Sons Of The Forest's latest update adds hard mode

Because cannibal hell wasn't hard enough already

Sons Of The Forest is about crash-landing on a remote island described as a "cannibal-infested hellscape." If you've played the early access survival game and thought, "Hellscape? More like swellscape," then Patch 06 might be for you. Released yesterday, it adds a "first pass of hard survival" mode, alongside cooking improvements and the ability to craft custom effigies. Lovely.

Hard survival mode reduces food spawns in crates, lowers fish and animal spawns, decreases health and stamina regeneration speeds when cold, and increases the penalty for eating raw or rotten meats.

The quality-of-life improvements for cooking are numerous, including countdown clocks in the dining area, swifter interactions for emptying and placing pots, and new and improved UI for cooking bonuses and cooking recipes, among others.

I'm not sure from the patch notes exactly how custom effigies are made, but the effigies you make will "cause fear to cannibals based on number of body parts." Perhaps relatedly, cannibals will now "sometimes drag their dying friends away from the player".

There are a bunch of other additions, improvements and fixes in the full patch notes. Kelvin can now pick up stones, continuing on from the last patch allowing him to pick up two logs at the same time. What might the next patch allow him to pick up? Two stones??

If this is your prompt to give Sons Of The Forest a try, check out our many guides, with one on how to befriend Kelvin among them.