In Sons Of The Forest, you’ll start your journey of survival with only a lighter as your light source. It’s great for starting campfires, but once you start entering caves you’ll notice it’s not so up to snuff after all. Thankfully, you can swap it out for a flashlight.
Obtaining the flashlight is a journey in and of itself. Deep into the forest, you’ll need to follow your GPS and come across a bleak little story, but at least you’ll come out with a better piece of equipment.
Where To Find The Flashlight
That little GPS you picked up from your survival kit is a handy little tool, especially in terms of finding the flashlight. There are little purple exclamation points to follow on the GPS which lead you to other signals. It’s one of the many symbols you should familiarize yourself with to get the most out of the GPS. Be warned that you may not always like the story beats you come across by following these markers, the flashlight being a strong case in point.
This marker will lead you to a stone cliff side. If you follow the path and find yourself at the bottom of the cliff, wondering what you’re looking for, the answer is that you have to look up.
The owner of this signal is dead. Hanged over the edge of the cliff. One of many victims of the forest, but you’ll never know if this was suicide or murder. Either way, the next question is just what exactly to do now. This corpse doesn’t just hold a radio signal, they are also the owner of the flashlight you’ve been looking for. In other words, you are going to have to get them down.
How To Obtain The Flashlight
If the way you followed the waypoint already brought you to the top of the cliff, you just need to find the rock the rope is tied around. If you entered the area at the bottom of the cliff, start walking to the left of the hanged corpse, and you’ll eventually find a section of the cliff that’s a good enough footpath to walk up to the top. Once again you then have to walk up to the specific rock where the body has been hanged. You’ll find some bottles of alcohol and some extra rope, both of which you should add to your inventory for future crafting. After you grab this loot, you’ll want to pull out something sharp like an axe. Give that rope a good whack, and it will cut, dropping the corpse to the forest floor.
Now that you’ve desecrated the poor fellow, you can rob him. Check his pockets for extra supplies, and be sure to check just next to the body as this will be where the flashlight drops. Picking up the flashlight will make it immediately replace the lighter as your default light source. You can change what button using a light is, you just have to open up the menu, but the default on a controller is left on the D-Pad while the default for a keyboard is L.
How Good Is The Flashlight
Flashlights work best indoors. The specific light source is made to bounce off of walls to light up the entire area. Because of this, the flashlight is a great tool for when you need to scramble through a cave. It’s foolish to travel through a cave until you have a flashlight, as the default lighter will barely do anything to let you see. Now as the image above shows, this does not translate to the flashlight being wonderful outside in the middle of the night. Believe it or not, it remains a better light source than the lighter even in this circumstance. The lighter also does basically nothing to help your visibility during nighttime. While attempting to use the flashlight outside is still leagues better than using the basic lighter, the real lesson to take away is that if you are walking the forest at night, go to bed instead. You should not be wandering the forest at night. There are too many dangers, and setting a light will make you visible, not the other way around. Just go to bed, that’s your safety net.
One last thing to remember is that if you don’t have a flashlight, you might still be in luck for traveling caves if you happen to find some cloth. Combine cloth, a stick, and your lighter to craft a torch in your inventory. The flashlight is preferable, but don’t forget that even if you have the flashlight, the crafting materials for a torch are a great thing to have. You can always run out of battery power. You should have a backup, no matter how many batteries you find.
