Can I relax in this game?

[Blue_Lightning]

Can I turn off or lower enemy numbers enough that I can just build a house along the beach and chill? Or will it always have to be fighting the cannibals and building in the spare time I get?
How customizable are the difficulty options?

[RequiemsRose]

There are not many customization options as far as server setup goes but there is a peaceful and a creative mode available (though i believe by default you are meant to finish the main game at least once to unlock those, you can bypass that with console commands). The console use can be a little weird but it does give you more options for customizing difficulty (there are even a few "hidden" difficulty modes from the early access days before we had actual selection options, like veganmode is basically peaceful, but vegetarianmode is enemies only spawn at night or in caves, and for the masochists among us rawmeatmode is permadeath hard mode).

Edit: worth noting that if you are mostly interested in building, the console commands are likely to be your best friend as is....mods might even be better. There are mods that do basically everything that console lets you do and then some (like console has no fly command for tall structures, mods do). Inversely, if all you want to do is build normally but not worry about enemies wrecking what you worked so hard on then you could just go into your gameplay settings and set build destruction to off. the only structures that can be destroyed when destruction is off are consumable structures like fires still burning down or tree dependent structures like treehouses, sap collectors, or tree bridges going down if the tree they are dependent on is destroyed.

[Albi]

I am playing a game in peaceful mode and I never beat the game so it doesn't have to be unlocked. There are no cannibals it's just peaceful. While this game is interesting i honestly would NOT recommend it. There is a newer game from the same game designers called Sons of the Forest buy that one instead it's newer. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1326470/Sons_Of_The_Forest/

[Blue_Lightning]

@Requiems
Yes, I'm looking to build normally and still have enemies to fight but just not have everything dictated by them besieging my base.
Would I need a server for this if I'm planning to play solely online? My CPU is a bit weak and the game looked like it would run well from its sys reqs. Would I be ok running it locally on a 2-core, 4-thread Athlon 200GE?

@Hammerdin
Nice to know that's an option in case I need it. I won't be doing peaceful mode from the get go but it will certainly be a good option to try if gets too tedious.
SoTF is on my radar as well but crruently my CPU is too weak to run it so I'll have to settle with its predecessor.

[RequiemsRose]

If you are up for the fight and just don't want them wrecking your base then you'd probably want to just turn destruction off. No need for commands. I'm not the most tech-inclined user but you don't need to have an actual server, as in dedicated hosting, in order to play solely online. That said, there is no built in anticheat for this game and one of the most common available mods is a grief client so the vast majority of servers that do exist are either private or peer-to-peer, or both (and any server you do host will likely be the same for the same reasons). You can just play a peer to peer multiplayer game to play online, i believe with a max of 8 players total at a time. Be aware that whether it's a peer-to-peer or a dedicated server, there are also not many admin moderation options available either, so moderating a public server can be challenging/frustrating. Like...."hard save" before making anything you care about into a publicly accessible server, check your player list frequently enough to be considered paranoid, and accept that you might have to rollback to a previous save suddenly and at any time should you choose to host a public server.

Also fair warning on SOTF, it is newer, it is prettier, but its optimization is already lacking and its performance is already all over the place for existing players (like i can play on a steam deck but you also got people with brand new modern era top of the line gaming rigs reporting issues in the SOTF forums). If you are already worried whether this one will play right, then the sequel might be out of your hardware range.

[Blue_Lightning]

Yeah destruction off sounds like a good middle ground for me.

I won't be playing online whatsoever, that means the game will be hosted and run completely locally right?

Yeah I'm not even up to the min reqs for SOTFS so I won't be considering it until I can upgrade.

[RequiemsRose]

Originally posted by Blue_Lightning:

-snip-
I won't be playing online whatsoever, that means the game will be hosted and run completely locally right?
-snip-

Yeah, should be entirely locally. be aware this can extend to cloud saving as well. This game is capable of cloud saving but apparently not always great at it, so if you do have a save you are really invested in, manually backing up that save data is not the worst idea.

[Jethro]

Got the itch to get back into this.

Played Sons, and yeah, it’s very good looking and polished a bit but honestly the progression and story is just whack. It gives you a GPS which tells you pretty much where all the POIs are. That’s what made the first game so much more enjoyable: actually having to explore and eventually map out locations.

But yes - you can absolutely relax. You can choose “Peaceful Mode” from the start when making your game. It’s great to just chill and build. But eventually becomes boring, imo.

[Blue_Lightning]

Yeah I prefer un-mapped exploration as well; may I ask how well it ran on your system and how "heavy" / demanding The Forest was?

[RequiemsRose]

I have never been the most tech-inclined but so far performance here hasn't been a major issue across a couple of computers I have had over the years. It even worked on my old XP machine that was more than a decade old (then again the game itself is a decade old now so maybe not so surprising). Realistically it's old enough that most will have a system beyond it's requirements at this point (though not everyone). It's not the most optimized for its era though, and when it can't run you tend to run into issues like unresponsiveness, lag, rubberbanding, etc.

Steam does have a refund policy that pretty much guarantees your right to refund a product as long as you have played under 2 hours and owned it less than 2 weeks so if you really wanted to you could get it, see if it holds up on your system, and return it if it doesn't. Otherwise if i'm not sure my system will actually run a game i tend to check through "can i run it?". basically compares your system to the listed specs and tells you exactly how it matches up, with a decent sense of what might struggle or not work at all (and what you might be able to upgrade to make it work, if applicable).

[Blue_Lightning]

I do meet the minimum requirements and surpass them by a lot in everything but the CPU but I wanted to check out everyone's experience with it as well. If it ran on an XP machine I'm confident it'll run well for me as well so thanks for the info.

Happy gaming everyone.

[Dolly ✨🌈🔧]

An option I have not seen mentioned: If you build your base inside of a cave, you are safe from all mutants and cannibals. Walk-in cave entrances allow you to carry logs through. A small cabin is fairly easy and quick to build inside of a cave. This allows you to play with enemies enabled, but you only have to fight them when you feel like it, and you don't get harassed at your home base.

(Endlessly respawning resources at your home base is also a nice bonus.)

[Blue_Lightning]

Thanks, will definitely consider that option. Hopefully I won't need it but that sounds like a good way to learn the ropes without having to turn enemies off completely.

[ELTATA]

Yes, if you like gathering and survival, although it can be stressful when it comes to moving, the stamina can be a bit stressful.