At the end of May, we saw Endnight Games release a new open world horror survival game on steam called The Forest. Several famous YouTubers tried the game out and the game has gotten very popular, very fast. The game had a lot of issues at the time of its release, for instance the players were not able to save their progress which meant that they had to start over every time they started the game but that issue was resolved after Endnight Games released a hotfix.

Now Endnight Games has released a new update which will be adding tons of new features to The Forest. The update is called update v0.02 and it includes new animals, as well as various other improvements and fixes.

The update allows you to now craft rafts via the book, Birds can be killed with fire, Stamina recharge now takes longer, starting cutscene is a little more dramatic and has better lighting, etc. The water levels of lakes and rivers change from time to time with the in-game tide, the underwater visuals have been changed and players will no longer die in deep ponds.

A list of all the new features, tweaks and changes has been given below:

New Features and Gameplay Tweaks

• Sharks
• Simple raft now buildable via book (No Sail yet!)
• Walls can now snap to form floors and roofs (experimental, can defy gravity)
• New suprise item added to yacht
• When being knocked out for first time you will now wake up in a random cave
• Lowered fall damage amount
• Birds can be killed with fire
• Stamina recharge now takes longer
• You can now block attacks with the red plane axe by holding down right mouse button
• Timmy taken scene a little more dramatic, better lighting, sparks
• Lowered intensity and range of fire light
• Lowered health on turtle
• Improved fish movement
• Increased range of lighter
• Enemies will drag downed friends out of danger again
• Females will sometimes freak out at dying family members

Performance

• Improved load times
• Reduced stutter
• Overall performance increases
• Big memory optimizations, should help crashing on some pc’s
• Improved cave wall memory usage
• Dropped sticks and rocks are now pooled and shouldn’t increase memory over time
• Optimized hud rendering (10% faster on cpu)

World

• Improved lake water swim zones
• Ocean swim zones now correctly rise and fall with tide
• Underwater visuals improved
• Improved terrain in some areas, reduced lumpiness in rocky area, fixed issues with caves poking through terrain
• Fixed super deep ponds that could kill players by falling into them
• Small old boat collision added
• Plane exterior collision added
• Improved balance on some grass textures (less bright)
• Lowered top heavy pine tree to be easier to cut
• Lots of small material/texture tweaks
• Sunset/sunrise made brighter
• Beach cave entrances made bigger and easier to enter
• Improved world collision in some areas
• Improved low resolution mountain textures
• Improved terrain rendering and missing specular
• improved cave lighting and details (caves 4,5)

Bugs

• Fixed countdown timer not taking different time zones into account
• Fixed some spelling mistakes in tutorials and in survival book
• Fixed shelter on fire spawning infinite logs
• Fixed bug where day count was 1 more than it should be
• Fixed issue where sticks,rocks and logs needed could go to -1
• Fixed not switching back to default weapon after holding lizard, rabbit or fish
• Fixed player not colliding with things tagged ‘Prop’
• Fixed light leaking into parts of some caves
• Fixed bug where you couldn’t cook multiple times on same campfire
• Fixed spear being able to cut down trees
• Fixed ponds flickering at certain distances
• Fixed some items not being saved in inventory when game is loaded (some might still vanish, expect more saving fixes/improvements soon)
• Fixed log holder not saving logs on load/save
• Fixed twinberries not having eat icon and having wrong leaf texture
• Fixed bloody tables in cave not being cut out of nav mesh
• Fixed lizard and rabbit skin triggers not being connected to ragdoll body
• Removed extra set of teeth and eyes appearing behind Timmy
• Chopping dead bodies no longer results in player flying into the air
• Animals no longer spawn multiple copies if on fire
• Cannibals shouldn’t run underwater or follow player out to the boat (they might run a little bit into water however)
• Fixed some bushes missing vertex colors when cut
• Fixed birds landing in sky, improved bird a.i. and performance

Have you tried this new open world survival horror game? If you have, what are your thoughts on The Forest? Let us know in the comments.