Outbound Guide: How to Get Food and Manage Hunger

Quick Answer: Snag Roadberries from blue bushes and mushrooms near trees to quickly restore 15 to 20 percent of your hunger gauge during the early game. Once you unlock the Gardening Blueprint, build a Crop Plot and a Watering Can to grow a permanent food supply right from your camper van!

Nobody likes crawling at a snail’s pace while trying to explore a massive world. In Outbound, keeping your character fed is crucial to maintaining your mobility. You can track your current hunger level by glancing at the green circle wrapped around the banana icon in the bottom right corner of your screen. Let that meter run empty, and you lose the ability to sprint entirely.

While the game is somewhat forgiving with its survival mechanics, crawling around because your character skipped breakfast is incredibly annoying. Here is exactly how to keep your stomach full and your character moving fast.

Foraging for Quick Meals in the Wild

When you first start your adventure, you need to rely entirely on the land. Nature provides plenty of quick snacks if you know where to look. Your primary targets are going to be wild berries and mushrooms scattered throughout the starting biomes.

• Roadberries: Keep an eye out for leafy bushes dotted with bright blue berries. Interacting with these yields Roadberries.
• Mushrooms: These frequently spawn around the base of large trees and hidden within thick foliage.

Eating either a Roadberry or a mushroom will instantly refill roughly 15 to 20 percent of your hunger gauge. Grabbing these as you run past is the most efficient way to stay topped up during those early hours.

Eventually, you can craft a Food Processor to cook actual meals. Honestly? I found this to be a bit of a time sink. Scarfing down raw berries and mushrooms gets the job done just fine without burning through extra resources.

Building Your Mobile Garden

A few hours into your journey, the game hands you a permanent solution to your hunger problems. You will unlock the Gardening Blueprint, allowing you to cultivate your own crops directly on your vehicle.

Getting your farm up and running requires a couple of specific items. Crafting these tools will eat into your early game materials, so if your stash is looking a little empty, brush up on your gathering routes with our Scrap Metal farming guide before you start building.

Here is what you need to craft at your workbench to become an RV farmer:

Planting and Harvesting Mechanics

Farming in Outbound has a wonderfully simple quirk. You do not actually need to hunt down specific seed packets to grow things.

Once your Crop Plot is placed on your van, interact with the tiny wooden sign attached to the front of it. As long as you have at least one piece of the fruit or vegetable you want to grow stored anywhere in your inventory or RV storage, you can plant it.

You must water your plots regularly using your newly crafted Watering Can. Ignore your garden, and your plants simply will not grow. After a few in-game days of consistent watering, you can harvest your fresh produce.

Just a quick warning before you rely entirely on your garden. Not every single crop you grow in the game is edible. Because of this, you should always keep an emergency stash of scavenged Roadberries or mushrooms tucked away in your van just in case your current harvest turns out to be purely crafting material.

If you want to master every aspect of your campervan adventure, be sure to check out all of our other guides at Novus Vektra.