How to Get Food – Sons of the Forest

“You are hungry” is a message you’ll be seeing a lot of when you first start playing Sons of the Forest. That energy bar you found at the crash site isn’t much of a breakfast, and it can be hard to figure out where to find more sustenance. In this guide, we’ll go over some quick and easy ways to get food at the start of the game.

After spawning and grabbing everything you can from the crash site, your best bet is to head straight down the mountain, towards the beach. We’ll get most of our food once we reach the ocean, but there’s still food to find in the meantime! Use your GPS to navigate as you follow the river to the beach.

Craft a Spear

Once you get out of the heavy snow and into the forest proper, you’ll be able to use your Axe to chop down small, thin trees (1), or find sticks on the ground (2). Once you have two sticks, you can open your inventory ( /). On your crafting mat, find your sticks (the bottom right of your inventory) and combine two sticks with some of the duct tape you found at the crash site (press / ) to put things on your mat for combining, then add your knife and use the same input on the gear icon on the crafting mat. You’ll craft a spear — equip it with /, and you’ll automatically leave your inventory.

Hunting & Gathering in the Forest

Now continue making your way to the beach, keeping one eye on your GPS tracker and one eye out for berries and rabbits.

Hunting

The rabbits can be hard to spot, but the meat they have is well worth the effort! Once you find one, resist the urge to throw your spear at it (since missing means needing to collect your spear), Instead, sprint (Left Shift/) after it and stab it — all it takes is one good jab. You’ll then be able to hold // while looking at the corpse to remove the meat.

If you’re really hungry now, make a fire (or have Kelvin do it) and then hold // while looking at the fire (1). Doing so will let you look at all the items you have that can be cooked — find the raw meat and press / to place it in the fire (2). Keep an eye on it — once it turns from pink/red to brown, look at it and press // to pull it out of the fire (or hold // to eat it immediately). Don’t put tons of food on the fire at once — it appears only 5 or so pieces can cook at once, and additional raw meat placed in the fire is lost.

Gathering

Not as exciting (or filling) are the berries you can find. You’ll find both blueberries and twinberries on bushes in the forest — the former fill your hunger meter very slightly, while the latter fill it more but actually injure you somewhat. Like with the meat, you can either put the berries in your inventory by pressing / /, or hold the button to eat them straight off the bush. Keep your eye out for bushes with berries as you make your way to the beach, and definitely take the time to stop at any bushes you find and pick clean.

At the Beach

Once you make it to the beach, wade out into shallow water and look for turtles. Use your spear to stab them — it takes a few pokes — and then do just like you did with the rabbits, holding // while aiming at the corpse to take off the shell. Unlike rabbits, this is a two-step process; first you’ll remove the shell, and then you can remove two pieces of raw meat from the turtle. Make sure you only tap // , as if you hold it you’ll eat the raw meat. You can cook this meat exactly the same way you did the rabbit meat, on a fire.

You’ll also encounter large numbers of seagulls on the beach. Unlike rabbits, these are easily hit with a spear, as the seagulls will happily land close by. Equip your spear and hold / to aim your spear, wait for it to land, then set the throwing arc so that it lands squarely on the gull — then just press / to throw it. Gull meat is harvested just like rabbits, and can also be cooked on the fire. Don’t forget to grab the feathers floating around as well.

You should now have no trouble staying fed in Sons of the Forest! We hope this guide was helpful — questions and suggestions are welcome in the comments section below.