Abiotic Factor: Best Food To Cook, Ranked

Abiotic Factor has surprised many gamers with its quirky and unique take on the open-world survival crafting genre. Locked inside an infested office building, players must collect materials and take care of their basic needs to continue their research and eventually escape. One such basic need – the need for food – has led players to scour the internet for the best recipes. What items give the best return on investment and buff?

Luckily, the game’s recipes are clearly written, and the buffs are plentiful. Players can buff their XP gain rate for various stats, slow down their Hunger and Thirst meter drain, or even increase their carrying capacity. Which food is best to cook will depend on your playstyle and available resources, but here are ten of the best food options to cook in Abiotic Factor.

Players can cook using a frying pan or soup pot on a stove. Alternatively, put food in the oven for baked recipes. Cooking level 3 is required to make soup, and Cooking Level 10 unlocks baking.

10 Sustenance Soup

Level Up That Accuracy Stat

Sustenance Soup won’t be available to players until they start the latter half of the game, since it is made from MREs found on or around soldier-type enemies. The simple recipe of an MRE and a pot of water also does not provide much Hunger or Thirst. Despite these substantial drawbacks, the food still belongs on this list due to its secondary buff.

The buff Quick Reflexes is quite difficult to obtain in Abiotic Factor, but any ranged combatant will want to prioritize it so that they can get and use better guns. Quick Reflexes cause the player to gain Reloading and Accuracy XP more quickly (a 10% boost), and these skills gatekeep a number of the game’s best weapons.

9 Sweet Porridge

Get More From The Vending Machine

Sweet Porridge is a strange soup made from Anteverse Wheat, Melted Ice Cream, and a Pot of Water. The resulting soup restores a moderate amount of Thirst and a limited amount of Hunger. However, the real advantage is the Sweet Tooth buff players get upon consuming it.

Sweet Tooth doesn’t impact any of the player’s skills, but it makes vending machine snacks such as chips 25% more effective, as well as increasing the Hunger fill value of Sweets by fifty. As a result, Sweet Porridge is a handy recipe to keep in the back pocket when the player is very hungry and has a couple of scavenged food items available.

8 Cooked Egg & Peccary Tartine

Sometimes You’re Just Starving

Unlike the previous two foods on the list, Cooked Egg and Peccary Tartine isn’t on this list solely due to the buff it provides. Instead, this food is one of the best for quickly restoring a player’s hunger, with a whopping 98.75 Food value. As for Thirst, the Cooked Peccary Tartine refills a moderate amount of just under 40.

To make this food, players will need a powered convection oven as well as a Raw Egg, Super Tomato, Bread, and Raw Peccary Sausages. The recipe is quite complex and requires the player to have a working farm, but it is very much worth it.

7 Meaty Stew

Get Ready For A Fight

Meaty Stew is ideal for players to eat just before a fight. This is due to the Heightened Senses buff, which accelerates the XP gain of Blunt and Sharp melee weapons by 10%. Most players will be making use of a weapon in one of these categories. Additionally, higher weapon skills will unlock better weapons that deal more damage, and accelerating this leveling process is one of the best things you can do in the early game.

To make Meaty Stew, players will unsurprisingly need an assortment of meat-based ingredients, such as Peccary Sausages (chopped), an Alien Drumstick, an Alien Rump, and finally, the always-present pot of water. In addition to the aforementioned buff, this concoction will also provide 62 Hunger and 20 Thirst.

6 Greyeb Chowder

Give It To The Party Tank

Greyeb Chowder is a soup with substantial food value and a buff that can be either a blessing or a curse. The buff, Desire of the Flesh, gives the player’s character substantial damage resistance but makes them more likely to attract the attention of aliens like the Leyak. This could be a death sentence for a squishy player who relies on stealth in high-level areas but might be considered an additional bonus for tanky party members who seek to draw aggro away from teammates.

To make Greyeb Chowder, players will need to grow Greyeb and Potatoes, obtain a pot of water, and collect a Milk Sac from a Peccary Sow. Then, this mixture can be cooked on the stove to produce a soup capable of restoring 32 Hunger points and 63 thirst points.

5 A&L Mega Stew

Worth An Arm & A Leg

A & L Mega Stew, short for Arm and a Leg Mega Stew, has a fairly self-explanatory recipe. Requiring an Exor Arm, Raw Alien Drumstick, Raw Exor Heart, and a Pot of Water, this soup is one of the few soups in the game that require no grown ingredients. Therefore, it is ideal for players who don’t like messing around with farm plots and seeds. Additionally, this soup restores a whopping 74 Hunger points and 24 Thirst points. Players can easily survive off of this soup alone.

As if that didn’t make this recipe tantalizing enough, the buff provided by A&L Mega Stew is nothing to sneeze at. The Mega-Ante Buff increases the movement speed of the player substantially as well as awarding 2 Strength XP. This makes players who enjoy fighting with melee weapons even better at doing so and makes obtaining ingredients for more soup easier.

4 Balanced Stew

A Little Bit Of Everything

On the other hand, if the player wishes for a more refined playstyle, then Balanced Stew is exactly what the doctor ordered. Despite providing only modest hunger and thirst points (22 and 21 respectively), the buff of Balanced Stew and the ingredients for making it are quite good. To make this recipe, the player will need a Carbuncle, Carbuncle Mushroom, Salt, and a Pot of Water. These can all be found in early game areas, and provide little risk to collect.

The buff of Balanced Stew – Big Brain – is a skill-agnostic XP gain buff. While under the effects of Big Brain, players will receive an additional 15% EXP for all activities. This can be used to level up quickly and unlock new recipes in the game’s realistic crafting system. However, Carbuncles can be rare – so players may not always have the ingredients to cook a Balanced Stew.

3 Veggie Stew

A Farmer’s Pride & Joy

Veggie Stew is, unsurprisingly, ideal for those who regularly farm crops. Farming is its own skill in Abiotic Factor, with specific XP that unlocks recipes and improves yields. As such, farmers will want to increase their farming skills as quickly as possible. This makes the buff from Veggie Stew (Living off the Land) invaluable. Living off the Land increases Farming XP gain by 10%. For the best results, eat Veggie Stew just before harvesting and replanting your growing plots.

To make Veggie Stew, players won’t need any ingredients outside those available from farming. However, some seeds are only unlocked in the later stages of the game. Each pot of Veggie Stew contains a Super Tomato, a Potato, one Anteverse Wheat, and, of course, water. Once you cook the stew, the resulting food item restores 45 Hunger and 43 Thirst.

2 Human Brain

Ethically Questionable & Mechanically Glorious

Unlike other items on this list, it is questionable whether the Human Brain should be a food item. However, in Abiotic Factor you can eat Human Brains, and doing so gives you a nifty buff, so here we are. Human Brains can be obtained by salvaging a Human Skull at the Repair Table inside your home base and can be eaten immediately without cooking.

While eating a Human Brain provides no nourishment to the player character, it does give them two status effects. The first, the Brain Drain Buff, increases all EXP gained by the player by 15%, the highest experience buff in the game and therefore very tempting. However, players will also be afflicted with the Sick Debuff because, well, they just ate a person. This debuff makes players throw up, which can then make other players sick, and appears to reduce the player’s maximum health for the duration.

1 Hearty Stew

Two Buffs For The Price Of One

First place goes to Hearty Stew, one of the best recipes in the game for general looting. The Hunger and Thirst gain when eating this soup is substantial (52 Hunger and 46 Thirst), but most impressive are the two buffs applied by eating Hearty Stew. The first, Souper Satisfied, is common when eating a good soup, and reduces the rate of Hunger and Thirst drain for its duration. This is handy for conserving resources in all stages of the game. The second, Boudacious, is a pack rat’s dream. It allows the player to carry 25% more weight without any negative effects.

Happily, Hearty Stew requires no rare ingredients. To make this powerful recipe, players will need one Raw Exor Heart, a Carbuncle Mushroom, a Super Tomato, and a pot of water. The Exor Heart and Carbuncle Mushroom can be harvested from common enemies such as the Exor, Exor Monk, Shroom Peccary, and Shroom Carbuncle. The Super Tomato is a readily available seed recipe from the mid-game and can be grown in farm plots.