Sons of the Forest’s first big update makes enemies more threatening, adds a hang glider, and quells Kelvin’s tree-chopping bloodlust

The precious boy will no longer demolish your home out of sheer enthusiasm.

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Sons of the Forestgot its first big patch yesterday, bringing a bunch of bug fixes and new features to theincredibly popular survival sim. And, look, there’s a lot of new stuff that we’ll get into further on, but let’s not bury the lede here: Kelvin—sweet, precious Kelvin—will no longer go absolutely hogwild cutting down trees with your treehouse in them. This is somehow both excellent news and the worst thing I’ve ever heard.

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But suppressing Kelvin’s free spirit isn’t allSons of the Forest’s Patch 01does. You’ll also be able to find a few new tools to help you in your anti-cannibal quest the next time you fire the game up. Specifically, you’ll now be able to make use of a hang glider and a set of binoculars to scout and traverse your surroundings, and build a defensive wall gate to protect your valuables from marauders.

If you don’t know how to get these new toys, you’re in luck, we’ve already got guides onwhere to find the binocularsandwhere to find the hang glider in Sons of the Forest.

There’s plenty of other additions, and I’ll include the full patch notes below, but what seems notable to me is the way the patch makes the game a little more dangerous. There’s a new mid-game boss fight, some of the cannibal villages now have lookout towers, shotgun damage has been halved and, as if that wasn’t enough, “Angry regular cannibals can attack now by jumping out of trees,” possibly the most threatening single sentence ever committed to writing.

The patch has also upends theSons of the Forest speedrunning metaby fixing the glitch that let you use sticks to get through locked doors, updates the game’s DLSS version to 3.1.1 and, crucially, fixes an issue that meant certain varieties of small birds showed no fear whatsoever of the player character, which was really bruising my ego. If that’s not enough for you, here are the full patch notes:

Features

Balance

Improvements

Fixes

Audio

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One of Josh’s first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he’s been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He’ll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin’s Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you’re all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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