Good news – Sons of the Forest hotkeys are here, as developer Endnight Games addresses one of the most glaring omissions from the hugely popular horror survival game on Steam in a new patch. If you’ve been struggling to manage your inventory in the sequel to The Forest, then this small but crucial change will make it much easier to survive in Sons of the Forest.
The hotfix allows you to assign hotkeys to items in your Sons of the Forest inventory by pressing the numerical keys on your keyboard while hovering over them. You’ll get ten hotkey slots for all the 0-9 buttons, and then can quickly swap on the fly. This is a huge change that should make it easy to quickly swap away from your shovel and whip out your shotgun in Sons of the Forest when you’re under attack.
That’s not all, however, as you’ll now also be able to press the ‘back’ key (Esc by default) to close your tutorial book, construction book, and grab bag – something that doesn’t feel like a problem until you start playing and realise how intrinsically baked into your PC gaming brain such concepts are.
The cutscene skip option has been improved slightly, too. It’ll now show the prompt to skip cutscenes in Sons of the Forest when they first start, or if you press common skip keys such as Escape or the space bar. The team has also added new hints to the loading screen to tell players about the new hotkey system and teach them how heavy attacks work.
It’s good to see Endnight moving quickly to update common complaints – the addition of hotkeys is a small change, but one that’s extremely welcome. After all, not only will it make dealing with the hordes of Sons of the Forest mutants and cannibals much easier (because who wants to scrabble through their inventory when a slavering murderer is bearing down on you ) but also it fulfils my inherent need to mash keys and rapidly flick between items while running about the world.
Make sure you’re set to survive by finding the Sons of the Forest flashlight, and check our guide to building the best Sons of the Forest base. You’ll also want to make sure you recruit Virginia in Sons of the Forest, because she’s an absolute beast with any of the Sons of the Forest weapons in her capable hands. If you feel like this is all too relaxing, take a look at more of the best horror games on PC to sort that right out.