V1.0

Hey Everyone,

Today The Forest moves from early access into a full release.

It’s been a crazy ride, made possible only by the players who have supported us for the last four years. To the team here it feels like a game we all made together, us and the community. Your input suggestions and feedback has been invaluable to us.

This version of the game adds a bunch of new stuff, from a craftable warmsuit, significant re-work of the endgame and a new alternate ending. Along with this there is a ton of cave re-work and polish and many many improvements and fixes.

There is a lot we still want to do, and plan on heavily supporting the game moving forward. Some other big items we hope to implement soon are proper cheat controls in multiplayer and fixes to the issues that will likely come up in this release.

Today we are also announcing our first major update to the game. The VR version of The Forest will release for free to all players of the game, on May 22. It’s the full game, with your hud on a smart watch, a full 3d inventory, and tree cutting using motion controls. We think it’s the most fun vr game we’ve ever played and can’t wait to share it with everyone.

We know there are a couple reports of crashing and keyboard related issues that came up in the last 2 days and will aim to get fixes for those as soon as we can.

Edit: Added a possible fix for keyboard issue & Fixed missing 32 bit build

Edit - We just uploaded a small hotfix, fixing an issue with some players keyboards.

Edit: Here are a few small fixes for some issues that came up since yesterday's release:

• Effigies now unlock when sanity drops below 90 instead of below 50

• Fixed some issues with enemies not reacting to players

• Fixed drawn compass rose oriented wrong on map

• Slightly altered speed from max athleticism

• Fixed some additional keybinding issues and re-added ability to bind walkie talkie and survival book

Edit: Added a small hotfix, improving some visual issues.

• Fixed cases of icons in center of screen possibly overlapping in some conditions

• Fixed draw distance setting resetting to high when previously set to very high

• Increased sky contrast slightly, to look less washed out

• Unity ambient occlusion type now works in backpack view

• Fixed fire on boss monster using old fire effect

• Fixed unity AO not darkening grass/terrain in light

• Fixed background mountains looking blurry and low resolution at high FOV setting

• Fallback tone mapping on cards below dx11 should now look exactly like old tonemapping from patches pre-73

If you are running a dedicated server, you will need to restart your server with the latest version to be compatible with this patch release.

As always, please continue to post your bug reports and feedback in the Discussions area of the Community Hub

V1.0 Changelog:

• Improved range of fire lights

• Set medium quality settings to previous version settings

• Taa off by default, turn on via options menu

• Fixed repairing small log cabin

• Fixed attaching plastic torch to weapons

• Fixed Cave 8 bridge room floor

• Fixed Cave 8 broken waterzone

• Fixed grade contrast for caves and nighttime

• Fixed repairing defensive spike

• Fixed creepy armor value not accounted for in stats page display

• Fixed missing icon on sled after loading a save

• All tasks are now striked through after doing alt ending

• Fixed wrong menu mapping for dualshock gamepads with xinput on

• Fixed missing dates on save slots in title scene

• Added clouds beside window in opening plane cutscene.

• You can now craft a spear bag, which will allow you to carry up to 5 basic spears

• Improved lighting in opening cutscene drag away scene

• New pick up item added, Hairspray! Use hairspray with a lighter for a mini-flamethrower. Findable in some suitcases and in specific parts of world.

• You can now carry upto 10 rabbit skins, and 10 deerskins

• You can now retrieve boar and racoon skins! And carry 10 of each in inventory

• New art added: skinned boar

• New icons added for slingshot, hairspray, raccoon and boar skin

• Fixed shooting arrows into end boss causing arrows to scale incorrectly

• Fixed chainsaw still animating when out of fuel

• New item added: (spoiler)

• New item added: (spoiler)

• Pooled props such as benches and chairs now stipple on smoothly when approached/backed away

• Added spoiled meat shader. Meat will now visually decay depending on its state.

• Improved look of cooked rabbit, lizard

• Multi Thrower now uses grab icon instead of climb icon

• Menu buttons when activated are now a yellow instead of grey to make it clearer they are on

• Fixed some wrong capitalization in options menu and renamed ‘fastest’ preset to ‘very low’

• Fixed lock icon when placing body in a part of endgame

• Added 4 new buildable creepy head trophies !

• Fixed dynamic text in book and on manifest so they aren’t visible when book is clipped

• Fixed lighting on text in book and manifest

• Updated new font shader for smoother font edges

• Improved look and resolution of blue inventory tarp

• Made lighter yellow to be easier to see on inventory tarp

• Added small white dash under page numbers

• Next and previous page buttons are now spaced out across both pages

• New xbox and ps4 controller icons

• Fixed extra pixels visible at top of flame texture sheet on stick lit

• Fixed gazebo built not lining up with gazebo ghost

• Head trophies can now be harvested from creepy corpses

• Added signals page in book in place of effigies. Effigy page now shows up after sanity falls below 50%

• Calories are now always considered positive and lead to gaining strength unless in hard survival difficulty mode.

• Player collect and switch clothing system. You can now find specific colored suitcases in the world which have outfits you can change into. Some caves and specific locations have unique outfits.

• Darkened inventory UI backing when hovering an item

• Held flares now require right click to light

• Added new space, l and r icons for keyboard interaction

• You can now use the rebreather light in the ocean at night

• (Multiplayer) Dying with an empty inventory no longer produces a backpack

• Reworked inventory item descriptions, and placement. Less text overall.

• Increased thickness of yellow outline when hold to select an item

• Improved game start times!

• Added new endnight logo to start of game

• Major memory improvements/reduction by removing unused assets and older duplicates of plants that were no longer being used

• Deerskin can no longer be equipped as an armor piece (check below for replacement)

• New crafting cog icon, new mp dying skull icon.

• You can now craft a warm suit! Wearing a warm suit replaces all of your current armor forcing you to choose between warmth and damage protection.

• You can now wear armor skin from dead creepies. This is the strongest coolest looking armor in game

• Added some hairspray pickups to some of the further beach huts

• Added clothing switch suitcase to some areas near snow and in further cannibal village locations

• Happy birthday trap text now matches rest of book

• Fixed some wrong legacy left over icons

• New check off animals system added with drawings. As you find animals and plants in the world, the greyscale drawings will turn to colored pictures. To activate, look at animals or plants up close for a short period of time.

• Fixed player not holding logs properly if logs were picked up while cold and hands are empty

• Improved cut geometry when chopping dead shark heads!

• Aligned construction UI with camera

• Run speed now slightly increases with athleticism skill level

• Improved the look of ambient occlusion

• AA, bloom, dof, motion blur, chromatic aberration, grain, all are now using unity post processing.

• Added new improved camera image effects for aa, bloom, motionblur chromatic aberration, eye adaptation and grain

• 4 New structures added and become available when you: (Spoiler)

• You can now equip timmy photo from inventory to remember him!

• Icons on backpack quick select tooltip now render correctly

• Item tooltip now extends length if item name is longer

• In game pause menu now uses action icons instead of hand icon

• Small generic meat renamed to small meat and Generic meat renamed to meat

• Meat freshness is now displayed in the description line of the tooltip instead of the item name

• Fixed all meats not in caps

• Fixed  X icon inside stuff like circle eat food a few pixels too high

• Fixed translation showing localized text for keys no longer used in english (ie: removed item descriptions)

• Added plant/animal specific message when ticking off stuff in nature guide

• Tweaked prev/next gamepad icon action position in book pages

• Rewrote cell culling, should fix a lot of the tree flickering, and several cases that left distance cell rendering enabled

• Player will now stop and look at a photo of Timmy if attempting to leave the world on a raft

• Improved placement of distraction devices and bombs that are placed on trees

• Rearranged positioning of many items in the inventory

• New stealth armor model and textures in inventory that match worn version

• You can now carry the full armor amount of each armor type

• Action icons 15% smaller will help with left hand side messages

• L to light now has the circle around it before pressed to indicate you need to hold.

• All items in the inventory now animate and play a sound when hovered over! Crafting items together will also cause an animation to play and the cog will spin when hovered.

• Added missing translations in mp scene

• Player are now faced with a decision to either (Spoiler) or (Spoiler)

• Gamepad can no longer navigate to the top buttons in options, use bumpers to navigate instead

• Checked missing Caps option in options & title scene

• Fixed rafts sometimes bouncing up and down weirdly while in water

• Fixed player moving at wrong speed when attacking immediately after a downward strike

• Added new Loading/Unloading Caves message while entering/exiting caves

• (Multiplayer) Improved animation sync of creepy ragdolls in MP

• Fixed player able to fire empty flintlock pistol while in aim mode

• Book texts are now dynamic, allowing translations to smoothly blend in

• Newly picked up in world items now shine in inventory until first interacted with to alert you about the new item

• Fixed walkie talkies not working correctly on dedicated servers

• Performance - fixed some always on dynamic objects falling out of world at game start

• Ingredients recipe now shows along product icon and name when adding ingredients to the crafting mat, giving you a list of all possible items you can craft using this ingredient.

• Player can no longer save while doing other actions like entering caves or climbing ropes

• Fixed spacing of embedded action icon in between labels

• Finished the book drawing buildings! These should make the book feel more enjoyable to look through and make quickly identifying structures easier

• Selecting pouch or quiver in inventory now correctly highlights entire model

• Improved look of selected materials in inventory and fixed manifest not highlighting when selected

• Changed bottom left message limit to 5 per message type at a time (ie: no more than 5 got item entries)

• Clothing outfit pickup rolls now give far fewer chances of receiving already owned clothing pieces

• Added a 0.2s delay before showing tooltips in inventory

• Fixed boats being pushed if moving against additional built structures on them making them easy to flip over

• Item tooltip positioning improved

• Performance - improved cull grid performance

• Sheen inventory now uses a screen space effect! Fixes sheen effect being affected by UV’s

• Fixed player able to shoot multiple rocks from slingshot

• Fixed quickly hovering a single item on crafting mat sometimes leaving it wrongly enabled

• New base fire effect. New molotov fire effect. Replaced also player on fire and enemies on fire with new fire effects!

• Improved positioning of blood when hitting enemies.

• New close map, pedometer and rewind icons to replace legacy text

• Same bonus upgrade recipes are now combined into a single entry in the recipe list shown when adding ingredients to the crafting mat

• Performance: Optimized a bunch of textures, and fixed and removed a ton of old referenced textures and models that were no longer in game

• Performance: Cleaned up a bunch of unused resources that were being kept in memory

• Upgrades can now be placed automatically replacing the fiddly old system.

• Fixed cases of upgrade ingredients on crafting mat not showing the filling cog

• New crafting mat action icons design

• Added new outline ghost shader. A thin outline will appear around outlines giving them more of a drawn appearance and making them easier to see in various lighting conditions.

• Fixed cursor appearing below filling cog in inventory

• Fixed far shadow option still calculating even when disabled

• Procedural buildings point locking logic now properly check for permission to build on dynamic structure, thus effectively preventing doing so with current state of the features

• Crafting tutorial now says to open book and doing so will now open the crafting chapter. replaces the tutorial in inventory when acquiring molotov ingredients for the first time

• Calories text in stats pages and inventory item tooltip is hidden unless in a hard survival game

• Fixed can see through heads on effigies small and large

• Fixed houseboat ghost building too high above water

• Chair now requires deer skin instead of rabbit skin to construct

• Fixed multiview created crafting inventory views retaining the selection outline

• Fixed molotov liquid sfx playing when loading a saved game

• Fixed stash item whoosh playing when loading a saved game

• Fixed stash lighter routine playing sfx even when lighter isn't equipped, was triggering for example when bending the bow

• Fixed player name display on load save screen

• (Multiplayer) Fixed wrong font used in parts of the chat UI

• Fixed button hover visual in book remaining active after clicking on a link, and flashing off when going back in previous pages

• Fixed place/take icons not always updating correctly on food holders

• Removed building proximity check on structures where it didn't make sense, such as bridges, ziplines, leaf pile traps, sap collectors etc

• Fixed bench and armor mannequin missing build hammer

• Improved positioning of hammer icon on ghost structures and fixed some cases of icon visible before ghost position was placed

• (spoiler)

• Blocked building rafts on terrain, can now only be built on water like rest of boats

• Dpad down button is now bound to the Utility action when using a dualshock gamepad

• Fixed cloth wrapped clubs missing alpha cut out effect and fixed wrong uvs on burnt cloth

• Cloth wrapping weapons is now red

• Improved look of held weapon fire and added distortion effect

• Improved look of flintlock smoke

• Fixed case of going back to pause menu with a gamepad leaving the action icon halfway inside the continue text

• Fixed shiver animation still playing after becoming warm

• Blue skin while cold now smoothly blends on and off

• (Multiplayer) Fixed some characters having excessively shiny hair

• Improved look of bonfire flames, and blocked cooking on bonfires. Can now only be used for heat and to attract enemies

• (Multiplayer) Fixed revive player action icon remaining visible after looking or walking away

• All plants in the nature guide are now checked off by looking at them briefly in the world

• New underlake plants added

• Regular enemies can now destroy cannibal art structures by running through them

• Improved look of the big lake in game that crosses world

• Fixed ghost structures appearing stuttery if moving left or right while placing

• Player no longer gets stuck igniting lighter when attempting to light fires and structures

• Fixed backing on loading screen being grey instead of black

• Caves - Old suitcases in caves can now be broken.

• Added sledding tutorial

• Procedural building UI now as inverted lock/unlock icons when using a gamepad to match physical position of buttons

• New 3d crafting cog art

• Made all action icon sizes more consistent

• Added a confirm overwrite save feature

• New quick select inventory UI design to make quick selecting easier

• Tweaked camcorder, map and walkie icons position

• Rewind icon turns off immediately when stashing camcorder to prevent possible overlap with map icon

• New underwater lake refraction visuals! And fixed looking up in cave water and seeing only black. Scene now correctly refracted!

• Added darkening in cave entrances to cover transition of player entering and loading

• Switched walkman to right hand to make it possible to use fire to turn it on and off! Instead of having it stuck on forever

• Now assigning items as quick select by pressing the matching buttons after combining backpack with an item on the crafting mat

• Now dynamically centering the switch ghost wall type & cancel ghost icons instead of using preplaced position which was not centered in case of unused icons

• Burning plants are now considered as destroyed immediately and fire can no longer be cancelled by walking away to trigger a LOD change

• Instancing support thing

• Burnt bushes and plants now spawn the cut version with same material look/effect after burning down

• Removed coordinates from pause screen

• Target no longer requires blue paint to build

• It is now possible to store creepy armor on armor rack !

• Options menu fixes, fixed gameplay buttons, cleaned up gamepad nav, setup anchors to ensure buttons don't overlap each other in other languages

• Fixed weapon rack widget

• New cave climbdown area covers and fixes can stand on opening holes

• Removed annoying loud bat screech from title scene

• Forcing always caps translations

• Joining a game with no player slots left now reads “Server Full”

• Kicked from a game message now reads “You have been kicked”

• Banned from game message now reads “You have been banned by Host”

• Player backpack recovery message now reads “Recover your backpack”

• (multiplayer) Updated icons above players heads

• Renamed up and down in key binding to forward and backward

• Fixed placing a flare on mat showing prompt for crafting a "Flare Gun" instead of "Flare Gun Ammo"

• Options are now linear instead of looping back around

• Dynamically created at runtime texts like build missions are now translated if changing language at runtime

• New decorative props added to cannibal village climb entrance

• Made colored difficulty backings consistent across different game modes

• Fixed scale of headless burnt bodies

• Fixed big gap at top of mappings table

• New trap re-arm UI using same design as constructions and updated traps icons

• Item thrown as projectile with the catapult now use the correct pickup icon

• Fixed a rare occurance of grabber sometimes resetting its collider continuously, thus resetting any timed input until looking away and back

• Door weights now only accept rocks and skulls and can no longer be collected back

• Limited multi thrower to rocks, skulls, dynamite, molotovs and bombs

• Added new gore underfoot sounds to gore piles in caves

• Optimization - buildable lights and fires will now turn off from distance

• Molotov’s and held burning weapons are no longer extinguished by rain

• New black backing stripe added to pause menu

• Stealth icon is no longer visible while on rope

• Fixed berries not moving with bush in garden

• Fixed in cave state sometimes breaking when entering swim caves

• Fixed some minor issues in (Spoiler)

• Fixed geese lake water reflection being too small for size of lake

• Matched brand of vodka on held and shelf/inventory versions

• Ghost models now use the same geometry and the final build versions, making the models line up perfectly.

• Log sled built now has set flag color that can’t be changed to help identify its location

• Improved placement of weapons on racks and holders!

• Performance - removed deprecated items from the action icon atlas

• Burning weapons are no longer extinguished when entering caves and climbing ropes

• Setup dynamic signals / effigies / family effigies book pages

• New buildable added: Sos marker.

• Items that cannot be crafted due to being at max capacity in inventory now show up in recipe list with an icon showing it cannot be carried

• Fixed rock model in some destroyed structures not having underneath model

• Fixed climbing a rope attached to a structure that was partially broken causing rope animation to play in wrong position on rope

• Big dead tree logs now fade smoothly on and off

• Old caver tents now fade on smoothly and from further away

• Setup all systems that involve adding or taking an item and were playing the whoosh sfx to play a custom sfx for any item that has one

• (spoiler)

• Procedural bridges now use 3 half log model variations !

• Fixed lowering texture resolution breaking cave entrance visuals

• Gamepads DPAD buttons now work as well in menus to navigate

• (Multiplayer) Todo list is now properly carried over to the new character after dying

• Food no longer loads in save games on fires

• Procedural stairs now display actual shape before locking first point

• Blocked building on small prop tents in world

• Fixed bats fly out of cave position being wrong

• Cloth covered stick upgraded in inventory now positioned correctly with cloth showing

• Fixed the very first lag spike that use to occur when launching a game

• (spoiler)

• Player can no longer climb very short ropes on platforms/treehouses

• Switched book todo font to more readable font

• Fixed position of anchor icons for all elevated structures

• (Multiplayer) Fixed buildings placed on tree structures not properly removed if the tree is destroyed

• Added missing bush 5 billboard

• Fixed suitcases not appearing in caves for clients if host is not also in the cave

• Removed paints, flintlock and toy from crafting achievement and replaced with other craftable items

• Added small snow camp and fixed alternate frozen man not appearing

• Fixed some collision areas in snow and extended height of cliffs to cover low resolution mountain

• Reworked crafted axe textures and bloody variation

• (Performance) Added LODs to procedural bridges

• (Performance) Added LODs to defensives walls

• Dropped bodies will now smash and push away small objects in their path!

• Improved zipline environment detection to prevent placing the rope through things as much as possible

• Fixed water level from water collector not decreasing if drinking not thirsty

• Fixed ghost birdhouse sometimes being wrongly not placeable

• It's no longer possible to burn bodies placed in the log sled

• Fixed fortune pickup respawning if you already have it

• Cloth on enemy racks no longer re spawns by going in and out of its close vicinity

• Replaced inventory cod with new cod model/textures

• It is now possible to remove defensive wall gates using the hole cutter

• Fixed missing breaking apart effect when destroying catapult

• Fixed some held animal heads in wrong position on other players

• Improved lods for when oceans turn on/off

• Rebreather is auto equipped now when diving underwater in caves

• New skin models and art for skin rack and for skin in inventory

• Fixed cant add some items to metal tin tray in mp

• Fixed adding lizard or fish to tray and not having them visible on mat

• (Multiplayer) Fixed a bunch of case of distortion not occurring for clients when damaging building

• Fixed procedural floor and roof sometimes not parenting correctly with its supporting structure

• Fixed switching defensive wall to gate loosing parenting information

• Improved some cases of placement of defensive wall reinforcement difficult

• Fixed error log spam when using walkie talkies in mp

• Fixed some areas in snow cliffs you could walk out of world or into collision areas

• New cliff lods for snow area stipple in gradually instead of pop

• Deer & rabbit skin can no longer be placed on terrain as decorations

• Added loading UI when opening endgame

• Timmy drawing placement icon now matches the top of the placed visual

• Setup ghost foundations to turn last edge red if not lockable

• Fixed procedural wall & derived structures showing place icon while not possible to place due for example to having a tree in the way

• Advanced controller support (XInput) option now on by default + resetting the value for everyone, can still be turned off if needed by going in options but having it on allows features like throwing spear to work fine with XBOX gamepads (driver issue when XInput is off)

• Fixed position of sodas on food holder

• Fixed cut blackberry bushes falling through terrain

• Added lod to caught rabbits in cages so performance didn’t take a hit with lots in a game

• Fixed steam overlay leaving the shift key stuck pressed

• Cave 1 - fixed holes and new lighting

• Cave 2 - fixed holes, new lighting and polish pass in several rooms. Tried to make the hanging room more inviting.

• Cave 3 - fixed holes, lighting and transition areas between other caves

• Cave 4-5 - hole fixes and polish

• Cave 6 - huge pass on lighting and general polish and fixes

• Cave 7 - Lighting and hole fix pass

• Cave 8-10 - overall polish pass

• Hellcaves- polish and fixes. New corridor layout added to cavern room

• Yacht - added new locked door and improved room props

• Enemies should no longer get stuck on the corners of Happy Birthday traps