How to get water in Sons of the Forest?

Whether you love it or hate it, The Sons of the Forest‘s sheer dedication to survival game mechanics is impressive. Now that the game’s received its 1.0 content update, it’s time to jump back into this cannibal-infested horror, and one of the first things you’ll need to find is water.

Granted, those who have previously played The Sons of the Forest‘s Early Access build will have a general sense of where to go and what to do to get access to fresh water. Otherwise, you’ll struggle to efficiently do much of anything, let alone fend off waves of flesh-munching nudists in the middle of the night. The good news is that there are several different relatively reliable sources of water on the island, though, and most of them will be accessible to you on day one!

Getting water early in Sons of the Forest

Depending on where you wake up (the beach, the forest, or the mountain), the odds are good that you’ll have access to drinking water within running distance of your initial spawn point. Obviously, you can only safely drink fresh water – the ocean does not count. To that end, by far the easiest way of finding water in The Sons of the Forest is to open up your GPS and move in the general direction of a river or an inland lake.

Now, the tricky bit is that cannibals usually camp nearby as well, and you’re extremely susceptible to attacks if you’re just prowling about through the forest willy-nilly. This makes water-searching expeditions a potential danger, and since your character didn’t think about packing a drinking flask, you’ll need to make repeat daily trips to your designated water source to stay alive.

Not ideal, by any stretch. Thankfully, there are several things you can do to make drinking safer. Firstly, you may well luck out and find one of the water sources that doesn’t have a gang of cannibals attached to it. In that case, we highly recommend building a base somewhere nearby, which will make subsequent survival that much easier.

However, you could also stock up on berries of all kinds, as they slowly hydrate your character as you munch on them. Yarrow, too, is solid for these situations, and planting a bunch of it around your base might be a good idea.

Finally, if you spawn within walking distance of the beach, the odds are good that you’ll eventually come across some sea turtles. It is a bit queasy, but you could kill one of these helpless creatures for their meat and shell. Doing so will let you build a fairly efficient water collection implement, and drinking from it won’t even increase the odds of you getting sick, which is a real threat when using most other sources of fresh water. Of course, if it doesn’t rain, there won’t be any water for the former turtle to collect, so you still want a backup somewhere nearby.