How to play the forest

After years and years of early access, The Forest’s version 1.0 has finally been released. While Endnight Games has plans to continue to support and improve the game, it’s finally reached its long awaited final version.

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Experiment with Crafting
Make Your First Home Along the Coastline
Don’t be Afraid to Explore
Hit the High Seas

The first moments of the game are self-explanatory. A plane crash has left you stranded on a remote island with little guidance. Upon regaining consciousness you’ll find tools and supplies scattered across the aircraft cabin. Food, drink, medicine, and a trusty emergency hatchet. In combination with a survival handbook, these will be the tools that get you started on your survival adventure. In order to increase your odds of survival, we’re here to give you the most valuable tool of all: knowledge.

Experiment with Crafting

Your survival book will be the primary source for crafting recipes, but it does omit a number of crucial ones that you would otherwise have to discover yourself. It’s worth playing around with the inventory screen and combining putting sticking some leaves to a turtle shell with some tree sap just to see what happens (nothing in this case). Much of The Forest‘s fun comes from discovering uses for the resources around you, so I certainly don’t plant to spoil the fun, but here are a few crafting instructions to get you up on your feet.

Combine two sticks together to make a weak spear. It’s great for catching fresh water fish in small ponds, and can be helpful hunting bigger game, if you can aim it properly.
Make an “upgraded stick”. There are certainly better names for this item and it’s more valuable than it sounds. Upgraded sticks are crafted together using a stick and a piece of cloth. It makes for a great torch and it also has greater durability as a defensive weapon than your fresh-off-the-tree branch.
Rope is a rare commodity that is difficult to find lying around in the wilderness, but if you combine pieces of cloth, you can craft your own rope very early in the game, giving you access to the crafted axe and crafted bow.

Make Your First Home Along the Coastline

The Forest has many surprises in store for you, and they are not going to wait to make their appearance. Hostiles will quietly approach you while you’re distracted picking blackberries near your cabin in the woods. The best strategy for beginners is to head straight to the coastline. My personal favorite location is on the beach near a stranded yacht, which provides all of the necessities: supplies, safety, and sea turtles.

Sea turtles will make their way onto the shore every morning providing players with an endless supply of food while they rest at camp. Large trees are generally not too far away and make building a beach side condo quite easy. Most importantly, your enemies don’t like water, giving you a priceless natural defense.

Don’t be Afraid to Explore

Once enemies begin appearing, it can be tempting to stay at home and avoid confrontation. Building a bigger and better lodge surrounded by traps for pesky cannibals is tempting, but you’ll miss out on the best parts of the game. This simple island has many secrets to uncover, most of which are buried beneath the island in a series of caverns below.

The caves are arduous and difficult to navigate, but indeed a rewarding task. Key plot progression items are found almost exclusively within the caves, giving players little choice but to explore them. It’s best to treat time on the surface as a way to restock on supplies, and time below as the way to unlock new gear.

Hit the High Seas

While not the most popular structure, I strongly recommend building a house boat. It’s a fantastic way to travel around the island and the small islets just off the coast without separating yourself from your supply stock, or the safety or the safety of the water. It can take some time to build the house boat and all of the supply storage that makes the home worthwhile. However, it’s easier to put the time into one traveling base that’s fully stocked, as opposed to many smaller ones with minimal supplies.

I’ve yet to complete my playthrough of the final version of The Forest, so I’m certain there’s new content that could impact the strategies that helped me complete the game the first time around. Have an approach of your own? Let us know in the comments below!