The best mods for The Forest
Turn The Forest into an RPG, a building sim and more
Ah, The Forest. I returned to it recently and remembered that there are horrors in the game beyond the creatures that look like God’s spare parts bin got tipped over. The building system still feels like it never left early access, and I wished I could craft cabins that looked like mansions. Luckily, I've found the best Forest mods to help with that, while also allowing me to turn the whole game on its head by making it into an action RPG. You could say I’ve mutated it. So who has six thumbs and wants the best mods for The Forest?
The best mods for The Forest
The Forest mods come in all shapes and sizes and add all manner of different features to the game, so we've split this list into sections so you can hop directly to the kind of mod you're looking for. Alternatively, you can just carry on reading the whole thing. We also tell you how to actually go about modding The Forest with our step-by-step guide on how to use its modding platform.
- Champions of the Forest
- Forest Map
- Better Blueprints
- No Limits
- Tree Respawn
- More Crafting
- Day22SpawnChange
- Tides
- Inner Clock
How to mod The Forest
The Forest’s modding platform is a sort of all-in-one mod downloader, loader, and updater. To start with, you select The Forest from the list of mods at at ModAPI.
It will automatically select the base package to install. From there, you can select a mod or number of mods to add to your download from the list below. The most popular mods appear at the top, and you can extend the list with the 'Load More' button. When you’re happy, just download the package and extract the zip somewhere and run 'modapi.exe' to run the program. There’s nothing fancy here. You just tell the program where to find your game, enable the mods in the menu, and it’ll patch it with the new files.
If you want to add more mods, you can download them from their specific mod page on ModAPI and add them to 'mods' > 'TheForest' folder.
If you want to cleanse your game of all your tweaks just verify the files on Steam. It’ll reacquire any modded files, resetting the game for you.
Champions of the Forest by Hazard
Survival games are basically RPGs without the instruction manual. The fuzziness of The Forest’s logic is a deliberate decision to make everything you do fraught with peril. Even so, for everything Champions of The Forest undermines in the basic design, it adds a ton of ridiculous stuff.
It plops a typical RPG bar on the bottom of the screen, showing off your XP and hotbar - and yes, The Forest now has a hotbar instead of forcing you to rummage through your backpack while that legbeast kicks you. Everything you do feeds into the XP pool, so chopping trees and/or limbs gradually builds up your abilities. There are new powers beyond “hit the pink thing with the thing on a stick”. You can have magic skills, like teleporting and tossing fireballs, and they can all be upgraded to help deal with the increasingly limby terrors within the woods.
A whole new inventory slides into place, with slots that make sense instead of having everything laid out on a tarp, and you can add hot keys to weapons and powers. Everything’s a lot less fraught, but it’s a lot of fun if you’ve played the game a lot and crave some nonsense. You deserve to have a shield a broadsword after everything you’ve been through.
It requires both Builder Core and Builder Menu to work.
Download Champions of the Forest
Forest Map by Alles
I played the game exclusively in co-op, which means the opening fight of the game, where you’re dragged into a cave with a map and compass, doesn’t happen. This map mod fixes that, and more. It shows you the whole island. Pressing 'M' gives you an overview of the land, highlighting resources, camps and more. And it also shows you the movement of any cannibals and mutants roaming the area. It’s especially worth using if you’re restarting the game specifically to play alongside a friend. You become part of the world, rather than a lost and confused meal on legs.
Better Blueprints by Moritz
Building in The Forest is awkward and fiddly. Better Blueprints fixes a few issues. Most people will appreciate the ability to build whatever you want wherever you want, without having to worry about physical limitations. I just like the fact that there’s a reverse rotate button bound to 'F' now, so I don’t have to fix any angles by rotating back through 359 degrees. It also lets you have infinite anchor points enabling complex structures, and infinite zipline lengths.
No Limits by Ben
If you have a pile of logs and a dream, No Limits Mod will allow you to build the size of building you want. From single poles, should you choose to celebrate festivus, to towering walls dragged up into the sky. And, of course, in between you can customise your own shacks or cabins if you’re creative enough to do so.
Download No Limits
Tree Respawn by Alles
If you need more wood to build the OTT buildings I just mentioned, Tree Respawn lets you insta respawn about 10% of all the trees you’ve chopped down each time you press 'Shift + R'. You can regrow your building supplies pretty speedily with this.
More Crafting by Rurido
More Crafting drops a few, err, more crafting recipes into the game. There’s only five, but you can now turn a pile of leaves into cloth, or create sticky tape with cloth and tree sap. They’re just handy little tweaks that you'll think fondly of when one of those floppy little mutant babies fly directly at your face.
Day22SpawnChange by Disi
Sometimes you just want a night off from all the attacks and the resultant busy work that happens. Day22SpawnChange will let you do just that and more. It’s a creature spawn menu that lets you change the overall spawn rate of the skinny, skinned, pale, painted, regular and creepy cannibals. You can turn them off, or you can alter the individual rates of each class. So, if you really want to be surrounded by dozens of naked and giggling arm munchers, go right ahead.
Tides by Alles
Tides is an odd mod that adds life to the map's water. The tides change every 13 hours, from high to low and back again. In doing so, it changes routes through the map across the beaches. Some of the usual routes are more accessible at low tide, whereas others are cut-off during high tide. A nice addon if you want to add some unpredictability to the map.
Inner Clock by Kouga
I have napping super powers in real-life, so having the cooldown in game really does bug me. With Inner Clock you can sleep, and therefore heal, without having to wait for the sleep timer to reset. It also lets you specify how long you sleep, with a range of four lengths.
