Nomad Drive Pan Location: Where to Find a Cooking Pan

There is no single pan location in Nomad Drive. The pan is loose loot, and because the world is procedurally generated, the building it appears in changes from run to run. In two public demo playthroughs, players picked one up inside a point-of-interest (POI) building — one at a tower-style stop with counters and a fridge, one at a roadside stop that already had a stove sitting in it. If you need a pan for the "Cooking basics" objective, the practical answer is: stop at POIs, go inside, and search the kitchen-type interiors and shelves instead of driving toward a marked spot.

Where pans have turned up

Both accounts below are from the free demo, which launched on 15 June 2026 according to the official Steam page.

In Nomad Drive | RV Repair & Driving Simulator, the player reached a stop, spotted a stove, and found a pan right there with it — the "Cooking basics" objective then moved straight on to finding cookable food. In This Road Trip Keeps Getting Better | Nomad Drive, the pan turned up at the tower stop while the player was checking the building; the same run had already passed a storage-crate POI and a bus-stop-style stop without a pan. Notably, the fridge at that tower was empty and the drawers and cabinets gave nothing — the pan came from somewhere else in the building, so a quick glance at one container isn't enough.

Using the pan once you have it

• Carry it with you. Players report picking the pan up and keeping it in the RV rather than leaving it behind, so one pan covers every later stop.
• Cook on a stove. Place the pan, add cookable food, and turn the stove on. One player watched a drumstick progress through raw, medium cooked, and cooked stages before eating it.
• Expect food to matter more than the pan. In one run, eating the cooked drumstick cleared hunger completely while thirst needed extra drinks afterward.
• Don't confuse the pan with a pot. The pots you find in the world are planters for seeds, not cookware. One player used a pot for watermelon and apple seeds and got fruit back from it.
• Store food cold if you can. The official Steam announcement of 21 June 2026 states that refrigerated food now correctly stops spoiling, which matters because players have had carried steaks and bananas spoil mid-trip.

If a stop has no pan

Loot is rolled per run, so a POI with nothing useful is normal rather than a sign you missed something. Points of interest appear as you drive; one player estimated roughly two or three minutes of driving between them. Carrying a crate helps a lot here — players describe crates as the easiest way to haul a large batch of loot at once, and the 21 June 2026 patch notes on the Steam community hub mention adding more crates to the world. Gas stations were called a strong loot stop in one playthrough, and are worth a look even though the pans in these reports came from other buildings.

The same patch notes rebalanced food freshness, spoilage, and cooking times, and the 29 June 2026 notes reworked world and loot stability at distance. If you are on an older demo build, what you find at a given stop can differ. The official Steam page does not list item spawn points as of 2026-10-16, so everything above is player-reported demo experience rather than a published map.

Related cooking gear

A stove is required to cook at all, and the official Steam page describes using the RV's kitchen to turn found food into better meals. Coffee works as a separate loop: one player found a coffee maker, placed it, turned it on, and drank from the pot, reporting it seemed to help with thirst. Watermelon, potatoes, apples, and tomatoes came from seeds and pots rather than from cooking. One caution from a demo run: eating a mushroom left that player poisoned, so treat unidentified food as risky rather than free nutrition.

As of 2026-10-16, the Steam page lists Nomad Drive as an Early Access release planned for 20 October 2026, with the developer warning that system-heavy updates may require save wipes — so pan spawns may move around in later builds.