Best Sons of the Forest Server Settings for Co-op Survival Horror

Sons of the Forest doesn't give you the endless config buffet that ARK or Squad does. That's the first thing worth saying out loud – if you've come here hoping for 200 tunable knobs, you're going to leave disappointed. Endnight built the game first and the server second, and dedicatedserver.cfg reflects that. You get a difficulty mode, a handful of GameSettings toggles, and – crucially – a custom mode that unlocks roughly 15 CustomGameModeSettings keys covering enemies, seasons, survival stats and containers. That's the whole palette.

The good news is that palette is enough to meaningfully reshape the experience. Three sliders on enemy damage and aggression, plus the season and survival penalties, is the difference between a campfire-chat co-op story night and a genuine horror run where you sprint past a cave because fighting what's inside is a bad idea.

I've hosted enough SotF groups to have strong opinions about which combinations actually hold together, so below are three preset configs I'd genuinely drop into a server tonight. I've rotated the format on each so you can scan for the one that fits your group rather than reading three identical tables.

For the full reference on every key in the config file, the companion Sons of the Forest server configuration KB is where to go – the presets below assume that context. If you haven't ordered a server yet, our SotF plans cap at 8 slots because the game itself does.

Preset 1 – Story-first co-op

This one's for the group that showed up to see the story and doesn't want to lose half an evening to Demons. My wife and I ran SotF this way on our first playthrough because she wanted to see Virginia and Kelvin do their weird sibling-NPC thing without us dying to a creeper on the beach in minute three. It worked – we finished the story, she still talks about the bunker reveal, and I didn't have to keep reloading saves. Peaceful is too far (the cannibals barely do anything and it gets dull), so what you actually want is normal difficulty with the sharp edges filed off.

Drop this into your dedicatedserver.cfg:

{
  "ServerName": "Story Run - SotF Co-op",
  "MaxPlayers": 4,
  "Password": "setone",
  "SaveSlot": 1,
  "SaveMode": "Continue",
  "GameMode": "custom",
  "SaveInterval": 300,
  "CustomGameModeSettings": {
    "GameSetting.Vail.EnemySpawn": true,
    "GameSetting.Vail.EnemyHealth": "low",
    "GameSetting.Vail.EnemyDamage": "low",
    "GameSetting.Vail.EnemyArmour": "low",
    "GameSetting.Vail.EnemyAggression": "low",
    "GameSetting.Vail.AnimalSpawnRate": "high",
    "GameSetting.Environment.StartingSeason": "Summer",
    "GameSetting.Environment.SeasonLength": "long",
    "GameSetting.Environment.DayLength": "long",
    "GameSetting.Environment.PrecipitationFrequency": "low",
    "GameSetting.Survival.ConsumableEffects": "normal",
    "GameSetting.Survival.PlayerStatsDamage": "off",
    "GameSetting.Survival.ColdPenalties": "off",
    "GameSetting.Survival.ReducedFoodInContainers": false,
    "GameSetting.Survival.SingleUseContainers": false
  },
  "GameSettings": {
    "Gameplay.TreeRegrowth": true,
    "Structure.Damage": false
  }
}

A few things to notice:

• SaveInterval: 300 drops autosaves to every five minutes instead of the default ten. When the group's travelling between points of interest, the extra autosaves mean an unlucky death or a crash costs you less.
• Structure.Damage: false – probably the most group-friendly setting in this entire preset. Your base can't be damaged by enemies. If you want to build a proper home without waking up to find cannibals have chewed through your walls, this is the switch.
• Long seasons and long days keep you in summer for longer, which means the winter survival mechanics barely come into play. Story-first groups don't usually want to lose a session to "we need to craft warm suits, everyone."
• PvP friendly fire is controlled in-client from the host lobby, not this file – nothing I can drop in here will turn it off server-side, so have a conversation instead.

Preset 2 – Vanilla survival

Code first this time, because if you're here for vanilla you don't really need me to sell it to you. This is the "play it as Endnight built it" preset – the normal game mode, no custom tweaks, the autosave untouched.

{
  "ServerName": "Vanilla SotF",
  "MaxPlayers": 8,
  "Password": "",
  "SaveSlot": 1,
  "SaveMode": "Continue",
  "GameMode": "normal",
  "SaveInterval": 600,
  "IdleDayCycleSpeed": 0.1,
  "GameSettings": {
    "Gameplay.TreeRegrowth": true,
    "Structure.Damage": true
  }
}

I default to this for community servers where I don't know who's turning up. It's the best calibration if you want honest discussion online about the game afterwards – anyone who's played SotF will recognise the pacing, and nobody can claim you cheesed a build because the cannibals were on "low". GameMode: normal means you inherit Endnight's intended enemy curve: gentle first few nights on the coast, steadily scarier as you push inland toward the bunkers and caves.

The one knob I actually change from a fully-default file is IdleDayCycleSpeed. Setting it to 0.1 means when nobody's logged in the in-game clock slows to a crawl – you won't come back after a work week to find your winter crops dead and Kelvin starved. It's a floating-point value between 0 and 1 (strictly greater than 0); 0.1 is my sweet spot. Some hosts set it to the minimum because they want the world to essentially pause overnight – do whatever matches how often your group logs in.

I hosted an 8-slot vanilla server for a gaming Discord last summer and what surprised me was how much group composition mattered more than the settings. The same vanilla config for "four experienced survival players" is not the same vanilla config for "four people who have never played a Forest game" – the latter hit the first cave and bounced off pretty hard, and we ended up migrating to the custom config from Preset 1 about a week in. If you're unsure, start vanilla. You can always tweak.

If you're also wrangling the dedicated-server binary for the first time, how to join your Sons of the Forest server walks through the server browser behaviour (you need the Dedicated source filter – the default P2P option will not show your server).

Preset 3 – Hardcore horror: the "we brought this on ourselves" config

SotF doesn't technically have permadeath as a server toggle – the game's Hard Survival mode is the closest thing, and it's already built in, so all I'm really doing here is committing to it and tuning the custom knobs to make the environment match. A friend and I ran this back-to-back on a 2-player server last winter, and we lasted about eleven in-game days before a mutant absolutely dismantled us at the coastal cave entrance. It was the best SotF run I've ever had.

The mental model: hardsurvival gives you the brutal baseline (single save slot, no mid-game difficulty changes, tougher enemies, stingier loot) and the custom settings below push it further by shortening the forgiving summer window and hardening the survival penalties. You are meant to feel hunted.

{
  "ServerName": "Nightmare Fuel - SotF",
  "MaxPlayers": 4,
  "Password": "youllneedit",
  "SaveSlot": 1,
  "SaveMode": "Continue",
  "GameMode": "custom",
  "SaveInterval": 900,
  "CustomGameModeSettings": {
    "GameSetting.Vail.EnemySpawn": true,
    "GameSetting.Vail.EnemyHealth": "high",
    "GameSetting.Vail.EnemyDamage": "high",
    "GameSetting.Vail.EnemyArmour": "high",
    "GameSetting.Vail.EnemyAggression": "high",
    "GameSetting.Vail.AnimalSpawnRate": "low",
    "GameSetting.Environment.StartingSeason": "Autumn",
    "GameSetting.Environment.SeasonLength": "short",
    "GameSetting.Environment.DayLength": "short",
    "GameSetting.Environment.PrecipitationFrequency": "high",
    "GameSetting.Survival.ConsumableEffects": "hard",
    "GameSetting.Survival.PlayerStatsDamage": "hard",
    "GameSetting.Survival.ColdPenalties": "hard",
    "GameSetting.Survival.ReducedFoodInContainers": true,
    "GameSetting.Survival.SingleUseContainers": true
  },
  "GameSettings": {
    "Gameplay.TreeRegrowth": false,
    "Structure.Damage": true
  }
}

Why this is genuinely nastier than just setting GameMode: hardsurvival:

• Enemies are pegged high on every axis – health, damage, armour, aggression. The default hardsurvival mode raises the floor; this preset raises the ceiling too.
• AnimalSpawnRate: low with ReducedFoodInContainers: true and SingleUseContainers: true means you can't graze your way out of a food crisis. Every pine cone matters.
• Starting in Autumn with short seasons pushes you into winter fast, which combined with ColdPenalties: hard is where the real survival tension lives.
• TreeRegrowth: false means the forest around your base actually runs out. That 200-log mega-fort you were going to build? Pick your spot carefully.
• I've kept SaveInterval: 900 (15 min) instead of dropping it to 5 min specifically because the longer gap between saves punishes sloppy play. If you die, you might be reverting further than you'd like. That's the point.

This preset rewards caution, exploration pacing, and actually using your stealth mechanics. Don't sprint everywhere. Watch the tree line. If you get downed and your teammate is three chunks away, make peace with the idea that the run might end there – and lean in if it does. The troubleshooting steps in our SotF troubleshooting guide cover the log-read-out side of things if the server itself is misbehaving, but this preset is about the game misbehaving to you, which is the whole idea.

Where to go from here

The honest limitation worth naming: Sons of the Forest's server-side config is shallower than its competitors. There's no tick-rate dial, no day-night cycle length in raw seconds, no structure-count cap, no PvP toggle server-side. What you get is the custom mode sliders above, SaveInterval, IdleDayCycleSpeed and the two GameSettings booleans. That's the shape of the game – don't let anyone sell you a "secret SotF server optimisation" post that invents knobs that don't exist.

What those real knobs do give you is enough dynamic range to tune an evening. Switch between Preset 1 and Preset 3 on the same SaveSlot and you're essentially playing two different games. The full key reference is in Sons of the Forest server configuration, and if you're migrating a save between presets or hosts, uploading your SotF save to your server walks through the save directory structure – you'll want that if you decide mid-run that your vanilla group has earned the Nightmare Fuel preset.

One last thing. Whatever preset you pick, commit to it for at least a week before you start swapping values. SotF's pacing unfolds over in-game days, not minutes, and most "this setting feels wrong" reactions come from judging a config after two hours. Set it, play it, then tune.