Can You Starve to Death in Sons of the Forest?

Survival game Sons of the Forest tasks you with keeping yourself healthy by finding water and food from various sources. But what happens if you don’t or can’t find enough to eat? What happens then? Can you starve to death in Sons of the Forest?

You Can’t Usually Starve to Death in Sons of the Forest, But You Can Suffer in Other Ways

If you’re playing Sons of the Forest in Peaceful, Normal, or Hard mode, you can’t starve to death. Your food and water indicators will empty and start flashing, and your stamina bar will become roughly a third of what it once was. However, you won’t take any health damage. 

That said, the lack of stamina is dangerous. It means you can run for a shorter period of time, get fewer axe swings in before you’re exhausted, and generally just have a harder time doing anything. It certainly means that if you come under attack by cannibals, you’re more likely to get killed. 

In other words, you should keep yourself fed and hydrated not because you’ll starve to death but because being hungry reduces your chance of surviving combat encounters.

Can You Enable Death by Starvation?

In short, yes. If you want to make it so that starvation does do health damage, you can enable that feature in a custom game. You’ll need to start a new game, pick custom difficulty, and enable “Starvation Damage” in the menu. Now, being low on food or water will slowly eat away at your health, leading you to eventually starve to death in Sons of the Forest. If that’s an option you want to take, you’ll have to work harder to stay alive, such as by making sure that you’re always stocked up on meds.