ICARUS.
First Foods
Berries & Vegetables

When you first land on ICARUS, you’ll be able to harvest Berries from bushes in the Forest biome. These fill your food as well as your Water meter, and are a great way to tide yourself over until you can do some hunting. There are other edible plants, though many need to be cooked over a fire in order to unlock their full benefits (see food list).
Note that depending on your draw-distance settings and your graphics card, Berry Bushes may be indistinguishable from other bushes until you get fairly close to them. Plants like Watermelon and
Pumpkin lie flat on the ground, so you’ll need to pay close attention in order to find them if they’re in amongst bushes.
Meat and Fish
Once you’ve crafted yourself a Bow and some
Arrows, you’ll be able to take down Icarus’ animals instead of subsisting on berries. Smaller animals like rabbits and racoons go down in only one arrow, as do baby deer. Larger creatures require a headshot, a stealth attack, or both — land a headshot while crouched to ensure you take down medium deer and other larger herbivores in one arrow, otherwise they’ll run away. Lakes are another good source of food, since fish are easy targets. You can also try to take on wolves, assuming they’re alone. Have a
knife crafted and ready to go as well, since it’s much easier to deal the finishing blow in melee (the wolf will attack you once you start rudely shooting arrows at it).
You can eat raw meat and
raw fish, but cooking it provides additional benefits and makes it significantly more filling.
How to Cook
Basic Cooking – Meat and Fish
Until there’s a Prospector perk that allows you to eat raw meat and raw vegetables, you’ll have to cook what you hunt and gather to make it edible. This can be done at a
Campfire, or in a
Fireplace once you’ve reached Planetary Tech Tier 2. Open the Campfire/Fireplace’s inventory, and place your raw meat in one of the available slots. Then put fuel in the fuel slot (this can be
wood,
fiber,
sticks, or
coal), and click the “Activate” button to begin cooking.
Basic Meals – Cooking Station & Potbelly Stove
Once you reach Tier 2 (the Crafting Bench) you’ll be able to craft a
Cooking Station. The cooking station will allow you to craft simple meals, like the
Fruit Salad and
Wild Salad — these meals offer significantly bigger bonuses than foods cooked at a campfire. It’s also where you create
Animal Fat, which is a component in some advanced recipes. The
Potbelly Stove allows for even more complex and beneficial meals than the Cooking Station, but these meals require harder-to-collect ingredients.
Advanced Meals
Once you’ve teched up to Tier 3 (the Machining Bench) you’ll be able to craft the
Kitchen Bench and its attachment, the
Biofuel Stove. The Kitchen Bench allows you to craft
Pastry and
Bread Dough, while the Biofuel Stove has recipes for a number of advanced meals. These meals give big boosts to your stats, and even offer significant bonuses to XP gain while you digest them.
How to Make Bread
Bread is significantly more involved than cooking meat: You’ll need a
Mortar and Pestle to create Flour from Wheat, and then a
Kitchen Bench to combine your Flour with Yeast to create
Bread Dough. Bread Dough can then be cooked in a
Biofuel Stove to create
Bread. You can also make
Flatbread Dough instead if you don’t have any Yeast.
How to Stop Food From Spoiling
While it’s in your inventory, you can stop food from spoiling by eating one item from the stack. This resets the spoilage meter of the entire stack. Note that when food is in a stack, only the top item spoils, not the whole stack. Once one item spoils, that item turns to spoiled food and the spoilage meter of the stack resets.
For food you want to store at your shelter, you’ll need to tech up to an Ice Box or
Refrigerator to prevent food from spoiling.
Food List
The following foods are currently available in Icarus. You’ll need specific crafting tables or materials to create many of them — foods have therefore been organized by where they can be crafted.
We hope this guide on food in ICARUS was helpful. If you have any questions, comments, or have some info we’re lacking, please let us know in the comment section below!
Looks like Pickeled Carrots didn’t make the list?
Thanks Jon, missed that one!