Sons of the Forest: How to Place and Reuse a Cooking Pot

Collect a cooking pot

The advanced cooking update introduces findable cooking pots and explicitly adds a pot pickup to the tech apartment in the residential bunker. That is one developer-documented pickup location. The notes do not provide a complete island map, bunker access route or a list of every pot spawn. [1]

Steps

1. Use the cooking-pot pickup in the residential bunker’s tech apartment when that location is available in your run. [1]

Place the held pot directly on a fire

Patch 06 changes fire interaction so holding a cooking pot while interacting with the fire places it immediately. It also permits adding a pot back to the fire even when it already contains a completed recipe. You therefore do not need to empty a finished recipe solely to place that pot again. [1]

Steps

1. Hold the cooking pot and interact with the fire to place it. [1]
2. To return a pot that contains a completed recipe to a fire, re-add it without first dumping the recipe. [1]

Empty the pot deliberately

Steps

1. When you want to discard the contents, use the right mouse button to dump out the cooking pot. The same input is documented for the flask. [1]

Account for ingredients and a broken fire

Version 1.0 disallows rotten ingredients in cooking. Patch 06 separately states that a fire destroyed while the pot is still cooking resets its contents to water, whereas destroying the fire after cooking is complete retains the recipe. These are different points in the cooking process. The release notes establish those state changes but do not supply an alternative ingredient recipe or a way to recover an interrupted meal. [1]