In Raft, you can eat a couple of different raw foods without having to cook them.
However, because of their low hunger value and the absence of any additional benefits, eating raw food is not the optimal diet for progressing in the game.
Instead, you should eat cooked food that requires you to follow recipes to make.
Recommended Read: How to Get Clay in Raft
Our picks for the best foods in Raft are Vegetable Soup, Simple Fish Stew, Chicken Coconut, BBQ, Steak with Jam, and Heart Stew.
Remember that the term “best food” is subjective, and what the best dish for you is can differ, depending on your current situation.
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What Is the Best Food in Raft?
Since there are 12 recipes you can cook in Raft that give different benefits and have different cooking times, some players may prefer one dish over another given their current setup, making that the “best” for them.
To choose the food that best matches your needs, we should establish some criteria first:
Criteria to Determine the Best Food in Raft
To choose the best recipes in Raft, these are things to consider:
- Ingredient availability: this criterion indicates how common the ingredients needed for the recipe are in Raft. Comparing ingredient availability with stat benefits is a must in choosing the best recipe, as some foods stand out because of their stats, but the ingredients needed are difficult or dangerous to obtain.
- Stats provided by the food: these stats include Hunger, Bonus Hunger, Thirst, and Special Buff. While raw foods can be great to help with hunger when you have no other options, cooked dishes are essential when it comes to maximizing your stats.
- Cooking time: compared to the above, cooking time is likely to be less important. Whether making a dish takes 90, 120, or even 210 seconds likely isn’t a big deal as you have many other things to do on your raft.
Although the primary purpose of food is to reduce hunger and thirst and provide perks, the availability of ingredients needed to make a dish matters the most in determining how good a dish is to cook.
Best Food With Simple Recipes and Widely Available Ingredients
Focusing on the ingredients of a recipe is more important than the stats of a dish. There are two recipes in the game that are extremely cheap yet offer great benefits:
1. Vegetable Soup
This is one of the cheapest foods in Raft, requiring 4 of any vegetable ingredient (beets and potatoes), a Cooking Pot, and a Clay Bowl.
Vegetable ingredients, such as Raw Beet and Raw Potato, can be looted in barrels or grown yourself, and the Clay Bowl can be quickly crafted using Clay.
Cooking a bowl of Vegetable Soup only takes 90 seconds and gives 40 Hunger and 35 Bonus Hunger. Its simplicity makes it a food you can cook until the end of the game.
2. Simple Fish Stew
Preparing this dish requires a bit more work. First, you must obtain any 2 Raw Veggies (potatoes or beets), which is the easy part.
Acquiring any 2 Raw Small Fish (Herring or Pomfret), however, might take some time, as you need to craft a fishing rod and spend some time fishing to get them.
Once you get used to it, though, you can easily whip up this dish in no time, even while on the raft.
The total cooking time for the Simple Fish Stew is 90 seconds, and it gives 40 Hunger and 45 Bonus Hunger.
Best Food With Exploration and Hunting Ingredients Required
To make the following dishes, you need to go beyond your raft. These recipes require more unusual ingredients and have a longer cooking time, but they are certainly worth it.
3. Chicken Coconut
This dish consists of 2 Raw Drumsticks, 1 Coconut, and 1 Cave Mushroom.
Coconuts can be found on islands, and Cave Mushrooms can be found in caves. Obtaining Raw Drumsticks is more difficult, as you have to look for Seagulls or Screechers and take them out with your weapon.
The Chicken Coconut dish takes 210 seconds to cook and gives 55 Hunger, 55 Bonus Hunger, and 10 Thirst.
4. BBQ or Steak with Jam
These two dishes greatly help with your Hunger and Bonus Hunger, especially BBQ, which gives 65 Hunger and 75 Bonus Hunger. However, everything comes at a price, and finding the required ingredients for these dishes is challenging.
If you want to make BBQ, you need to use your Fishing Rod to catch Raw Mackerel, your Spear to take out Seagulls for Raw Drumsticks, and head to an island with a cave to search for Mushrooms.
You also need to hunt animals for Raw Meat. The easiest to hunt are Lurkers, Bears, and Warthogs. Other animals can also drop Raw Meat, but these three are the easiest to fight.
To make Steak with Jam, you need to combine Raw Meat with 1 Raw Veggie and 2 Red Berries.
Compared to BBQ, Steak with Jam gives less Hunger and Bonus Hunger (40 Hunger and 40 Bonus Hunger), but it also gives 5 Thirst, which is a benefit that BBQ doesn’t provide.
Here are some alternative options that you might want to consider for your food choice. Each of these is similar to one of the three categories of dishes above, but they aren’t quite as good for various reasons.
- Mushroom Omelette: this food only gives 35 Hunger and Bonus Hunger and takes more time to cook (210 seconds). Additionally, you’ll need eggs, and to get those, you have to catch and tame Cluckers from large islands.
- Head Broth: this recipe provides the highest Bonus Hunger in the game (+100), but it’s a tiring process to make it. Obtaining the vegetables for the recipe is easy enough, but to get the Bucket of Milk, you need to catch and tame a Goat. Lastly, getting the Poison-Puffer Head can be dangerous, as the fish can damage and poison you.
- Sushi/Shark Dinner: both Sushi and Shark Dinner have exceptional effects, but cooking these recipes is quite challenging due to the rarity of Silver Algae, as each island only has 4 to 6 of them. So, unless you’re willing to spend some time diving, these two should not be your recipes of choice.
Best Food That Requires Ingredients From the Trading Post
Food in this group not only makes you less hungry and quenches your thirst but also gives you special abilities like Evade Death or Faster Run Speed for a limited time.
It’s important to note that in order to trade at the Trading Post, you need Trash Cubes, which are obtained through the Recycler, and this process requires a lot of effort. Therefore, the dishes mentioned below aren’t suitable for new players at the start of their run.
5. Hearty Stew
The Hearty Stew stands out among all the foods that offer special buffs, as it allows you to respawn, which is a major advantage when fighting bosses.
To cook the Hearty Stew, you need 1 Raw Potato, 1 Cave Mushroom, 1 Raw Meat, and 1 Juniper.
While most of the ingredients are easily obtainable, Juniper is the hardest part, as you need 1 Trash Cube and 3 Trade Coins to purchase it from the Trading Post.
There are other options in this category that you should consider as well:
- Catfish Deluxe: grants a faster run speed buff upon consumption, which makes it an excellent choice for those who wish to explore Large Islands at a faster pace.
- Salmon Salad: provides a Lung Capacity buff, allowing you to extend your underwater exploration time.
While these buffs can be great, we still recommend prioritizing the foods listed in the first category of this guide, as the buffs from these foods aren’t worth the effort and resources it takes to make them. You can easily beat the game without the buffs from them.
Those are the best foods in Raft!
Have any suggestions for this guide? Let us know in the comment section below.
