Sons of the Forest's first patch in 6 months is a doozy, adding buildable rafts, a procedural wall system, and fixing more than 100 bugs
Sons of The Forest's cannibal-infested woods have been quiet lately. After a wildly popular early access period, it launched in February last year, with developer Endnight Games providing frequent updates over its first four post-release months. Yet the studio has been largely silent since a hotfix in June, with no further updates, announcements, or even tweets in the latter half of 2024.
That's all changed now. On Wednesday, Endnight Games issued a monster of a patch, adding several major features to its survive 'em up, making numerous systemic refinements such as improving weapon aiming and extending the world boundaries, and fixing scores upon scores of bugs.
The primary new addition to Sons of the Forest is "3 buildable rafts" along with a mooring post to stop them from floating off into the ocean. In its Steam announcement, Endnight games didn't provide much information about the rafts beyond the fact they exist, but a YouTube video published by the unaffiliated Sons of the Forest Channel offers greater insight into these makeshift vessels. Players can build small and large rafts which are exposed to the elements, as well as a houseboat that comes with a cosy roofed area. All three rafts can be furnished with useful survival equipment like beds and chairs made from human bones, while players move them around lakes and oceans with an attached paddle.
Alongside rafts, the update adds "holder" structures for the glider and the Knight V electric unicycle, and a new procedural system for placing defensive walls. According to Endnight, this system lets you "draw out where you want the walls and let Kelvin finish them". Kelvin being the game's affable human companion.
That's it for wholly new stuff, but Endnight has also made numerous adjustments to how Sons of the Forest functions. Aiming has been improved for numerous weapons—namely the crossbow, compound bow, crafted bow, shotgun and slingshot—while the flightpath of arrows has been tweaked to "match trajectory when shooting bows". The map is also sort-of larger, with Endnight expanding the boundaries of the world so that your freshly made rafts have more room to float around.
Capping off the patch is a veritable tome of bugfixes, addressing everything from sleep icons to glitchy cannibal corpses. Among these are a few particularly fun examples. "Fixed cannibal jaws sometimes looking incorrect during death animation" conjures some amusing images, while I like to imagine the conversation around "Fixed French localisation for 'brain bite'". My favourite, however, is "The player will no longer be cold or freeze in hell cave". Frankly, this is the least I would expect from a hell cave.
You can read the full list of updates here. Perhaps this is a sign I should finally jump back into Sons of the Forest. I played a fair chunk of it during early access, and dug its fastidiously tangible crafting system, but never went back for the full release. PCG alumnus Sarah James made it her personal pick in our 2023 Game of the Year awards, however, dropping 40 hours into the game's cannibal-free Peaceful mode.