Building in Sons of the Forest has various options available to you. Starting out in your playthrough, building could very well be overwhelming at first. However, with our ultimate beginners building guide and some additional tips – you will be on your way to building a beautiful base in no time!
Starting out small, a quick but very helpful piece of information to know is the ability to call upon Kelvin to assist you with tasks. In this instance for example, we can command Kelvin to gather some logs for us – perfect for building! Simply interact with Kelvin to access this menu.
Beginners Building Guide
Setting up Shelter
Before we get into anything too crazy, it is good to get started with the tried and tested but simple tent and reinforced fire!
To setup the tarp tent, simply lay out the tarp from your inventory, bring a stick to the tarp and interact with it to create some shelter! It may not be perfect, but it’s home for now. Next up, grab yourself a couple of sticks and snap them with your knee. To do this action, make sure to right click to change function and then snap away! Finally, grab a few nearby rocks, this allows you to place the rocks around the sticks. Light up the broken sticks and there we have it, a reinforced fire and a place to sleep and save your game file.
Building Modes
You have two options when making bases in Sons of the Forest, Manual building and Blueprint building mode. By pressing “B” a crafting guidebook pops up, from here you can switch between the two by holding “X”. Manual building requires you to place every individual piece yourself, however Blueprint building will pre-place entire structures, furniture and more.
Beginners Guide to Building a Base
Laying the foundation
Firstly, an immense amount of logs are needed if you’re looking to make a medium to large base. Start out by laying full sized logs on the ground in a size of your preference. Once a square or rectangle is formed, slot in additional logs that form crosses to provide optimal foundation strength. Secondly, interacting with full sized logs from a vertical perspective gives you the ability to chop them in two! This is especially helpful when building as they are required for flooring, steps and more.
Walls, Windows and Doors
Now that the foundation is laid out, we can begin building up the walls. To build walls, much like the images provided – simply place a couple of full sized vertical logs, lay one log across the top and fill in the rest of the space horizontally! As a result of having the walls up, you can now cut sections of the walls out. This allows for you to make windows and even doors!
Doors however will require some split logs to slot into the space. It should be noted that you receive a prompt specific to what action you wish to perform when building. For example in the images below, you can see a red dotted line, this indicates the part of the log that will be cut.
Building a Roof Support
The base is finally beginning to take shape! A nice quick and easy way to get the roof support up and running is to pick a section of the wall, and look up. Looking high enough up should prompt you with an arrow to lean a log diagonally against the wall.
As a result, make sure to do this, bring a second log with you, and aim towards the bottom of the now diagonal log. Interact with the lower end of the log, this uses your current in-hand log to prop up the diagonal log. This gives you the beginnings of a roof support! Much like the foundation however, begin to flesh out the rest of the roof framework with logs using the same methods. In this beginners building guide, we recommend you take out the pillars propping the previously mentioned logs when you are done. This allows more space!
Building a Slanted Roof
One of the cool things about building in Sons of the Forest, is that the game offers you various ways to make slight edits to your preferences. For this beginners guide however, we want to bring you into the world of slanted roofs!
Firstly, assuming you have filled out the roof support with flooring via split logs – you should be able to stand upstairs now to work on the roof. Starting off, making the same build method you previously used to make a wall comes into play here too.
Place two vertical logs and one horizontal log on top of them. The difference here however, is the mechanic to cut off smaller chunks of a log. As seen below, look for the red lines to determine where to cut. Finally, cut the vertical log of which you wish to have the slant move down towards! As a result, make sure to fill the spaces with logs and split logs on the top of the roof itself.
Staircases
Staircases are a great addition to any build in survival games such as Sons of the Forest. Building staircases allows you to reach higher up parts of your base with greater accessibility. Fortunately in this case, they are very simple to build and add.
Firstly, lay out a couple of full sized logs on the wall of your base you wish to have a staircase built. In this guide we’ve decided to build one on the back of the base. Next up, split as many logs required for your base to reach the height desired. Finally, you have two options when placing split logs on diagonal logs; slanted (for roofs) and flat (for stairs). As a result of this, check the arrow indicators position to know for sure you are placing it the correct way!
Furniture
Furniture in comparison to the rest of the building options in Sons of the Forest is much more straight forward. This is due to the use of Blueprint mode. Simply select the pre-built option you wish to place, and place it down! All that will be required from here is to slot in the required materials until the blueprint is finished!
As shown below, the required items will be shown both on the blueprint and in the bottom left of your HUD.
Defensive Walls
As you have probably seen by now, there are many dangers on the island. Having a base is one thing, but defending it and having it properly secured is another! As a result, we will be building a defensive wall!
Defensive walls are incredibly simple to create. Firstly, collect a large amount of full sized logs, while carrying the logs, look towards the ground – doing so should give you the option to place the log vertically. After placing two logs, each additional log placed will be given a unique indicator. This indicator will show you the clear line of the wall and snap the log into perfect positions for you.
Finally, you can also sharpen up the tips of the logs by looking up at the top and cutting the log when the red indicator is shown – as a result this will help you in keeping out any jumpy monstrosities attempted to break in!
As seen in the distance, you can create quite the fortress! Nothing wrong with keeping yourself safe.
Base Building Completed
Now isn’t that looking great! We are very sure that fantastic players such as the community will come about to create absolute masterpieces, but this is without a doubt a good start! With this beginners building guide you have made and implemented the following:
- Tarp tent shelter
- Reinforced fire, for cooking
- Foundation
- Flooring
- Walls
- Doors
- Windows
- Roofs and support
- Stairs
- Defensive Wall
- Furniture
- And more!
Quite the impressive amount of building aspects to pick up and use in a short space of time! Now that you have the basics down, without a doubt you’ll be on your way to building wonderful bases, constructs and more!
Additional Building Tips
There are plenty of useful additions to your know-how when it comes to building in Sons of the Forest. For example, a small but useful thing to note is that keeping an eye on where you are cutting a tree with your axe will determine the direction of the fall.
At first this sounds obvious and simple, however, depending on where you start the cut on a bigger tree, you may have to switch to cut down the rest of the tree! This can cause some issues like destroying your own buildings with accidentally falling directions, and missing opportunities to utilize the environment. In this case; rivers.
Use Rivers to Collect Logs
If you didn’t know already, the environment can provide great use cases for you as a player. For example if you were to build your base on a hillside area, with a river nearby, this can speed up production rates in multiples!
This is primarily due to the water flow physics within the game. Cutting down a tree and having it fall into the river will have the logs flow down the river naturally until they reach a point of stoppage. However, this is where us as the players come into good use! We can build a Dam to collect all the logs in a specific place!
Building a Dam
It is worth noting however that there is multiple ways to design your dam, but it does depend on the landscape most of the time and depth of the river at the point you wish to use. In our example we took the approach previously shown in the guide when building walls. A combination of vertical and horizontal logs.
Whichever way you decide is best for you when it comes to building a dam, as soon as you test the effectiveness of it – chop down trees to your hearts content and leverage the power of nature!
And that’s about it! We hope this ultimate beginners building guide for Sons of the Forest has helped kick start your creative thoughts and inner builder! We can’t wait for you to share your creations with us on our Official Community Discord. For more Sons of the Forest content, check out our in-progress map for potential items such as the Machete, the Shotgun and the Hang Glider, and locations to build!
