The Forest vs Sons of the Forest (2026) — Which One Should Your Group Play?
Last verified: June 12, 2026 — mid-revival: The Forest just set its all-time player record (109,242 concurrent) a decade after launch, with both games on deep Steam discounts ahead of the June 25 Summer Sale.
A strange and wonderful thing is happening on Steam: a 2018 horror-survival game is bigger than it has ever been. Deep discounts pushed The Forest to an all-time record — 109,242 concurrent players, ten years after its Early Access debut — while Sons of the Forest hit its lowest price ever (about $8.99 at 70% off) and surged alongside it. Thousands of co-op groups are asking the same question this week: which one do we actually play? Having hosted servers for both, here is the honest comparison.
The short answer
- Pick The Forest if your group wants horror first: tighter, scarier, more focused, with a story that ends and haunts. The best $5 co-op fear purchase on Steam.
- Pick Sons of the Forest if your group wants survival-sandbox first: a far larger island, modern visuals, seasons, deeper building, and the AI companions (Kelvin and Virginia) that define its character.
- At these prices, the real 2026 answer is both, in order: the story connects, and The Forest costs less than the snacks you will eat while playing it.
What each game actually is
The Forest (2018) is a masterclass in dread economy. One peninsula, one crashed plane, one missing son, and a cannibal ecology that probes, watches, and escalates. Resources are tight, the caves are genuinely oppressive, and base defense matters because the pressure never fully relents. It is the harder game and the scarier one, and its ending is one of the genre's best.
Sons of the Forest (2023; 1.0 in 2024) trades some of that focus for scale and systems: an island several times larger, seasonal weather that changes survival math, a building system that works from structural pieces rather than blueprints, vastly better visuals, and the two AI companions — Kelvin, your traumatized lumberjack helper, and Virginia, the three-armed wildcard — who make even solo play feel inhabited. The horror is still there, but it shares the stage with sandbox ambition.
The comparison that matters for groups
- Fear factor: The Forest, clearly. Sons is creepy; the original is frightening.
- Building: Sons of the Forest — the structural system enables real architecture. The Forest's building is functional and charming, not expressive.
- Length of a co-op arc: The Forest is a tight 2-4 week group project with a finish line. Sons supports months of sandbox play before the story even matters.
- Difficulty & tuning: The Forest is harder by default; Sons offers extensive custom difficulty settings to push it either way.
- Mods: both have scenes; Sons' is the active one in 2026 (see BepInEx plugins).
- Story order: sequel callbacks land far better with the original played first. Standalone is fine; in-order is better.
The server question
Both games support dedicated servers with persistent worlds (up to 8 players), and both benefit from one for the same reason: peer-hosted co-op means the world sleeps when the host does, and the revival wave is exactly when your group's schedules will not line up. Differences worth knowing:
- The Forest: older, simpler server tooling — easy to run, light on hardware. Setup: The Forest dedicated server guide.
- Sons of the Forest: the modern server, matured through 1.0 — more configuration surface (difficulty, seasons, building destruction) and more hardware appetite. Setup: Sons of the Forest dedicated server guide; common fixes: connection timeouts and world migration.
- The 2026 pattern: groups buying both during the discount run The Forest first as a story arc, then migrate the crew to a Sons server for the long sandbox — one community, two chapters.
Is the revival worth joining?
Yes, with eyes open: discount waves are when co-op games are at their best (full friend lists, active community servers, fresh content creators) and the window is real but finite — the wider sale runs into early July, and populations historically settle a few weeks after. If your group has been waiting for the moment to do the Endnight games properly, a 109k-player all-time record ten years post-launch is the moment.
Getting the crew together for either island? Host a Sons of the Forest server or a The Forest server with Supercraft — persistent worlds for the revival wave and after it.
Looking for managed Sons of the Forest server hosting? Supercraft runs dedicated servers with daily backups, instant setup, and 5 region options. Plans from $5.99/mo.