It’s another busy week for survival games. Nightingale entered early access on Tuesday, survival driving game Pacific Drive launched today, and last year’s survival horror smash Sons of the Forest is back because it just hit version 1.0.
Yep. After a year in early access, you can now grab your loyal buddy Kelvin and jump back in to play the full release of Sons of the Forest. If you’re wondering what’s new in the 1.0 version of the terrifying survival game… well, there’s kind of a lot.
Along with a new title sequence at the start of the game, there’s a new choice-based ending, and more cutscenes have been added. Remember Timmy from the original The Forest? He’s back and is now voiced by none other than Shawn Ashmore (Lamplighter from The Boys, Iceman from X-Men, and Jack from Quantum Break).
As for actual gameplay stuff, there’s now a sickness system that comes from drinking bad water or eating spoiled food, and a couple of mutants are joining the chaos: one is named Legsy because it has a lot of legs, and the other is named Holey for reasons I don’t want to speculate on. Gliders are now foldable so they can fit snugly in your tremendously massive backpack, and the world contains more paths, caves, and points of interest to discover.
I’m excited to see there’s also a new creative mode that will let you play without restraint, including an inventory filled with all the items you need. You don’t even have to wait for build animations in creative mode: just pop a structure down and it’ll appear. The only catch is you have to unlock creative mode by finishing the game.
And one big mystery is about to be solved. Sons of the Forest updates over the past year have added pieces of an artifact for players to collect, but no one was able to finish building it. That changes today. Not only can you fully build the artifact, it apparently had more than one purpose. As the patch notes put it: “You can now *(Spoiler)* or create a *(Spoiler)* with the combined artifact.” Mysterious!
Check out the massive list of patch notes below, and keep in mind that, according to developer Endnight Games, this isn’t everything: it’s just the “biggest features, improvements and balance changes” and “beyond this list there are many more small fixes and improvements.”
Features
- New title scene and end credits details, visuals and music
- Added new choice alternate ending
- Added 5 new cutscenes
- Revised and added new voice acting and details to dining room, gold room, get down son and Jianyu intro cutscenes
- Added new voice acting to Sahara confidential found footage
- Added proximity voice chat with filters for in caves & underwater along with adding additional filtering to the walkie talkie
- Added creative mode, with a new alternate creative inventory, and ability to skip build animations (unlocks when players complete the game story)
- Added Raccoons and gave ability for squirrels and raccoons to climb trees
- Added 2 new mutants; Legsy and Holey
- Added new stronger puffy variation ‘Spotty’
- Added higher tier gold armor level for cannibals
- Added new sickness system tied to drinking unclean water or eating bad food. Drinking clean water or eating meds will cure sickness
- Many new story item pickups added and most story item pickups re-worked, along with new in world decorative notes and magazines
- Renamed glider to Foldable glider and it can now be hot-keyed and stashed to inventory
- Golf Carts now come equipped with radio decks and a GPS screen
- Added new world details, more paths, partially dug tunnels by excavators, new Jianyu camps, 14 new mini caves and cellars and many other environment tweaks and updates
- Revised hell cave door opening, will now require additional steps to open
- Added NPC Timmy to hell cave
- Added 2 final artifact pieces and final artifact can now be crafted
- You can now *(Spoiler)* or create a *(Spoiler)* with the combined artifact
- Jianyu helicopters will now take off and leave from bases around map, and may occasionally hover over player structures to check on them
- Added dying tactical soldiers with red flares that can be seen from a distance to help direct players towards locations
- Added new findable dead Tactical and Worker dudes with GPS locators that appear when nearby, helping direct players towards interesting locations
- Added campfire smoke plumes to cannibal villages that can be seen from a distance and will go out if there are no cannibals there to tend to the fire
- Added various details to the snowy mountains; outdoor Solafite areas that attract lightning, snowmobile versions of carts, and small radar dishes
- Added new cave (unlocks after end game sequence)
- Added a new Arrow Storage structure and a new explosive storage structure
- Added new nice chair and nice couch buildable structures
- Added 2 new platform prefab structures and ability to snap them to built structures
- Added new auto foundation system for some prefab structures ( including small cabin, lean-to and lookout tower, and platforms)
- Added 3 new trap structures
- Added option to extend camp fire with logs to turn it into a bonfire
- Added a range and valid target readout to the rope gun
- Added 4 new findable blueprint structures, including a glider launcher, and 3 mystery structures
- Added strikeout to the message window UI for tutorials or ingredient counts that have been completed
- Added additional achievements
- Added seed items for Twinberries and Snowberries and a new Jam Recipe
- Added new soft opening video to bunker food
- Added new rotten textures for rotten meat, oysters & fish
- Added PVP damage setting, and made it available in the multiplayer admin menu
- Added AMD Fidelity FX™ Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) support
- Added a new weather occlusion system for buildings to provide much more accurate weather visuals & Reworked interior space warmth system to be more accurate
Improvements
- Player can now carry up to 4 stones at once and can now place multiple stones at once, as many as currently held
- Reworked stone wall so that upper rows require only 4 stones instead of 5
- Hell cave lava, lighting, effects, details and audio re-worked and improved
- After player sleeps Kelvin will be found also sleeping somewhere nearby
- Virginia & Kelvin will now wear outfits you’ve given them in cutscenes
- GPS screen now more accurately reflects the world, showing cliffs, paths and clearings
- Moved many items and pickups to better locations
- Added support for weather occlusion to structure tarps
- Added new system to ensure multiplayer clients see completed ghost structures transition smoothly to the built version regardless of networking conditions
- Slightly increased size of the tarp sleep trigger so its easier for all players to sleep
- Grounded beams fake pillars now remove snow around them
- Powered cross and leg lamp now have a fixed snap point for the wire
- Placing a new stone floor will now orient it to place in front of where player is aiming instead of the default calculated position which might be outside viewport
- Improved some placement UI to better reflect position of the snap point
- Placing stone beam on ground now displays more accurately where the stone will be placed
- Added snow remover to snow golf cart plow
- Added sound effect when relocating structures
- Flyswatter and Bone-maker traps can now be moved after placed
- Furniture supported by other furniture is now linked, preventing the dismantling of the supporting one, destruction is also applied to the supported furniture
- Players can now trade bones
- Bunker Luxury entrance reworked and set dressing improved
- All bunkers relit, and additional details added in some of them
- Stone beams and floors now use a more subtle place animation
- Mushrooms, Twinberries and Snowberries can now be grown in planters
- Large female cannibals have new full-body taunts and short yell animations
- Added boots to players pajamas
- Oyster greeble layout improved
- Improved some areas in Cave D where players were getting stuck
- Added a tutorial message for zooming the tracker.
- Improved placement of tree structures
- Added more golf carts to golf course
- Golf carts and Hang Gliders now appear on the GPS screen when nearby
- Eagles now sometimes land on logs and dead trees
- Added some additional animal zones around map
- Improved fall detection to avoid triggering fall animation when walking over small ledges
- Stripped crunch from all textures smaller than 1024 to improve performance
- Virginia Beckon locations now save and added many more locations for her to take you to
- Any consumable, including drinking dirty water straight from a body of water, will now play the bad food eaten audio event on the player
- Added Loading screen hints for sickness and toggling creative inventory mode
- Enabled count readouts on all items on shelves that are not 1 to 1 visuals
- Improved case where muddies would run to water or food and back to trees before finishing eating or drinking
- Flashlight and shotgun no longer respawn upon loading if you already have them in inventory
- Solar panels cannot be placed anymore in occluded areas (underground cellars)
- Reduced shader variant counts & added shader warm up in loading to remove first time shader compile hitches
- The GPS Tracker will now remember the current zoom level when re-equipping it
- Blueprint structures that are being relocated will now retain their previous facing direction
- Updated strength hint in loading screen to include damage
- When a structure is dismantled, it can now spawn bundles of items
- Changed it so that the last tabs on the blueprint book stay open longer if the mouse is moved off them
- Added LODS to armor racks and armor on shelves
- Improved the debug free camera system which now uses the main camera, so assets around it load properly, and now works with gamepad (’Freecamera on’ through the debug menu)
- All held items will now play a stash audio event when they are unequipped.
- All held items will now play their mouse over audio event when the item is equipped.
- Optimized all colliders in inventory and sped up how long it takes for items to appear when inventory is opened
- Added an area light to the screen of the held GPS tracker to give it some glow
- Cloth in inventory now has a stack of five that will fill up
- Doubled the speed of the item hover animations in the inventory
- Items can now be batch added and removed from the mat in inventory by holding the button down
- Reduced the out of breath sound when the player has reached their minimum vitality when all their stats are reduced
- Improved the interaction and animation of throwing items from the grab bag
- Button can now be held to continue throwing items from the grab bag
- You can now hold the button down to keep eating berries in inventory
- Added watch pile on the crafting mat
- Removed small river rocks from lake greebles to reduce asset intersections
- Improved nav mesh for hell cave
- Placing walls under leaning beams on ground is now possible if they are level
- Updated lean-to blueprint, using walls instead of apexes for the surrounding pieces and added one sided apexes to fill gaps on the sides
- Lowered CPU cost of having lots of idle structures
- Now only the structure being actively placed turns red when placement is invalid
- Log plank and variants now throw with the same orientation as logs
- Improved look of solafite
- Added Timmy drawings and Jianyu notes as world details
- Reworked and improved many temp art assets
- Added toss stone animation when adding stone to structures
- Added extra snow sled to help direct players from snow crash to the first ice cave
- Removed extra locator on GPS for cave F
- Improved look of skin on creepy Virginia and Armsy
- Fixed some objects in world being dynamic that should be static
- Increased headlights brightness on Golf Carts
- Added ‘search parties frequency’ and ‘building resistance’ settings to custom game menu
- Added pause menu icon over players in multiplayer ( appears as a cog over their name )
- Improved creepy Virginia ragdoll
- Cave entrance bat flocks can happen at any time of day now
- Improved Ai interactions around village objects
- Added burning sound and light when an actor is on fire
- Required Ingredients UI will now no longer show an available count higher than the required count
- Added a tutorial for when the player has been killed and needs to pick up their backpack
- Tab for the currently active page is now kept active instead of only when hovered over
- Both held books now have a close UI prompt at the bottom
- Updated the UI text and added localization for when a battery or air tank is used to recharge the equipped item
- Some items can now be added to storage more than one at a time
- Removed the page numbers from the top of the page in the blueprint book since the tabs now stay open for the current page
- Added a flashing Exclamation mark and bright red light to discoverable laptops
- Added a loading screen hint for drying racks placed by fire drying things faster
- Gold Armor renamed to Ancient Armor
- Added Drink and Dump Out UI for the flask and cooking pot
- Fire arrows and Torches will now ignite bodies when the arrow impacts or the torch performs its downward thrust attack
- Updated Cooking buff UI notifications to include the cooking pot icon
- Ziplines will now have visual harnesses when attaching stones or logs to the zipline
- Added a cooking pot stand for when the pot is placed on a fire to avoid it visually floating
- Required Items UI for structures is now hidden when the player is in caves or bunkers
- Added a pulsing light beacon to the dropped inventory bag to make it easier to find in the dark
- Added close UI when holding a story page item
- Lakes will now visibly freeze when players are nearby
- Various memory and CPU optimizations
- New dead Puffy poses added to the world
- Other players names are now hidden when riding in the golf cart
- Increased host not responding delay from 5 to 6.5 seconds
- Texture streaming budget will now update when changing texture resolution options
- Optimizations to streaming system to improve movement around the world and remove risk of leaving things active when moving fast
- Renamed Kelvin ‘take item’ order to ‘take clothing’
- Reworked game save code to be more robust in case of error during the serialization process
- All blueprint pickup items are now called blueprint instead of the recipe name to avoid spoilers
- Added audio event notification on game saved
- Updated default bindings for golf cart, will now use RT and LT by default
- When giving items to other players using the grab bag, the UI on the item will now say GIVE instead of USE
- The mini-map view is now zoomed out a bit
- Improved flashlight on the hanging tactical
- Updated the inventory visuals for the Ancient Armor
- Story Objectives are now displayed in red
- Added a tutorial to build storage the first time the player fails to pickup an item due to full inventory
- Improved billboard texture memory usage
- Action cameras are no longer fake dropped. If the player collects the camera and already owns the video clip, they are notified with a UI notification
- Added UI notification to display how many people are waiting to sleep in multiplayer to let others know its time to sleep
- Added UI to inform the player how to change the icon on held GPS locators
- Added bones and skulls to some of the clay pots when broken
- All blueprint structures should now properly clear grass and bushes
- Campfire and standing fires now use new fire burning audio events
- If the bow does not have an arrow loaded but the player does have an available arrow type available in inventory, it will be automatically loaded into the bow
- Storage will now drop certain items in bundles when the structure is destroyed
- Only one person can interact with a campfire at a time
- Structure dismantling is now X instead of C to prevent clashing with adding items to storage
- You can now drink water when holding a spear
- You can now add twin and snow berries to shelves
- Improved some spittle layout in caves
- Added a UI notification for when the player is interrupted sleeping from enemies nearby
- Dead tactical soldiers now wear balaclavas and have bloody clothing
- Mountain fog layout improved
- Torch smoke trails improved
- Added terrain anisotropic graphic setting
- Player now has idle and moving animations when holding artifact pieces
- Player can now look down further before the spear switches grip
- Rebreather mouthpiece is now moved offscreen when leaving the water
- Eating berries while in inventory is much faster
- Heavy cannibals can now wear winter clothes
- Glowing Puffies now have more unique looking materials
- Fix some issues with cannibal facial deformations not matching on carried bodies and not darkening when burned
- Added more variations to the enemy search party events
- Improved texture loading speed of items in inventory
- Added Holosprings logo to screens in bunkers
- Improved look of walkie talkie
- Re-worked look of bunker icons on GPS to be distinct
- Smaller cave icons on GPS
- Added UI to show player current strength level
- A.I. Can now better navigate around player built furniture and small structures
- Improved AI navigation in player bases
- Added AI pathing to rope bridges
- Improved blood and wetness of creepy Virginia and on babies
- Improved physics of bushes when cut
- Dead stumps react better when cut
- More saturated coin visuals to be able to see them better in inventory
- Kelvin can now walk over logs ( also fixes pushing them through terrain )
- Inventory now gets the correct fake ground applied every time the inventory is opened
- All items in the inventory now have hover animations
- Setup LODS for preset tarp elements
- Optimized construction database to reduce amount of CPU usage and lower amount of data to send over network in multiplayer games
- Setup combined LOD system and added 4th LOD to optimize rendering cost of stone floors
- Improved look of defensive wall LODs
- Made rendering of the Construction UI more consistent visually
- Broke up tiling on frozen lakes
- Added shoreline wetness to the cliffs
- Rainbows will now show up after it rains
Balance
- Babies are now single hit kill from any weapon in normal mode
- If a player sleeps in unprotected location, they can now sometimes be interrupted by enemy search party
- ‘Containers don’t refill on load’ set to True by default in Normal games. Can be set in a Custom game.
- Players max strength level has been increased from 50 to 100
- Each level in strength now increases melee and tree chop damage by 1%
- Adjusted Hang Glider ‘down force’ when pitched up to make it easier to gain altitude
- No printer resin by default in printers, instead you need to find and add it
- Players name tag will now be hidden when crouching in multiplayer games
- Large cannibals running now drains more energy
- Sea turtles now respawn at rate of 1 per day (4x faster)
- Added 10 more sea turtle zones
- Explosions will now cause break damage to all armor pieces hit
- Added more golf carts to golf course and around map and made more connecting paths to drive them on
- Adjusted the rates at which the players skin temperature changes and the rate at which the player gets wet and dries off
- The player will now get soaked from snow much slower than when in rain
- Indoor temperature is now clamped within a range so that indoor temperature is not always the same as outside
- Fire sources are hotter now so the player will dry off faster
- Adjusted the amount of rest the player gets indoors and outdoors and how comfort modifies it
- Energy Bar Fullness increased from 15 to 30
- Some item counts in inventory have been reduced to match their visuals in the inventory and to encourage using storage
- Cat food and Oysters can now rot
- Increased the raw fullness of some of the perishables
- Adjusted spawn logic of cannibals in villages so stronger types won’t spawn at villages close to player start points at start of game. Fewer Elise spawns, and added a few Franks in villages
- Igor, Henry, and Elise can no longer appear in early game search parties
- Igor, Henry, and Elise can now appear in nomad families starting day 8
- Rotten items can no longer be used in cooking
- Dried perishables will no longer go rotten
- Cooked foods now take twice as long to rot compared to raw
- Air tanks now drain 25% faster
- Stone Storage and sled now carry 28 stones instead of 27
- Updated eggnog recipe to use 4 eggs
- The taser stick now only has 3 charges per battery
- The player downed time before respawning has been greatly reduced. Also sped up the skull animation to give more sense of urgency
- Buckshot count reduced from 15 to 8, and cone spread reduced from 25 to 20
- Slug ammo will cause now cause shotgun hit reacts on enemies even if armored
- Fence electric wire now sustains damage when electrocuting something (can fire 6 times before being destroyed currently)
- You can now carry 20 Solafite
- Fat cannibal Health increased from 140 to 170
- Heavy cannibals now can wear armor
- Increased chance of spawning head armor and body armor pieces on enemies
- Tweaked all enemy armor values
- Cannibal head damage multiplier from sharp melee reduced from 2x to 1.5x
- Demon attack increased damage by 25% and increased Coop game health up to 30%
- Adjusted the enemy spawns in some caves and bunkers
- Regular male cannibals run & walk 20% faster and are 5% larger on average
- Puffy attacks have increased speed
- Creepy plating attack changed from 1 to 2 waves (each wave slightly smaller) It will also now include the new creepy mutant types
- Balanced enemy structure damage and fixed some creepies, demons and large female cannibals being unable to damage structures
- Set structure distortion at 70% of structures max HP and partial collapse at 20%
- Stick spikes and electric fences are now more fragile
Audio
- Improved audio for open areas like fields and on mountain
- Increased volume of bats
- Added updated music for Jianyu intro
- Added music to get to chopper cutscene
- Added new Hell cave audio and reverb snapshot
- Updated and retimed the music on opening crash cutscenes
- Added ‘stone’ pickup audio and mouse over when in inventory
- Removed ducking of music on settings menu
- Added Player getting a little sick sounds
- Tuned open air audio and default ambience
- Made mutants in caves footsteps louder, made cave wind louder
- Tuned mutant epoxy footstep distances
- Tuned Demon Boss distance vocal events
- Fixed old weapon hits lasting as events longer than their audio
- Added bunker announcement events to underwater group and tuned rebreather sounds
- Added better audio for Big Boss intro
- Made ambush event 2D
- Added events for moving structures and changed reverb on in cave objects
- Reduced steam hiss sound
- Tuned Golf Cart audio
- Tuned squirrel foot sound distances
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