Sons of the Forest: The Great Shovel Expedition

 

Can We Survive Winter?

Last week Dave had been away, which in most games would simply mean missing an evening of progress.

Sons of the Forest had other ideas.

Dave returned to discover that the tropical island holiday brochure had been withdrawn, the temperature had plummeted, and everyone was now living through winter.

More importantly, Dave had nothing.

No useful equipment. No carefully accumulated survival gear. No specialist cave-diving apparatus. Just the clothes on his back and the reassuring knowledge that somewhere on this frozen, cannibal-infested island his friends were probably doing something extremely dangerous without adequate supervision.

So Dave was dispatched along the shoreline to collect a hang glider and whatever other supplies he could scrape together.

Welcome back.

The Great Shovel Expedition

The current grand strategic objective remained the elusive shovel.

It had become our Excalibur. Our Holy Grail. Our One Ring.

Except considerably harder to obtain and apparently requiring half the equipment catalogue before anyone was allowed to touch it.

Sons of the Forest doesn't have a conventional crafting bench where missing equipment can simply be built. Important tools such as the rebreather and rope gun have to be found out in the world.

This meant Dave, having missed the previous week's adventures, didn't have them.

The others did.

And so Dave's contribution to the great shovel expedition was temporarily reduced to sitting in a cave while everyone else went exploring.

Eventually, the correct cave was found.

Naturally, finding the cave was merely the beginning of the administrative process.

Inside was a zip line.

To use the zip line, you need a rope gun.

Everyone except Dave had a rope gun.

Thus everyone except Dave headed farther into the cave while Dave remained near the entrance, presumably taking up a new role as CCF Cave Receptionist.

"Good evening. Welcome to Certain Death Caverns. The others are currently being eaten. Would you like to leave a message?"

The expedition continued.

Then came the next challenge.

Water.

Not decorative water. Not ankle-deep fantasy-adventure water where everyone splashes dramatically through it while carrying twenty-seven swords and a suit of plate armour.

Proper underwater passages.

Which required rebreathers and oxygen tanks.

Again, everyone involved had the necessary equipment.

Except Dave.

So Dave remained behind.

And this is where the evening settled into a surprisingly efficient division of labour.

Myles, Zaph and Craig explored the murderous darkness.

Dave listened.

From somewhere deep beneath the mountain came screams.

Then silence.

Then:

“I’m down”

More distant violence.

Another:

“I’m down”

Some explosions.

And, periodically, Myles swearing.

Then everyone would die, respawn outside the cave and run straight back inside.

Again.

And again.

Like lemmings who had recently completed a team-building course on persistence but skipped the module on learning from experience.

Dave found this very entertaining.

From Dave's position, it must have resembled an unusually violent radio play.

There was no need for visuals. The imagination supplied everything.

"Tonight on CCF Theatre: three men enter a cave. Several minutes later, three men inexplicably enter the same cave again."

There was so much dying that the group eventually discovered an unexpected game mechanic.

Apparently, the best way to exit the cave is to all die.

Death conveniently respawns everyone outside.

Thousands of years of human exploration produced ropes, climbing equipment, emergency procedures and carefully marked exits.

CCF had discovered something much more efficient.

Mass casualty.

Dave Gets Bored

This continued for an extraordinarily long time.

More than five minutes.

Dave became bored.

And boredom, in Dave, is a force of nature.

With the others still somewhere underground exploding things, drowning, being mutilated and occasionally announcing “I’m down”, Dave decided to go exploring up the mountain.

This was objectively a terrible idea and therefore required no further discussion.

He found a camp.

He found another cave.

He picked up some gear.

Most remarkably, when confronted by the entrance to this new cave, Dave made the extremely sensible decision not to climb down into it.

This may represent character growth.

Instead he continued up the mountain.

He made it about ¾ of the way up.

Then he slipped.

What followed was less mountaineering and more an extended practical demonstration of gravity.

Dave slid down a steep slope and died.

Somewhere deep inside the original cave, the others were presumably also dying, which at least meant the team was once again operating in harmony.

The Dave Survival Experience

Dave awoke in a Cannibal camp.

As one does.

He cut himself loose and set off on foot.

The island had already taken his dignity, altitude and possibly several bones, but Dave was not finished.

Soon he found a golf cart.

This was excellent news because CCF history has repeatedly demonstrated that giving one of us a motor vehicle dramatically improves the situation for approximately thirty seconds.

Dave drove around.

He discovered several useful sites.

He collected more stuff.

Cannibals appeared.

Dave fled.

The golf cart ended up crashed in a river.

Dave continued back on foot.

For anyone keeping score, Dave had started the evening unequipped, become stranded outside a cave, independently climbed a mountain, fallen off it, been captured by cannibals, escaped, acquired a golf cart and drowned the golf cart.

Meanwhile the actual shovel expedition had mostly consisted of screaming.

Progress.

The Bunker

Eventually, unbelievably, we had the shovel.

Which meant the next part of the island's elaborate workplace induction program could begin.

Myles and Zaph headed for the bunker that needed to be excavated.

Because ordinary travel had apparently become beneath us, they flew up the river in the dark.

There is something inherently reassuring about navigating a hang glider at night above a wilderness populated by cannibals and mutants while searching for a hole in the ground.

Dave also took his glider.

Dave managed to get as far as the beach.

Then he crashed.

This created a new problem.

It was dark.

Dave couldn't find the glider.

So after all the dangerous caves, cannibal camps, mountain accidents and vehicular river incidents, Dave was finally defeated by the timeless holiday experience of losing something on the beach after sunset.

There was nothing for it but to wait until dawn.

Once daylight returned, Dave recovered the glider.

Meanwhile Zaph got to work with the newly acquired shovel and dug our way into the bunker.

At last, actual progress.

Inside we found a security card.

We printed water bottles.

And we found a fire axe.

This was practically civilisation.

Admittedly civilisation with cannibals outside, mutants underground and several members of the expedition demonstrating only a theoretical understanding of mortality, but civilisation nonetheless.

Tonight's Campfire Song

In honour of Dolly Parton (RIP), the evening's campfire entertainment turned toward the working man's lament.

Or, more specifically, the working man's lament after being sent into a mutant-filled cave because somebody decided progression should require a shovel.

The CCF Foraging Song

Clock in at sunrise, berries in the sack,
Cannibals ahead of us and mutants at the back.
Gliders in the treetops, houseboat offshore,
Every time we find some gear the game demands one more.

Grenades in the backpack, dying on the floor,
Surely there's a survival game we'd rather explore.
Menus fighting menus, interfaces in the way,
Nothing says adventure like wrestling UI all day.

Run another bunker, crawl another hole,
Throw another explosive and surrender another soul.
Almost at the finish, enthusiasm nearly gone:
If this is island paradise, something has gone wrong.

We are almost done.

This isn't the one.

Did We Learn or Achieve Anything This Week?

An excellent question.

The evidence suggests that we learnt several things.

Mutant babies spawn in caves

Because apparently ordinary mutants were insufficient.

At some point a designer looked at the underground horrors already present and thought:

"Needs babies."

Not normal babies, obviously.

That would be weird.

Mutant babies.

Much better.

There is no point building; you only progress by exploring

This has been something of a philosophical problem for a group attempting to play a survival building game.

We can build houses.

We can reinforce them.

We can decorate them.

Craig can presumably construct another architectural monument to unsafe workplace practices.

But none of that actually gets us anywhere.

Progress requires leaving the thing we built and wandering off across the island looking for another cave, bunker, keycard, rope gun, rebreather, shovel or other piece of equipment needed to obtain the next piece of equipment.

It's less Sons of the Forest and more Sons of the Mandatory Prerequisite Chain.

Light the Molotov before you throw it

A useful technical discovery.

A Molotov cocktail which has not been lit before being thrown is essentially an aggressively delivered bottle.

This lacks some of the traditional tactical advantages associated with incendiary weapons.

So:

Light the Molotov before you throw it.

Future generations may thank us.

Boom, baby Boom

The night's other important lesson was:

Boom, baby Boom – use enough explosives to bring down a bridge and still die

There are few tactical problems CCF cannot make louder.

Grenades.

Explosives.

Fire.

Enough ordnance to warrant an inquiry.

And after producing a detonation capable of rearranging the local geology, there remains every possibility that the only creatures definitely killed will be us.

This is what decades of gaming experience bring to the table.

Final Results

So did we achieve anything?

Technically, yes.

We found the shovel.

We reached the bunker.

We excavated it.

We acquired a security card.

We printed water bottles.

We found a fire axe.

Dave reacquired a hang glider, lost it, found it again, explored a mountain, died, escaped a cannibal camp, commandeered a golf cart, crashed it into a river and returned on foot.

The rest of us repeatedly entered a cave until death became not merely an occupational hazard but the preferred exit strategy.

So perhaps the more accurate assessment is:

We all learnt nothing, but died trying a lot.

(Not really an achievement.)

And with that, another productive evening of survival came to an end.

Tune in next week to discover the greatest mystery yet:

Have we swapped to a more co-operative game?

At this point, even the cannibals are probably hoping so.