How to Cheat at Sons of the Forest

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 Manager, and Cheat Engine. Amongst other things, these were used to unlock the game’s console so you could enter console commands. But with the game’s 1.0 release, there’s a simpler way to enable console commands and, so, cheat.

How Does Cheating Work in Sons of Forest?

To enable cheating with console commands, you’ll first need the latest 1.0+ version of Sons of the Forest. If you’ve not got that, go online with Steam and it should automatically update. If you’ve not already begun a game, do so and save your game (via the tent). If you already have a save, you should be set. However, the cheat doesn’t seem to work with Early Access saves, possibly due to the popup that comes up.

Now, load any save (choose continue from the main menu) and wait until it loads. Now, without moving, quickly type in cheatstick on the keyboard. This will enable console commands.

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. 

Sons of the Forest Cheats/Console Commands

There are far too many console commands in Sons of the Forest to list here, many of which are useless to anyone but testers and developers. But these are some of the more useful or interesting ones, the ones that let you cheat. Any cheats that include ‘on’ can be disabled by retyping them with ‘off’ – eg aighostplayer off. Some of these are obviously cheating while others are just useful. addallitems, for example, gives you every item in the game. These cheats also work in multiplayer mode.

• addallitems – gives you every item in the game. WARNING: This also immediately gives you Steam Achievements which could potentially be detected on your profile.
• addvirginia – spawns an extra Virginia. Used in combination with other cheats, this could give you an army of gun toting Virginias. 
• aighostplayer on – enemies ignore you
• aigodmode on – Kelvin and Virginia are invulnerable
• buffstats – refills hunger, sleep and thirst meters
• aishowthoughts on – shows a little box with every AI entity’s thoughts, from human NPCs down to bluebirds.
• freecamera on – lets you fly around the world exploring via the camera while your character stands still.
• godmode on – enables invulnerability
• gravity X – where X is a number. The higher the number, the lower the gravity will be. Setting it to 5 will let you jump around as if you were on the moon.
• killradius X – where X is a number. This will kill anything within the range, which includes NPC allies.
• locktimeofday X – where X is morning, noon or night. The game will switch to that time of day and time won’t advance.
• regenhealth – refills your health
• season winter (or spring, autumn, or summer) – changes season, though you may have to wander a distance and sleep for this to take effect.
• showfps on – displays an FPS count in the top right corner of the screen
• showhud off – turns the HUD off, handy for getting screenshots
• treescutall on – removes all the trees in the local area, leaving their stumps. The wood just disappears, you don’t get to harvest it.

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 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 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 are 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. But that’s how to cheat at Sons of the Forest.

The above article was updated on March 6, 2024, by Chris McMullen to explain how to access the command console without third-party programs and to expand on the console commands that will be most useful to most players.