To survive long on the island, you need to always keep an eye on your stats. Aside from Health, Armor, and Stamina bars, the Strength, Fullness, Hydration, and Energy are also shown on your HUD. The latter three stats are pretty explanatory; you just need to eat, drink, and sleep to manage them. But how can you raise the Strength level in Sons of the Forest, and what does the stat do?
Strength Stat Explanation
In Sons of the Forest, the Strength level only dictates how much Health you have. It does not reset after sleeping and won’t affect your stamina or vitality, melee damage, speed, or carrying capacity. The number of enemies you encounter is also only affected by how long you have survived. You start the game at Strength Level 1 and can increase it to up to Level 50 by performing specific actions.
You can check your Sons of the Forest character’s Strength by looking at the flexing arm icon on the right side of your screen. The stat’s progress is stated through the red bar surrounding the icon. The Strength level number is shown on top of the flexing arm icon, as seen in the image above.
| Strength Level | Health Bar |
|---|---|
| Level 1 / Default | 4 Health Bars |
| Level 15 | 5 Health Bars |
| Level 30 | 6 Health Bars |
| Level 40 | 7 Health Bars |
| Level 50 / Maximum | 8 Health Bars |
Even so, as you have noticed, enemies hit hard in this game. With additional health bars, you can only tank two or three more hits than usual at best. Because of that, Strength level grinding should not be your priority in Sons of the Forest. Instead, getting the best armor and weapon is the best way to support you in combat.
How to Increase Strength Level in Sons of the Forest
As mentioned before, not all actions in Sons of the Forest can increase your Strength level. Only two of them can give Strength XP, to be precise:
- Swinging weapons and tools.
- This includes using Chainsaw’s secondary swing attack.
- Charged attacks do not give extra Strength XP.
- For some reason, chopping the tips of Log Walls does not increase your Strength as well.
- Picking up a Log from the ground.
- Carrying around and dropping Logs will not increase your Strength’s XP.
It’s not known how much Strength XP swinging weapons and picking up Logs actually give. Nevertheless, it seems Log picking yields faster results than swinging a weapon. You need to swing a Knife 100 times to raise your Strength from Level 1 to 2. Meanwhile, you only need to pick Logs 50 times to get to Level 2.
But do keep in mind that the actions needed between levels will be increased exponentially. For example, it takes 360 weapon swings from Level 6 to 7. Thankfully, there is no diminishing return on actions, letting you grind the same action over and over.
Sons of The Forest is available on PC via Steam.
