Sons of the Forest is fun if you play fair, but are there any cheats? What if you could turn yourself invulnerable or make winter go away with a simple command? If you’re wondering how to cheat at Sons of the Forest, we’ve got the answer.
Yes, You Can Cheat at Sons of the Forest, but be Cautious
There are a few programs that enable Sons of the Forest cheating, such as Weemod, Thunderstore Mod Managerm and Cheat Engine. We won’t link directly to them, but they’re pretty easy to find if you look for them. However, by installing such a third party program, you’re taking a risk.
They could, potentially, contain viruses, unwanted code, hidden crypto-mining tools, and other malware. Every now and then, there are even rumblings about mods causing PCs to overheat. While we’ve yet to experience that, we’re not going to say it’s impossible.
Secondly, if Endnight Games does enable some kind of cheat detection in the future, you could find yourself blocked from playing online. So be warned. In particular, we’d recommend keeping an eye on any updates the company puts out, just to check if they’ve implemented that.
How Does Cheating Work in Sons of Forest?
If you want to go ahead and cheat, you’ll need to download one of the aforementioned programs — again entirely at your own risk. That enables the console, the pop-up box where you can type in all types of cheats. The console was enabled in the PC version of The Forest but it’s disabled in Sons of the Forest, which is why those cheat programs are needed this time around.
Once you’ve launched the game with the console enabled, hit F1 to bring it up. You’ll be presented with a list of all the console commands in the game. You can type in the ones you want — some require a number after them — and you should get the desired effect.
We’re not going to list every single console command here but these are some of the more useful or interesting ones:
- addallitems – gives you every item in the game. WARNING: This also immediately gives you Steam Achievements which could potentially be detected on your profile.
- aighostplayer on – enemies ignore you
- aigodmode on – Kelvin and Virginia are invulnerable
- addvirginia – spawns an extra Virginia. Used in combination with other cheats, this could give you an army of gun toting Virginias.
- godmode on – enables invulnerability
- regenhealth – refills your health
- season winter (or spring, or autumn or summer) – changes season, though you may have to wander a distance and sleep for this to take effect.
- showhud off – turns the HUD off, handy for getting screenshots
Can You Speed Up Time in Sons of the Forest?
You can’t speed up the entire game. What you can do is accelerate the night/day cycle and speed up NPCs, enemies included. To speed up the night/day cycle, you need to open the console and type: setgametimespeed X where X is a number.
Experiment with different numbers to get the effect you want. For example, setgametimespeed 500 makes every day last around two seconds. 1 is the default, normal speed.
To speed up NPCs, use: aianimspeed X
Again, X is a number. We’d recommend you start with number 5. It doesn’t exactly make Kelvin five times as fast, since he seems to spend more time idling as well, but it does make him much faster than he was.
Except… it’s a bad idea to use that cheat in normal mode. Why? Because it speeds up everything, including animals and enemies. The cannibals will be a lot faster too, so use this with caution. Also, the more you meddle with the game’s speed the more likely you’re going to run into issues like unexpected slowdown or crashes.
Should You Cheat in Sons of the Forest?
We could go on and and on about the rights and wrongs of cheating. As the saying goes, if you cheat, you’re only cheating yourself. If activating a cheat makes the game a better experience for you, is there any harm in that? It’s certainly unethical to cheat in multiplayer mode, even though Sons of the Forest isn’t a competitive multiplayer game. On the other hand, though, by cheating you’re undermining Endnight Games’ vision for the game. It’s in Steam Early Access, but you’re still riding roughshod over their design.
Either way, there’s always the risk of malware from the third party programs, so that should be a major consideration to your decision on whether to cheat in Sons of the Forest.
