Abiotic Factor Cooking: 38 Soup Recipes and Their Buffs

There are 38 working soup recipes in Abiotic Factor, and 25 of them give you the same buff. Souper Satisfied, which slows hunger and thirst drain by 20%, is the default payout for almost anything the pot recognises. So the real question is not "what can I cook", it is "which of the other 13 do I need today", and that is a much shorter list: carry weight, melee XP, radiation resistance, movement speed, heat resistance, and a handful of skill-XP nudges.

Soup needs Cooking level 3, and the skill only goes up by cooking, so the first few pans of fried meat are the price of entry.

Every working soup, with its numbers

Hunger and thirst are fill values per serving. Every one of these makes 4 portions and takes 2:00 in the pot, so cook time is never a reason to pick one over another.

Highest hunger fill in the game is Witching Hour Brew at 42, which wants a Raw Penumbra Filet and a Glow Eye. Highest thirst fill is Greyeb Chowder, also 42, and it comes with a catch (see below). If you want both at once, Glacial Gazpacho at 30 hunger and 25 thirst is the most balanced heavy meal.

What the buffs actually do

The names are jokes. The effects are not, and most of them are XP multipliers rather than combat stats:

Two of those are traps worth reading twice. Greyeb Chowder gives the best damage reduction in the soup list, 15%, and in exchange the Leyak spawns on you more often, so it is a choice and not a free 15%. Sugary Slop buys cheaper sprinting with faster fatigue and bladder drain, which in practice means more bathroom trips in the middle of an expedition.

Which one to put in the pot

• Hauling a base move or a salvage run: Hearty Stew (Raw Exor Heart, Carbuncle Mushroom, Super Tomato). Bodacious at +25% carry weight is the single most useful thing cooking does, and this is the only soup that grants it.
• Levelling melee: Meaty Stew is the only Heightened Senses soup, so if you are grinding Blunt or Sharp it is the one.
• Going somewhere irradiated: Radfish Chowder halves radiation absorbed and still carries Souper Satisfied, making it the only soup in the game that stacks a real defence on top of the default.
• A long walk into a portal world: A&L Mega-Stew at 37 hunger with +10% move speed and +2 Strength. Expensive (an Exor Arm and a Raw Exor Heart), worth it for the distance.
• A crafting and base session: Balanced Stew for Big Brain, since the XP lands on exactly what you will be doing.
• Nothing in the fridge: a single Military M.R.E. makes Sustenance Soup, 4 portions and Quick Reflexes, from one item.

Everything else on the table is a hunger-and-thirst decision. Cook whatever your ingredients already point at, because the buff will be Souper Satisfied either way.

Getting a kitchen running

Two cooking methods, and you want both.

Frying. A Frying Pan or Makeshift Frying Pan on a powered stove, raw ingredient dropped in, pulled off when done. One ingredient at a time, fast, and the main way to grind Cooking XP toward level 3. It also strips the food poisoning risk off raw meat and produce.

Soup. A filled pot on a stove with electricity, then ingredients. Match a valid recipe and the dish name changes and the entry saves to the Soup Recipes tab of your Compendium. Miss, and you get Bad Soup.

You can live off the fixed stoves in facility break rooms early, but the Portable Stove frees the kitchen from them: 2x Coil, 4x Plastic Scrap, 1x Keyboard, plus 4x Metal Pipe or 4x Hydro Pipe, at a Crafting Bench. Both pipe variants produce the same stove, which is useful when one pipe type is what the salvage gave you.

Past level 3, the next Cooking milestone is level 10 for the Convection Oven and baking, with the Advanced Oven at level 13. The Somatic Gastrologist starts with a Cooking lean, so in co-op handing one player the kitchen gets a squad to soups faster than everyone frying their own dinner.

The four soups you do not want

Put the wrong things in a pot and the game still makes something. Bad Soup is the catch-all failure state and inflicts Borborygmus. Beyond that, specific ingredients force specific results: Rotten Food, Plastic Scrap, Giga Glue or an Exor Arm on its own produce Toxic Soup and make you Sick; a Bag of Feces alone makes Poop Soup; and any scrap metal, ammo, Leyak Essence or The Bad Soda in the pot makes Killer Soup, which is exactly as named. In co-op, that last one is why the kitchen should be one person's job.

Worth knowing separately: the pot also runs four utility recipes that produce materials rather than food, including Giga Glue from a Peccary Skull and Solder from Silver and Metal Scrap. Those are not meals and will not feed anyone, but they are a reason to keep a pot powered.

More Abiotic Factor

The Abiotic Factor wiki covers cooked food and survival needs in more depth. For the crafting side, the chemistry guide pairs weapon coatings with a Heightened Senses stew, the base building guide covers the power a stove needs, and the tier list ranks the weapons you will be levelling with that melee XP. New here? The beginner guide comes first.

Recipe, buff, hunger and thirst values verified October 2026 against the official Abiotic Factor Wiki cooking and status effects tables, and the Portable Stove recipe against its own page. Buff durations are not published, so treat every buff as temporary and recook before a long run.