PSA: Sons of the Forest companions can be revived with Notepad

Make Kelvin whole again.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

Sons of the Forestplayers have found the line of code that dictates whether their favorite survival companions live or die.

Kelvin and Virginia, your two NPC allies in the game, can permanently die if you let them. And, trust me, you don’t want to. Kelvin may be accident prone, but he only wants to help. And Virginia is a great shot, even if she won’t listen to your direct commands.

In the event that one of them dies, or you are a heartless person that refused to help Kelvin after the opening helicopter crash, you can resurrect them with a fairly simple tweak.

Locate the folder where your Sons of the Forest save games are located. For most people, it will be in your App Data folder on your C: drive. The address should look like this: C:\User[UserName]\AppData\LocalLow\Endnight\SonsOfTheForest\Saves. Alternatively, you can get close to it by hitting Windows key + R, type in “appdata,” and press OK. You’ll need to open and edit the GameStateSaveData.json file. I’d recommend saving a copy of the entire save folder as a backup just in case.

Then follow these steps:

Congratulations, now Kelvin and Virginia are effectively immortal. If you’re having trouble finding them, Reddit userAxLBRhas another change you can do to set their spawn location.

Now you canclone survival games' newest mascotinto an entire army. Or you can just keep him around because there’s always plenty to do, regardless if it’llset you backa few steps or not.

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Sons of the Forest cheats: Spawn more KelvinsSons of the Forest shovel location: How to digSons of the Forest keycard locations: Gain entrySons of the Forest rope gun location: Ziplines onlineSons of the Forest rebreather location: Dive deeper

Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his speciality is in action RPGs and MMOs, he’s driven to cover all sorts of games whether they’re broken, beautiful, or bizarre.

20 years later, Konami just finally revealed who played Eva in MGS3 and how she acted making out with Naked Snake

The ex-GTA lead whose blog got the kibosh from Rockstar chats San Andreas' worst bug and why ‘anything that isn’t visible to players tends to have swearing in it’

Five things I always tell people before they buy their first SSD