Struggling to find the bare necessities? Check out our Metal Gear Survive Food & Water Guide for tips and tricks on finding good sources of food and water early on in the game, giving you a nice little bonus to Stamina and Health when exploring the more dangerous aspects of the game.
Food and Water are vital to your progress in Metal Gear Survive. Without regular food your health pool is much shorter and you start to become a little delirious. Likewise with fluids, if you don’t have enough intake of water you’ll find yourself running out of stamina incredibly quickly. The survival aspect of Metal Gear Survive is all part of the experience. There isn’t a method that will instantly make food and water a problem of the past, but there’s a few things you can do to keep on top of it.
Where To Find Food
Managing food is going to be one of your main priorities for a long time. There is no quick fix to supplies issues. You’re going to spend much of your time hungry. At the beginning of the game you will be told various locations of small and medium sized animals. ALWAYS hunt these down. Every time you see a Wolf, Goat, whatever, take it down. Knocking them out with a swift kick or Slingshot can return more materials once captured and returned to base.
Animals respawn but very slowly. You can speed up the process by resting at tents, once you can build them, but this drops your Food and Water dramatically so it’s rarely the best idea. As soon as you’re able, get a bow and arrow made up. There are birds that land on rocks and atop trees that can be taken out and eaten. Never eat raw food and don’t waste your food. If you’re on 99%, don’t touch anything. Make sure the food value does not go over the 100% as the more you waste now, the tougher it is later.
You do eventually unlock farms but these are hardly viable sources until much later in the game as they take 3-4 hours to grow. If your hunger grows dangerously low, just jump into multiplayer. Once you reach 0 hunger you start taking health damage. If you jump into multiplayer, join a Quick Match and then quit before finding any party members, you can return to single player with 25 food. Not ideal but it stops you starving to death. The time on your crops also goes down.
Look for bodies of water. There are usually animals, berries and Gerbils you can find. Again, scoop them up and keep them safe. Make locations you discover animals with stamps so you can return later. It’s difficult in the early stages but using the multiplayer trick can help you progress through the darker times of managing your food levels.
Where To Find Water
Finding Water in Metal Gear Survive is actually really simple. There’s a small body of water near your base of operations. It has a near endless supply, requiring only Empty Containers in order to harvest it. You can use Canteens or Bottles, the latter being a very common junk ingredient found in most buildings and settlements in the game. The only trouble with this water, it’s dirty. You can drink dirty water but it has the chance of making you sick. If you have the medical supplies to cure the illness, you can drink to 100% and then simply heal the side effects away.
Otherwise, you’re going to want to know how to clean Water in Metal Gear Survive. Sadly, this is not something you have access to for a few hours. You need to progress through the story until you retrieve the Wormhole Generator and return it to your base. Once it is back at your base you can check your Construction station to build an upgraded campfire that lets you clean dirty water from Bottles and Canteens. This is the best and quickest way of creating a reliable source of water. You can also build Water Tanks at your base during the same part of the story. To summarize, progress through the story as quickly as possible. Leave multiplayer and side content alone until you’ve got the ability to clean your Water. You can get there in a couple of hours.
