How to Build a Shelter (Base)

A shelter (or a base), is a structure that you can build for your own protection. It's a place to take some restbite and recover from scavenging and building, think of it as a safe house from the mutants too. In The Forest, your stamina depletes quickly so sleeping, together with eating and drinking, is an important part in surviving from one day to the next.

When you start the game you're at the crash site which provides adequate shelter and protection from mutants but it won't help you once you start venturing further. Therefore, it's important to use the plane wreckage as an opportunity to search the nearby area. Use the first day or two to collect wood to craft your first shelter.

In order to cut down trees you must have the Axe, which can be collected or crafted.

The Forest - axe

Use the Axe to chop trees down and collect the logs and sticks. The large trees in the game produce logs, whereas the smaller trees will yield sticks. Most shelters also require stones or leaves, both of these are scattered round the map and can be picked up.

When you've collected enough resources it's time to find a good location for your shelter. It's best to avoid building too close to caves and swamps, instead go for open ground where you can see the enemy coming and also not too far from raw resources that you'll need to build more traps and repair your shelter.

Types of shelter

Shelters come in various forms, depending what resources you use to build them with. You can either choose from pre-designed templates; like the basic leaf covered shelter, small cabins, houseboats, fortresses and others. Alternatively, you can also place individual walls, floors, ceilings, etc allowing you to build a structure of your choosing. The grander the structure the more resources you need to build it.

The following shelters are included in Alpha:

Temporary Shelter
Requires: 26 leaves + 14 sticks

Hunting Shelter
Requires: 6 sticks + 6 stones + 4 logs

Log Cabin
Requires: 35 logs + 14 sticks

How to build - Tutorial

1. Open the survival book by pressing B
2. Navigate to the Shelters group
3. Click the shelter you want to build
4. Place shelter by pressing E
5. Collect the required resources if you haven't done so already (logs, sticks, stones, leaves)
6. Walk close to the shelter and repeatedly press E to add items
7. Add enough resources to complete the shelter

Tactics

Once built, you can surround your shelter with traps to help boost its defenses and fend off unwanted enemies. Unfortunately the large mutants (with several arms) can bash through wooden fences so make sure you repair your shelter should it get damaged overnight.

The Forest - building shelter

Your shelter should always be reachable by nightfall, and act as a fallback position if you get overrun by cannibals. Build more shelters at strategic positions to carefully explore the island one area at a time.

Where can you build a shelter

In alpha, you can only build shelters above ground but they can be anywhere on the island. You will not be able to build a shelter in a cave or underground. The same goes for traps which can only be built above ground.

The first Alpha release restricts players from venturing into the mountains, so you can't build a shelter there either.