It came out sometime late last week, but another round of patch notes have gone live for The Forest, which is in its 8th or so month of early access. The developers have been hard at work adding in new features, squashing bugs and adding Steam integration, and the game is quite a bit different from the time it released last year. As has been habit to this point, I’m still covering the patch notes as they release, with some commentary. First, the notes:

Version 0.13 Changelog:
Armsy combat improvements – can now turn around quickly, attack to left and right and attack from further away. Will swipe at trees more often. Will react to explosions by staggering backwards.
Armsy will knock down walls and other structures near player, and will now interact better with dynamic logs/props pushing them away
Lowered throw force on bomb timed and added friction to rigidbody to reduce hockey puck feel
Added distance based camera shake when bombs explode!
Improved look of wood plank barriers – better textures, better break apart chunks
Wooden planks now have a health value and will take longer to be broken down by a stick versus an axe
(multiplayer)Added two new player character model variations
(optimization) Improved Experimental Foundations & Walls memory footprint
(building) Removed Manual Foundations 4 edges limit, improved visual feedback
(building) Added closure snapping to manual foundations
Improved log sled pushing – less jitter and glitches when pushing sled close to other objects
Changed gazebo floor collider so items can be built on top of it.
Player can no longer jump while pushing the sled
Lowered damage from un-upgraded rock weapon
Added extra checks to stop player falling through world when climbing ropes
Lowered damage amount molotovs do to Armsy. Setting Armsy on fire will cause him to become enraged, running around or attacking the player
New dying sound distortion added when player is in grey-zone state
(audio)rope climbing sound effects added
(audio)Falling Leaves sound effects added and tuned
(audio)Fixed bug where bush rustle sound effect would sometimes not play if player was running full speed and at an angle
Fixed a rare bug that caused the game to get stuck halfway in the loading process
Fixed trees initializing after black screen removal when loading a saved game
Slightly larger hit colliders on birds and stick weapon, makes it easier to kill grounded birds with a stick
Enemy bodies no longer explode when you hit the body after killing them! You can now chop off individual limbs!
Tree houses now require rope to build
Cave 2 crayon map drawing with shiny sticker stars on it added as a collectible item. (hint: try and find locations of stars)
(audio) Music sting added when player is woken up by enemies
(audio) New music sting added when an important item or location is discovered
(audio)First pass at Skinny enemy audio added
Fixed log wall breaking apart rotated incorrectly
Cave 1- major design re-work. More interesting areas, easier to navigate, more secret areas and items, improved collision.
Player is no longer able to pick up logs while jumping, swimming, sailing raft or pushing sled
Equipped logs are now dropped when beginning to swim, sail a raft or push a sled
Standard enemies can now attack built player walls
(hopefully) Fixed bug where enemies would sometime appear in t-pose in multiplayer games
Improved cave 2 entrance visuals
Random hint texts added to dead screen!
Removed starfish from caves and other strange places. Will now only appear on beach.
(multiplayer) New voice chat system! Using microphones/walkie talkies will no longer cause memory allocation and framerate stutters as memory is attempted to be cleaned out.
(multiplayer)Performance improvements!
(multiplayer)Fixed delay where log would remain visible for a short period of time even after being picked up by clients
(multiplayer)Fixed delay between tree falling and breaking into logs for clients
(multiplayer)Craft audio now plays for each player, you should no longer hear other players craft sfx play from far away
(multiplayer) fix a bunch more 2d sounds that could be heard by both players at wrong time
(multiplayer)Major lag improvements for enemies! Enemies will now visually update more often when close to a player
(multiplayer)Fixed fires not replicating
(multiplayer)All enemy types now show up in multiplayer games (distorted, pale creatures etc)
Fixed missing collision on orange tents
Fixed issues where after climbing rope, it would slightly reposition player making it very easy to fall back into hole or off ledge
New buildable item: Weapon Rack! Store up to 4 non projectile equipment items
New buildable item: Snack holder
New buildable item: Explosives/molotov holder
New buildable item: Medicine cabinet
Fixed flare gun not setting enemies on fire
Getting hit while blocking now drains more stamina
Block will fail now when hit if you have very low stamina
Birds are no longer active while inside a cave
Optimized all animal animators to save cpu performance
(single player only)New buildable item: Climbing Rope (needs to be hooked to a single Structure Anchor, a minimum distance with floor is required)
Added Structure Anchors to: Gazebo (2), Log Cabin (2), Platform (2), Extensible Platform (4), StairCase (2) and Wall (2) [retro-active] (you can now attach bridges or rope to these items) (Single player only)
New cheat code added: ‘vegetarianmode’ enemies only come out at night.
New cheat code added: ‘meatmode’ cancels the other cheats
Active cheats now saved locally (Hint: Type meatmode on title screen to cancel active cheats)
(single player only)New buildable item: (experimental)Procedural Floor (snap on top of foundations, or to procedural walls that are on foundation + floors)
Can now rotate tree structures while placing them !
Improved building placement near structures that can be built upon

I jumped into the game the day this patch went live, with the intentions of finally trying out the co-op, as now you don’t need IP addresses or any of that junk, you can just start up a game and leave it open for people to join, or invite friends directly from Steam. Unfortunately, I only know a couple of people with the game and none of them are really playing it so I just started a game leaving it open for random people to join. Apparently no one was playing (or wanting to join a random game) when I was playing. Maybe it was the hour of the day or the day of the week, or perhaps there aren’t as many people playing right now due to the early access, but people are obviously finding bugs in the multiplayer component, so someone out there is playing the game. Either way, I didn’t get to check out co-op so I just played around for a while with some of the new stuff I hadn’t seen, and then logged off. I know this game would be fantastic for people who enjoy a PvE sandboxy building experience, but I guess the horror aspects scare some people away. Who knows. One day I’ll get to try the mode out.

#theforest #patchnotes #earlyaccess