Outbound Resource Guide: Where to Find Every Material and Food Item
Before you waste three hours driving in circles looking for a single piece of Coarse Ore, let me show you exactly where every resource is hiding.
Survival games love to hide basic materials in obscure corners of the map just to pad out your playtime. You will inevitably find yourself holding a massive blueprint for a base upgrade, only to realize you are missing one specific type of wood or metal that refuses to spawn in your current biome. I know exactly how frustrating it is to backtrack across the entire map on foot because your engine is out of fuel. Instead of guessing where the redwood trees grow or hoping a storage box gives you the right scrap, I have mapped out the entire material index for the first and second biomes.
Foraged Crafting Materials
These are the raw building blocks of your entire road trip. You gather these directly from the environment by picking them up off the dirt, chopping down trees, or breaking open rocks.
The Importance of Tool Upgrades
You cannot just grab everything with your bare hands. While you can snap small twigs and grab loose stones, the bulk of your progression relies on upgrading your equipment. You will notice very quickly that certain large shrubs and massive boulders are completely immune to your starting tools. If you want to harvest large sturdy bushes for Durafibre, you need to craft the Sickle II. If you want to break through the Mossrock walls blocking the caves, you absolutely must have the Pickaxe II. Do not ignore your workbench.
If your pockets start overflowing while you are out chopping down the forest, you need to read my guide on how to expand your inventory and van storage capacity. Do not leave valuable resources lying on the ground just because you ran out of backpack space.
Crafted Materials and Workstations
Raw logs and unrefined ore are completely useless if you cannot process them. The entire mid game revolves around feeding raw materials into specialized workstations to create advanced components.
Setting Up Your Production Line
You need to gather specific blueprints from Signal Towers before you can build the machinery required for these items. I highly recommend focusing on acquiring the Sawmill as soon as possible. If you are confused about how to set up your wood processing loop, check out my dedicated guide on how to build a sawmill and get everwood planks. Once you have your stations bolted to your van floor, the crafting recipes are relatively straightforward.
Foraged Food and Ingredients
You cannot survive on metal shavings and tree bark. Maintaining your nutrition and health levels is a constant background chore that will slowly drain your resources if you are not prepared.
Sustaining Your Character
In the very early stages of the game, you should focus almost entirely on gathering Roadberries, Amber Morels, and Carrots so you always have a baseline food supply. I highly recommend learning how to properly set up your agricultural loop. Read my full breakdown on farming, cooking, and staying fed so you can automate this process instead of picking berries in the dirt forever.
Cooked Meals and Recipes
Eating raw ginger out of the dirt is a terrible way to manage your health bars. Once you have built your kitchen workstations inside your van, you can combine your foraged ingredients into high tier meals that drastically cut down the amount of time you spend looking for food.
Upgrading Your Diet
You will need a Food Processor, a Cooking Pot, and a Baking Oven to access these recipes. Do not waste your valuable raw grain by eating it directly. Process it into bread and pizza to maximize the nutritional output of every single harvest.
