Throughout your adventures on Sons Of The Forest, you’ll fight for survival against some of the scariest creatures imaginable. From mutants to cannibals, these can lead to immense difficulty surviving on your server. Playing with friends can help, but even then, the game can prove quite the challenge. If the game becomes overwhelming, or even if it isn’t hard enough, knowing how to change Sons Of The Forest difficulty options can be advantageous, enhancing your Sons Of The Forest server and game experience!
In Sons Of The Forest, there are four different difficulties to try. Whether you’re looking for a nice peaceful exploration, a much harder challenge, or a set of custom difficulty options, you can. To ensure you can customize your server adventure, in this guide we will show you how to change the difficulty of your game and dedicated server for maximum survival fun with friends!
Finding your way around Sons Of The Forest can be difficult at first. If you’re new to the survival genre, you may find yourself virtually biting the dust after just a few minutes. In order to provide both newcomers and survival veterans with a great gaming experience, Sons Of The Forest has four different difficulty levels out of the box. Furthermore, the game allows you to create a difficulty level yourself. Below, you can find out how to set the appropriate Sons Of The Forest difficulty levels in the different game modes and what is in store with each difficulty.

On the Peaceful difficulty level, the island’s inhabitants are mostly removed from the game. However, this doesn’t mean that you won’t occasionally run into one. If you feel like battling it out, you can still find the inhabitants at cave entrances or bunkers in the game. However, this gamemode is more aimed at letting you explore the building and survival part of the game at your leisure without worrying about enemies. This is the perfect difficulty mode for Sons Of The Forest newcomers.
The Sons Of The Forest difficulty level Normal is the medium difficulty of the game, being very balanced and fair to players. Here, surviving on the island becomes much more difficult as you’ll be involved in fights more often. The mode has a few parallels to the peaceful mode but the island’s inhabitants move freely across the map. This is the recommended mode for Sons Of The Forest. Even though it’s significantly more difficult than in peaceful difficulty mode, you’ll have the best gaming experience here.
As you can imagine, the difficulty level “Hard” will demand everything from you regarding survival and combat skills. This means that you’ll need to quickly decide whether to run away from enemies or take them out when you see them. That, in addition to suffering from resource shortages. This mode is for all Sons Of The Forest veterans among you!
The hard mode isn’t hard enough for you yet? No problem, for that there is the “Hard Survival” mode. In this mode, you’ll find less food in crates, animals and fish are rarer, and on top of that, your life and stamina regeneration are worse. As if that wasn’t enough, eating rotten or raw meat will also have a much more drastic effect.
As the name suggests, you can freely customize this difficulty level. That means that you can focus on different parts of the game. If you want to be challenged in combat but at the same time find a lot of resources, then you can customize your game exactly for that. The “custom” difficulty level can be configured for single-player, multiplayer, and your own server depending on how you’re enjoying Sons Of The Forest!
You can set the Sons Of The Forest server difficulty level on your own Nitrado server in the webinterface in only a few seconds. You can find out how to do this in our detailed guide on Sons Of The Forest server settings!



Having been briefed on how to change your Sons Of The Forest difficulty, you’ll be ready for the mission ahead! Whether you enjoy a regular normal bit of action and survival or a more hardcore survival approach. Not to mention, you can even bring your friends along to help when you play together on a Sons Of The Forest game server. Which difficulty will you take on first with your friends?
Sons Of The Forest Difficulty Settings – Introduction
Difficulty Levels in Sons Of The Forest – Explained
- Difficulty “Peaceful” Mode
- Difficulty “Normal” Mode
- Difficulty “Hard” Mode
- Difficulty “Hard Survival” Mode
- “Custom” Difficulty Level
With New Difficulty Comes New SOTF Challenges & Adventures