How to Install Sons of the Forest and Join a Server

You will become fond of Kelvin, and Kelvin will walk into the sea.

Kelvin is the soldier who survives the crash with you. He cannot hear and he cannot speak, so you give him instructions by writing them on a notepad, and he goes off and does them — cutting logs, gathering sticks, fishing, building. He is genuinely useful and he is not clever, and everybody who plays this game has a story about an instruction that Kelvin interpreted with terrible literal-mindedness.

That relationship tells you most of what Sons of the Forest is. It is a survival game that is unusually interested in the things around you having behaviour, and it plays very differently depending on whether the people around you are also real. Listings collect on the hub, and this guide covers the multiplayer side properly, because that is the version most people should play.

What the island is

You arrive looking for a missing billionaire. The island has forests, seasons, caves that go a long way down, and a population that objects to your presence.

The enemies are the point. Cannibal groups occupy the surface, and they are not spawned in waves — they live somewhere, they move around, they watch you from a distance before they commit, and they respond to what you have been doing. Build a large fortified base and they treat you differently from a player sleeping under a tarpaulin. Kill a lot of them and they become more cautious and more organised.

Below ground it is a different game. The caves hold the equipment that opens up the rest of the island, and they hold things that are considerably worse than the surface cannibals. Going into one underprepared is the classic Sons of the Forest mistake, and going into one with three friends and a working torch is the best thing in the game.

Seasons change the vegetation and what food is available. Winter is meaningfully harder than summer, and a group that has not built anything permanent by then notices.

Building, and why the logs matter

Structures are built from logs you cut and place individually, and you can cut those logs lengthwise into planks and shapes. There is a blueprint system that plans a structure and lets you fill it in, and there is a completely freeform mode where you place every piece yourself.

The freeform side is what people stay for. It is slower than a snap-together building system and it produces things that look built rather than assembled, and a group with one person who genuinely enjoys carpentry ends up with a far better base than a group of four who all want to explore.

Kelvin will carry logs to a stack for you if you ask. This is the single most useful thing he does and it is the reason people forgive him for the sea incident.

Playing with other people

Co-operative multiplayer takes a group rather than a crowd — this is a game for a handful of friends, not a public lobby of forty.

Two shapes, and the difference matters:

Somebody hosts from their game. Simple, immediate, and the world only exists while that person is playing. If the host cannot make Thursday, nobody plays on Thursday, and anything you were building waits.

A dedicated server runs the world separately. Endnight added support for this, and it changes the character of a group's playthrough completely. The island exists on its own. People log in at different times. You come back to find that somebody finished the roof.

For a group who all play together on the same evenings, hosting is fine and needs no setup. For a group with different schedules — which is most groups after the first fortnight — the dedicated server is the version that survives.

What a dedicated server changes socially

It is worth thinking about before you set one up, because it is not purely an improvement.

When the world is always available, people progress at different rates. Somebody who plays four extra hours a week is further along, and in a game where the caves gate progression, that person ends up ahead of the group in equipment and knowledge.

Groups handle this in two ways that both work. Either you agree that nobody does the major caves without the group, which keeps everybody at the same point in the story. Or you accept that people play at their own pace and treat the base as a shared project rather than the progression as a shared journey.

Deciding which in advance avoids the conversation where somebody has finished the game alone on a Tuesday.

Joining a specific server

The multiplayer menu handles both hosting and joining, and it lists servers it knows about.

Where a friend or community has given you an address, the direct route is the reliable one. Take the port with the IP. A host running more than one world on a machine has moved most of them off whatever the default is, and an address without its port fails in a way indistinguishable from the server being down.

Public servers exist and they are a different proposition from a private group. This is a game where anybody with an axe can dismantle what you built, so communities running open servers tend to vet people. That is sensible rather than unfriendly, and our guide to running a whitelist people actually apply to covers what a reasonable process looks like.

Read a server's own description for two things: whether it is running a modified difficulty, and how far into the story its world already is. Joining a world where the group has finished the caves is joining somebody else's endgame, and there is very little left for a new arrival to discover.

Difficulty, and picking it honestly

The game offers settings that range from a genuinely punishing survival experience to a mode where nothing attacks you at all.

The peaceful option deserves a mention because people are sniffy about it and should not be. A group who want to spend forty hours building an enormous timber hall on a cliff, with no cannibals interrupting, are playing the game correctly. The building system is deep enough to carry that on its own.

At the other end, the harder settings change how the enemies behave rather than simply increasing their health, and the difference in how the cannibal groups organise is noticeable.

Pick with the group. A server where half the players want a horror game and half want a woodworking simulator satisfies nobody.

Practical things nobody tells you

Sort out light before you go underground. The caves are genuinely dark, and the sequence where your light source runs out a long way in is memorable for the wrong reasons.

Build near water and near trees. Everything you do for the first ten hours involves carrying logs, and carrying logs a long way is the least interesting part of the game.

Kelvin cannot swim well and should not be asked to. He also cannot hear you shouting.

Virginia takes patience. The other companion is wary and approaches on her own terms. Being calm around her, rather than shooting at her, is how that goes well, and she becomes genuinely capable once she trusts you.

Mark your base. The island is large and looks similar in a lot of places. The navigation tools you find early are the ones you will use constantly.

Do not store everything in one place. The reasons for this become apparent.

The enemies are worth paying attention to

Most survival games treat hostile creatures as weather. Sons of the Forest does not, and noticing the difference changes how you play.

The cannibal groups on the surface have territory and behaviour. They approach a new structure and look at it before deciding anything. They gather, retreat, come back with more of them, and leave markers around places they have decided are theirs. Kill enough of them in one area and the response changes.

The practical consequence is that your behaviour shapes the pressure you are under. A group that builds a fortress and defends it aggressively gets a different island from a group that keeps a low profile and stays mobile. Neither is wrong, and on a shared server the group has effectively made that choice collectively whether or not anybody discussed it.

There is a second population underground that does not follow these rules and is considerably worse. The caves are where the game keeps its horror, and the transition between the two — walking into a cave entrance and having the surface rules stop applying — is the best thing the design does.

Bring a friend. Everything about the caves is easier with somebody watching the direction you are not.

Running one for your group

The dedicated server package is straightforward for anybody who has set one up before, and the demands are modest for a small group.

The thing to watch is that memory demand grows with what you have built rather than with the player count. A world with an enormous base after two hundred hours is heavier than a fresh one with the same eight players connected. Our notes on how many slots a server needs and game server hosting costs both apply, and the answer for this game is smaller than people assume — eight friends is not a demanding server.

Back up the save on a schedule. A survival world lost is a hundred hours of building gone, and groups do not recover their enthusiasm after that.

Host near the players. Our note on picking a hosting region covers the reasoning, and while this is not a game where milliseconds decide fights, a server on the wrong continent makes melee combat feel wrong.

Where else to look

If it is co-operative survival with building, Valheim is the friendliest version and has the best-behaved multiplayer of any of them. Enshrouded and Soulmask both run dedicated servers well and both lean further into progression systems.

If it is the horror rather than the carpentry, Project Zomboid and 7 Days to Die both make survival genuinely frightening in different ways — one through slow attrition and one through a scheduled siege. DayZ makes the other players the horror, which is a different proposition entirely.

And if what you liked was the small-group co-operative shape rather than this particular island, Sunkenland and Abiotic Factor both run dedicated servers for exactly that sort of group, in settings that have nothing in common with each other or with this one.

Sons of the Forest is at its best with three or four people, a dedicated server that stays up, and a shared agreement not to go into the big cave without everybody. Everything else about it works itself out.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Sons of the Forest servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.