Endnight Games’ The Forest has received a fairly hefty update – as we’ve revealed before – so just log into Steam and it will be automatically downloaded. What does it add? Along with the usual optimizations and tweaks, the first person sandbox survival horror is now running on Unity 5. This adds several new graphical improvements including sub-surface scattering for plants, physical based rendering and plants that bend.
The developer has also added new graphical options to help slower computers run the game faster. One can also adjust the view distance from an ultra level of detail to ultra low. Support for 32-bit machines which use less than 4 GB of RAM has also been added and there should be improvements all around to performance. That’s not including the new skin shaders, billboarding systems, new tree models and a new ocean shader.
Check out the full changelog here. However, that’s not all – new hotfix has also gone live, adding even more improvements. Windows 32-bit users can rejoice – volumetric lighting no longer shuts off automatically for you. Increased grass draw distance at highest settings and other bug fixes have been added so make sure to check out the hotfix notes here.