How to Cook, Automate, and Survive on Food

What changed in 1.0

The Cook Bot received a major overhaul in Scrap Mechanic 1.0 and Drilling Thunder. Before 1.0, the Cook Bot turned raw crops into a single generic “Cooked Food” item with flat hunger restoration. Now it produces tiered recipes with distinct hunger, thirst, and health effects. The update also added Revival Burgers — the first food item that restores health during combat — and full Connect Tool support for automated kitchen chains.

If you placed a Cook Bot before updating, it keeps working but unlocks new recipes only after you interact with the Builder NPC at the Mechanic Station and complete Quest 3 (farming). Until then, only basic Wheat and Beet recipes appear.

Placing and using the Cook Bot

Place the Cook Bot from the Dispenserbot at the Mechanic Station, within 5 blocks of the Dispenserbot like every other bench. Interact with the Cook Bot to open the recipe panel. Each recipe shows:

• Input crops — pulled from your inventory or from an adjacent container.
• Cook time — 5 to 30 in-game seconds depending on tier.
• Output stats — hunger, thirst, and health restoration values.

The Cook Bot does not require fuel or power. It runs passively once you start a recipe. You can queue up to three recipes; the fourth attempt returns an error until a slot frees.

For the full crop catalog and where to find seeds, see farming and raids and the farming guide.

Food tiers explained

1.0 organizes food into four tiers. Higher tiers require more crop types but restore more bars per inventory slot.

Tier	Examples	Hunger	Thirst	Health	Unlock
1	Cooked Wheat, Cooked Beet	Low	None	None	Quest 3
2	Veggie Soup, Carrot Stew	Medium	Low	None	Warehouse crate
3	Pineapple Pizza, Broccoli Bake	High	Medium	5 HP	Second warehouse
4	Revival Burger, Golden Smoothie	Full	Full	50 HP	Quest 7 + rare crops

Tier 1 food keeps you alive during early exploration. Tier 2–3 food sustains long warehouse runs and underground mining trips. Tier 4 food is mandatory for boss fights — the underground final boss and the Trash Bot both deal damage faster than tier 3 food can heal.

Revival Burgers for boss fights

Revival Burgers are the most important recipe in 1.0. They restore 50 HP instantly and fill both hunger and thirst bars. One Revival Burger lets you survive a Trash Bot charge or an underground boss slam that would otherwise one-shot you from full tier 3 food.

Recipe (Tier 4):

1. 2x Cooked Wheat
2. 1x Cooked Beet
3. 1x Pineapple (grown or found in warehouse crates)
4. 1x Rare Spice (dropped by Farmbots after Quest 5)

Cook time: 30 seconds. Output: 1 Revival Burger.

Boss fight loadout recommendation:

• Trash Bot — 4 Revival Burgers, 2 tier 3 meals for sustained recovery between phases.
• Underground final boss — 6 Revival Burgers, full metal armour, Spud Shotgun.
• Farmbot patrols — tier 2 food is enough; save Revival Burgers for dungeons.

Revival Burgers do not stack their instant heal — eating two in quick succession only applies the second heal after a 3-second cooldown. Space them between boss phase transitions.

Connect Tool kitchen automation

The Connect Tool links the Cook Bot to containers, conveyors, and other benches for hands-free cooking. A basic automated kitchen looks like this:

1. Crop storage chest — place next to the Cook Bot input side.
2. Connect Tool link — connect the chest output to the Cook Bot input. Raw crops flow automatically when a recipe starts.
3. Output chest — connect the Cook Bot output to a second chest. Finished food collects without manual pickup.
4. Optional conveyor chain — for large farms, route harvested crops from the field via controllers and sensors into the storage chest.

Advanced kitchen automation adds a Refinery Bot in the same chain to smelt metal while food cooks — useful for overnight AFK sessions at base. Wire a motion sensor at the farm gate so the conveyor only runs when you are home and can collect output.

The Connect Tool respects the same 5-block Dispenserbot range rule. Keep the entire kitchen cluster near the Mechanic Station or build a secondary Dispenserbot outpost at your farm.

What to cook at each game stage

Hours 0–3 (Quests 1–3): Cooked Wheat and Cooked Beet only. Plant Wheat in three separate cells using the mini-farming technique to avoid early raids.

Hours 3–6 (Quests 4–6): Unlock tier 2 recipes from your first warehouse crate. Veggie Soup is the best hunger-per-crop ratio for road trips to Mining Island.

Hours 6–10 (Quests 7–8): Start farming Pineapple and stock Rare Spice from Farmbot drops. Craft your first Revival Burgers before entering the underground mining layer.

Post-questline: Automate tier 3 and tier 4 production. Golden Smoothie (tier 4) replaces Revival Burgers for general exploration once you have the rare crop seeds from the second warehouse.

Linking food to other systems

Food connects to every other Survival system:

• Farming — crop tiers determine food tiers. See farming and raids for raid-safe planting.
• Trading — the Trader sells Soil Bags and occasional Pineapple seeds. Trade spare tier 2 food for refined metal in co-op barter sessions.
• Combat — Revival Burgers are the difference between clearing and wiping on the Trash Bot fight.
• Quests — Quest 3 requires a harvest; Quest 8 assumes you have tier 4 food. See quests and NPCs.

Common Cook Bot mistakes

• Cooking tier 1 food all the way to endgame. Tier 1 restores too little for underground or warehouse damage.
• Forgetting Rare Spice. Without it, Revival Burgers stay locked even if you have every crop.
• Building the kitchen far from the farm. Hauling crops by hand across biomes wastes more time than automating a field kitchen with a Connect Tool chain.
• Eating Revival Burgers during normal combat. Save them for boss phases; tier 2 food handles everything else.