Overview
Cooking is a gameplay system in Solarpunk that lets players prepare meals from harvested ingredients. The first version of the system shipped with 10 recipes, and more may be added in future updates.
How Cooking Works
Players combine farmed ingredients at a cooking station to produce prepared meals. Each recipe uses one or more ingredients and produces a food item that can be eaten for a temporary effect.
Hunger and Thirst
Solarpunk has hunger and thirst survival meters. Cooked meals provide temporary bonuses when consumed, typically slowing how quickly those meters drop for a few minutes:
Bonus Type | Effect | Duration |
|---|---|---|
Reduced hunger | Slows the rate at which the hunger meter depletes | A few minutes |
Reduced thirst | Slows the rate at which the thirst meter depletes | A few minutes |
These bonuses let players spend more time exploring, building, or managing their base without stopping for food or water as often. The exact duration and strength of each bonus varies by recipe.
Ingredients
Cooking ingredients come from the player's crops, so a working farm is a prerequisite for cooking. Because storms can destroy unprotected plants, a steady supply of ingredients usually means growing them in greenhouses.
Baking Bread
Bread is the one recipe with a documented step-by-step process, and it is a two-stage one rather than a single craft:
Craft dough at the workbench from your harvested ingredients.
Place the dough in the furnace and wait for it to bake.
Take the finished bread out of the furnace once it is ready.
The two-stage pattern is worth noting because it means not every prepared food comes out of a single station. Some recipes are crafted, then cooked, and the intermediate item has to be moved between the two.
Water as Well as Food
Thirst is managed separately from hunger and is not solved by cooking. Drinkable water comes from a rain catcher, or from filling a carafe at a lake and boiling it, both covered on Resource Gathering. Cooked meals slow how fast the thirst meter drains but do not fill it, so a water supply is still needed alongside a working kitchen.
Connection to Other Systems
Farming: all cooking ingredients are grown crops.
Multiplayer: in co-op, one player can focus on farming and cooking to supply the group with bonus food.
Exploration: hunger and thirst bonuses from cooked meals allow longer airship trips between islands without returning for supplies.
Kitchen and Food Basket Changes
Version 1.3.0 removes decorative pans from the Kitchen crafting recipe and moves the Food Basket unlock later, to the point where it can actually be crafted. The patch does not provide a complete replacement ingredient list or the new unlock requirement, so those values remain unspecified.
Version 1.3.0-304818 reached Steam on September 30, 2026. The announcement placed the console rollout after platform approval; a matching live version has not been confirmed for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S or Nintendo Switch 2 as of October 8. Check the installed version before relying on these changes on another platform.