Sons of the Forest on Steam Deck is Good Enough (when it's not crashing)

Luckily for the Steam Deck community, there are heroes out there optimizing the hardware even better than Valve.

Sons of the Forest is a survival horror video game developed and published by Endnight Games. It is the sequel to the 2014 game, The Forest. The game is set in a mysterious and dangerous forest, where players must gather resources, build shelter, and fend off hostile creatures while trying to uncover the dark secrets of the forest. Sons of the Forest features both single-player and multiplayer modes, and promises to deliver a more immersive and challenging survival experience than its predecessor. The game is currently available on Steam in early access.

On my Steam Deck, the game consistently crashed as I loaded in. The Deck has about 14.5gb of RAM available for gaming, and when you hit the hard limit while loading up, the game will crash fairly consistently on you.

The good news is, there is a FIX!

To all Steam Deck owners out there, I highly recommend installing CryoUtilities 2.0 on your machine. It is a fairly quick install that can be done in desktop mode, it took me about 10 minutes to get it all sorted out and I was able to play the game crash-free.

My playgroup and I are about 8 hours into the game and I have enjoyed a fairly smooth experience, except for the occasional in-game bug, not having to do with hardware.

One unfortunate thing is that I was still unable to play full screen with the game, and my graphic settings are all pretty much the lowest they can be. A full breakdown of the graphics settings I'm using are below:

Quality Preset: LOW

Anti Aliasing: FXAA

Dynamic Resolution: OFF

Bloom: OFF

Screen Space Reflection: OFF

Motion Blur: OFF

Film Grain: OFF

Everything else should be on the lowest settings as possible. That's about it, now you're ready to get killed by some cannibals while chopping some trees!