Sons of the Forest cheats: console commands and codes

Sons of the Forest keeps its cheats in a built-in console, and the way in is a single made-up word: type cheatstick during a single-player game, then press F1. A command box opens and fills in suggestions as you type, so you get godmode, buildermode, addallitems, and the rest without memorizing a thing.

Two things decide whether it works at all. Your keyboard has to be set to English (US) or the word cheatstick won't register, and you need to flip Allow Cheats to On in the options first.

The payoff is unusual for a survival game: community guides agree the console does not switch off your Steam achievements. We've laid out every command below by what it touches, with the exact text to type and the caveats worth knowing.

Player cheats

These change your own body: health, stamina, jump, and speed. godmode is the one most people come for, and it's the best-corroborated command on this page.

godmode shows up in more than one guide. The other four here come from a single detailed community guide rather than two independent sources, so treat them as slightly lower confidence and expect the odd one to misbehave between patches.

The toggles take an explicit on or off, so superjump on turns it on and superjump off puts your legs back to normal.

Building cheats

Building is where the console saves the most time, since these skip the resource grind that shapes a normal run.

buildermode on/off is the heavy one. It bundles three effects together, free building, invulnerability, and a stop on enemy spawns, so it's the closest thing to a creative mode for laying out a base in peace.

buildhack on/off is the lighter version if you still want the mutants to show up while you build.

World and weather cheats

This group controls the sky and the calendar rather than you.

Swap the bracketed part for the value you want. forcerain heavy brings heavy rain, forcerain sunny clears the sky, season winter drops you into snow, and settimeofday 12 sets the clock to midday.

Item and creature cheats

Here's where you fill your pack or populate the island. Item spawning has a nice edge over the first game.

spawnitem <item-id> <x> takes a quantity, so one line can hand you ten of something at once. That's a step up from the original The Forest, whose additem couldn't take an amount.

addcharacter [type] [n] names the creature and how many to drop in, and addvirginia calls in Virginia, the multi-limbed companion, on her own.

How to enter cheats

Everything above lives in one console, and it's PC and single-player only.

First, turn the feature on. Set Allow Cheats to On under Options, then load into a game. In the console itself you don't have to spell commands perfectly, since it auto-suggests names as you type.

Here's the sequence in full. In Options > Gameplay, set Allow Cheats to On (single-player); in-game, type cheatstick on an English (US) keyboard layout, then press F1 to open the console. Press F1 again to close it.

The English (US) layout step trips up the most people. If cheatstick seems to do nothing, your keyboard language is almost always the reason, not a broken command.

The separate server "Cheats" setting

There's a second thing labeled Cheats in Sons of the Forest, and it isn't the console above. The Custom difficulty configuration used for dedicated servers exposes its own Cheats toggle, an admin-level setting for multiplayer hosts rather than the single-player cheatstick console. If you're setting up co-op, our guide on whether The Forest is crossplay covers both games' platforms.

We're keeping this page on the single-player console, so treat that server switch as a separate feature with its own rules. Whether it carries any achievement restriction of its own isn't clearly documented.

Third-party trainers exist for this game too, the memory-editing tools some players reach for to add extra toggles. This page sticks to the game's own built-in commands and doesn't cover setting up any of that.

What cheats disable: achievements

Here's the honest read, because it's better news than most survival games give you. Two independent community sources agree that using the cheatstick console does not turn off Steam achievements in Sons of the Forest. Sons of the Forest also earns a spot on our best horror games on Steam list.

That's the opposite of games that gate achievements behind a general cheats flag. The catch: no official Endnight Games statement confirms the policy, so it's community consensus rather than a developer guarantee, and a future patch could change it.

The server-level Cheats difficulty setting mentioned above is a separate question, and whether it restricts achievements on its own wasn't established.

Commands that may be out of date

Sons of the Forest has patched heavily since launch, and community guides flag that some console commands are reported outdated or non-functional in current builds.

We've listed the commands the guides document, but if one does nothing, that's the likely reason rather than a typo. The auto-suggest list inside the console is your best live check: if a command still appears as you type it, it's probably still wired in.