Sons of the Forest: Should You Commit Cannibalism?

It is surprisingly easy to get into a situation in Sons of the Forest, now on Steam Early Access, where you might have to eat somebody. But should you?

Specifically, is there any kind of mechanical advantage or disadvantage to making an enemy into a quick snack? It does sound like biting people in the ass will, well, bite you in the ass in the long run, but is Sons of the Forest the kind of game that will penalize you for cannibalism? Here’s what we know so far.

Order Up: The Pros and Cons of Eating People in Sons of the Forest

As you may notice after a couple of fights on the island, you can dismember (or decapitate) opponents by hitting them with your trusty axe. This critically injures that cannibal and generally means it’s done messing with you, one way or another.

Alternatively, you can also use an axe or other bladed weapon to chop up cannibals’ corpses. Dead mercenaries and engineers seem to be immune to this, but any cannibal you kill on the island can be reduced to spare parts with your axe.

Severed arms can be used as improvised weapons, while you can use a severed head with a stick to create gross totems/trophies; these also seem to have the useful property of encouraging other cannibals to stay away from a particular location. It may actually be useful to set up a couple of your own gross totems surrounding any area where you’re building a house.

Arms, legs, and heads can all be stuck onto campfires in order to turn them into bones and skulls, which can be made into armor, weapons, or truly disgusting furniture. If you kill mutants with fire, such as by pegging one with a Molotov, their corpses will eventually disintegrate in the same way.

Legs and arms can also be just straight-up eaten. A freshly-severed limb is a “raw leg/arm.” As the name suggests, you can eat them as-is, or stick them on a campfire for about 30 seconds to cook it. Eating a cannibal’s limb restores a significant amount of hunger, albeit not as much as raw or cooked meat, and does not appear to regenerate lost health.

As for long-term side effects, well… there don’t appear to be any at this point in Sons of the Forest, although some may show up later on. It’s neither penalized nor necessary.

The reason this is a question, aside from the host of other games that actually do have some form of penalty for cannibalism, is because of what’s essentially an abandoned mechanic in SotF’s predecessor, the 2018 survival game The Forest.

In The Forest, there’s a stat called Sanity that you can track in your journal (below). Sanity gets slowly lowered whenever you kill a cannibal, spend too much time underground, or eat human flesh. It’s restored by sleeping, listening to music, or eating normal food like fish.

This seems like it’d be a big deal, as well as another resource you have to manage, but Sanity has no real effect in The Forest. At 90% or below, you can use dead cannibal body parts to build flaming effigies, but other than that, the game plays the same at 100% or 0% Sanity.

Unlike Sons of the Forest, The Forest also actually has an achievement, Major Cannibalism, for eating a lot of limbs.

As such, the real answer to the question—should I be eating the cannibals in Sons of the Forest?—is a resounding maybe. You can eat as many cannibals as you like in the initial release of the game and suffer no meaningful mechanical effects, but that could change as the game continues to move through Early Access.

I’m going to go eat a salad.