Early Access game Sons of the Forest certainly makes no attempts to hold your hand through its open-world survival horror experience–it just drops you on this hellish isle and tells you to have fun, with only a GPS device, an objective, instructions for building a few basic structures, and your own wits (and those of your friends if you’re playing co-op) to get you through.
But if you want to not just survive, but thrive, then you’re gonna need a few more supplies than what you start with. And there’s one cave near the beach starting location that will give you a leg up early with two very important pieces of equipment: the stun gun, and the rebreather.
How to get the rebreather in Sons of the Forest
There are three possible starting spots, and if you’re lucky you’ll be on the beach right next to the cave that contains both the rebreather and the stun gun. But even if you do start the game next to this cave, you probably aren’t ready to go right in–you’ll want to at least get a decent weapon before heading in, and a light source stronger than your lighter would also help, because this cave is very dark.
Here’s the cave, with the GPS for reference.
When you do decide to take the plunge, you’ll find the cave entrance blocked by planks of wood. You’ll have to break them to get through, but consider the warning they represent: there are some bad things down there that somebody didn’t want getting out. But as you’ll see very soon, these guys aren’t built for surface life. They’re still a threat to you while you’re down there, though.
This cave is linear, so when you get inside you should just make your way straight forward. Occasionally you’ll find a powered light on the ground–leave them on and keep going until you find living beings.
These are Cave Cannibals, having turned into the human versions of sea life that evolved in the lightless deep. So they have no faces and are thus blind, but they hear extremely well. So you can sneak past them, but you’ll need to be very quiet. But unless you have a real weapon, sneaking is what you’ll need to do.
This cave is linear except for one branch that you’ll find near where these first two locals were. The well-lit passage on the right has its own little treasure at the end of it, but it’s not the rebreather. For that, you’ll need to head left into that pitch-blackness, as indicated by the arrows in the image below. I know that doesn’t look like anything, but trust me, it’s a path.
Just follow the path for a while. You’ll wade through some waist-deep water with lifejackets floating in it before the path veers off to the right and eventually emerges into a very large and very dark room with a lake in the middle.
It is very important that you don’t get in the water, because there’s a shark swimming around in it–that’s the only enemy on this path. So keep to the right and follow the edge of the water until you find a large backpack-looking thing next to several other lootable items on the ground–that backpack is your rebreather. Once you pick it up it will equip and use itself automatically whenever you have oxygen tanks available.
And, yes, you can kill the shark and swim under the cave lake to get back to the surface, but there’s no need to waste oxygen when we have other business in this cave anyway. At this point, you should backtrack to the cave fork we discussed earlier.
How to get the Stun Gun in Sons of the Forest
This time, you’ll need to take the well-lit path on the right. This path is super fraught with danger, though, because it’s home to two more adult cave people and two really messed up cave babies that will curl themselves up into a ball and throw themselves at you. The babies don’t have much health, but they can be tough to hit, so don’t take them lightly.
Eventually, after a long while of wandering through pitch-black corridors, you’ll get to the very end, where the corpse of a miner is hanging from the ceiling. And on the ground below him is the stun gun that you came here for. You can backtrack to the entrance of the cave to escape, which should be easy if you cleared it of enemies.
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