Dark Forest

You have to go out and see

Strange creatures have appeared all over the islands. The news told everyone to lock their doors and wait for help. You nailed every door and window in the house shut and waited for three days. The tins are nearly gone, and nobody has come.

Dark Forest is a first-person survival game. Scavenge, craft, build, hunt and fish by day, and keep clear of the dark places at night, when the creatures come out. Play alone, with up to five Steam friends, or on a server of your own.

A world without end

• The endless world is made as you go, like Minecraft: whichever way you head, new seas, islands, towns, airports and boss islets keep coming. Or choose a classic archipelago of a fixed size.
  
• Set the world up before you begin: how big and how rugged the islands are, how much forest, how many rivers, lakes, caves, towns, houses, abandoned cars, animals and supplies, the seasons and the bosses.
  
• Each world grows from a number or word seed: cities and villages, temples, forests, beaches, snowy mountains, rivers and waterfalls, lakes and bridges. Day and night, fog, rain, thunderstorms, snow and rainbows.
  
• Animals come and go around you as you travel: deer, foxes, hares, raccoons, badgers, wolves and black bears in the woods, crows by the roads, mallards on the lakes, gulls and eagles overhead.
  
• Swim and dive among reefs, kelp forests and shoals of real fish. Dolphin pods leap offshore, seals haul out on the beaches, and great white sharks hunt in deep water.

Scavenge, craft, build

• Search houses, malls, cars and supply boxes. Chop trees, dig, quarry, and mine iron, copper and coal.
  
• Work your way up the workbenches: smelt ingots in a furnace, forge metal tools, make a bow and arrows, and build guns and ammunition at the armoury bench.
  
• Build whatever you like, wire up circuits and appliances, and build boats, cars and even planes, or drive off in the old cars left in town.
  
• Shape solids of your own — boxes, cylinders, spheres, ramps, cones and pyramids in wood, stone, metal, glass, concrete or brick — any size from a quarter of a metre to ten metres, and the bigger they are, the more they take to build. Stack them and set them side by side.
  
• Make a map or find one and hold it in your hands: it draws in the country around you as you go.
  
• Follow tracks through snow and mud, hunt deer, boar and hares, keep clear of black bears, butcher what you catch, and cook over a campfire.
  
• Fish the sea and the lakes for 15 species scanned from real fish. Dig worms or cut bait, read how each one takes the float, strike in time, then play it against the drag until it tires and lift it out by hand.

Something comes out at night

• After dark, creatures twisted out of realistic human bodies come out of the dark places. The richer a place is — underground, in the towns — the more kinds of them come out there.
  
• Seven bosses, each resting on an islet of its own shaped for it, and the Mother deep underground. Set foot on their ground and they wake; leave them, and they heal.
  
• At some airports the aircraft lie burnt out where they stood. At others an airliner still waits to be flown.
  
• Four difficulty levels, including Casual with no monsters at all.

Go underground

• Stalactite caves, flooded caves and abandoned mines, joined by an underground river that runs beneath the island to the sea.
  
• A vast cavern with an upside-down mountain hanging from its roof, glow-worms like a night sky, and a waterfall dropping more than twenty metres into a pit.
  
• At the bottom lies a lava abyss, and a deep mine more than 300 metres long leads to the nest of the Mother.

Together, or alone

• Online co-op for up to six players in the host's world, with voice and text chat. Friendly fire is on.
  
• Run a dedicated server, Minecraft-style, with the downloadable server launcher: set the player limit, the difficulty, god mode, a whitelist and every other rule in server.properties, and friends join by your address.
  
• God mode: fly, build and craft anything for free, carry anything through anything, and put any creature into the world. With the creature commander, set creatures against each other — one against one, or kind against kind — pick them up and move them, and set their health, speed, strength and size.
  
• When you die, your body stays where it fell with everything you carried. Go back for it.
  
• A hand-written notebook for your bag, crafting and journal, a character creator, a bestiary of everything you have killed or caught, and dances and gestures from real motion capture.
  
• 14 interface languages.

Credits

The animal 3D models are by AnimalMesh 3D, Rukh3D, kenchoo, , popcornbag, igor-lir, n-, Julian Johnson-Mortimer, ucdavisterc and Alexei Ostapenko, used under CC BY 4.0 and modified for the game. Full credits are in the legal notice at the bottom of this page and on the in-game Credits page.