Endnight had to take a few more hours last night to finish up the latest Patch for Sons of the Forest, but there a quite a few cool features to make up for the wait.
The most notable one might be the Hard Survival Mode, at least for the players who felt the game was too easy — a common complaint from the community. You can now pick this difficulty from the start to play with reduced resource spawns, decreased health and stamina regen when cold, worse penalty for raw and rotten meats, and no item respawn on load. (Though, maybe someone will go ahead and just beat the game with a stick again.)
Another notable feature is Stone Building: ability to pick up stones and use them to build a stone fireplace, walls, beams, and columns. This should introduce some variety to the construction system, which has so far been heavily reliant on logs for things like walls and structures. Assuming stone construction will be significantly sturdier than wood, creating sturdier shelters (to protect against the island’s bloodthirsty denizens) should now be much easier. To support the new option, the advanced version of the log sled added in Patch 05 will now be able to carry logs, rocks, stones, sticks, and bones, which Kelvin can now help you with.
In return for making shelter easier to construct, you will gain less rest when sleeping outdoors. You can improve the efficiency of rest by raising your comfort level (using soups and clothing, for example); tip: the super-comfy 
Pajamas will be excellent for that purpose.
There are a few other changes in this patch, including custom effigies and improved cooking UI & cooking buff durations, which you can find in the official notes below.
Sons of the Forest Patch 06 Notes
Hey everyone,
This patch adds new stone pickups and the ability to build stone structures. We also added custom effigies, a first pass of hard survival plus a bunch of cooking improvements and lots more. For the full list, check below.
As always, please continue to post your bug reports and feedback in the Discussions area of the Community Hub.
Features
- Hard survival difficulty mode added
- Stone pickups added to world
- Buildable stone fireplace, stone walls, stone beams, and stone columns
- Custom effigies
- Advanced log sled can now hold logs, rocks, stones, sticks and bones
Improvements
- Countdown clocks added to dining area of food and dining
- Blown apart limbs added to exploded bathroom in bunker luxury
- The cooking pot and flask can now be dumped out with right mouse button
- Cooking pot will now be placed on the fire immediately if the player is holding the pot while interacting with the fire
- If a fire is broken while the pot is cooking, the pots contents is reset back to water. The recipe is retained if the pot was done cooking when the fire is destroyed
- Added some water movement to the pot when not boiling
- Visual and audio improvements to steady water drip FX in caves
- Improvements and fixes to Lava sound and visuals
- Adding thunder sounds to lightning strikes in space city view of gold room cutscene
- Rain catcher will no longer show the refill icon until there is at least enough water for one drink
- The pot can now be re-added to the fire even if it has a completed recipe in it
- The hotkey UI will no longer show up in quick select and grab bag menus and only be visible when in the inventory
- Added loading hints for Comfort rating and Sleeping indoors vs outdoors
- Added a loading hint for cooking bonuses
- Fish traps now run in game time instead of real time to work better with pausing and sleeping
- Fish caught in traps will no longer go rotten
- Added UI for current cooking bonuses
- Improved UI for cooking recipes
- Added a new equip/unequip animation for shotgun that is simpler and matches the idle held pose, so blending feels smoother and less awkward
- Cannibals will sometimes drag their dying friends away from the player
- General optimizations to reduce AI update cost
- Kelvin can now pickup stones
- Kelvin can now fill the log sled with sticks, rocks, and stones
- Reduced some oversaturated animal spawn areas and spread them out more
- Fixed dead bodies in beach cave floating in multiplayer games when host player is not in the cave
- Player effigies cause fear to cannibals based on number of body parts
- Spearing multiple fish will visually stack on spear instead of all overlapping
- AI are no longer blocked by defensive stick spikes, but still take damage
Balance
- Sleeping outdoors will now give less rest than sleeping indoors
- The amount of rest gained by the player is now modified by their current comfort rating (certain soups and clothing can affect comfort rating)
- Lowered chance of meds in crates
- Large Demons can now sometimes appear above ground after end game
- Lumberjack juice recipe has been reworked so that it’s easier to make in peaceful games
- Added hard survival to start difficulty settings
- Cooking buff durations changed from 8 hours to 4 hours in game time.
- Hard survival; Reduced food spawns in crates. No Item storage crate respawn on load in this game mode. Lowered fish and animal spawns. Decreased target health and stamina regen speeds while cold. Increased penalty for raw/rotten meats
Fixes
- Added some missing translations for cooking
- Fix for player not getting any effects from drinking the last bit of liquid from their pot or flask
- GPS locators placed on standing sticks now show the selected icon and retain it after saving and loading and improved positioning of 3d model on stick
- Fix for being able to interact with the cooking pot when refilling a container from the pot
- Fix for the grab bag opening rather than the player eating from the pot if the player was looking at the pot the entire time it was cooking
- Fixed utility page button color
- Changed the stick amounts needed in book from 48 to 60 for advanced log sled
- Fixed skinning on gold armor pickup
- Fix for some lake volumes poking out through terrain
- Fixed spelling of Protein Shake recipe
- Fixed lens flare occlusion not working if blood or cold post processing was active
- Fixed player getting stuck when quickly closing the grab bag after opening it on things such as storage, fires, and Virginia
- Fix for perishables getting desynced on shelves when a multiplayer client removes and fake drops them
- Fix for player getting into an unrecoverable state if they eat something in the inventory immediately after loading a save game
- Fixed issue with screen space reflection not always disabling correctly
- Various memory improvements
- Fixed issues with doors and hatches getting into a desynced state for multiplayer clients in some cases
- Fixed stumps not appearing outside after loading a save game inside a bunker or cave
- Fixed female cannibal broken neck and head gimbal flipping in hit with Molotov cocktail reaction animation
- Fixed a bug where equipping the lighter with the rope gun held looked odd
- Fixed some popping on crossbow animations
- Fixed Kelvin unable to pickup and drop arrows
- Fix for Muddy Cannibals stay near trees action only staying near the trees by player, and sometimes triggering too often
- Fixed case where audio on knight V could get stuck on
- Fixed audio when cutting tree with chainsaw
- Fixed navigation cutting when placing walls in ground that slopes up
- The players grab bag is now closed when interacting with a fire that has gone out
- After loading a save game, when drinking from a pot on a fire, the player will now receive the correct recipe stats instead of water
Audio
- Added audio for the pot lid bumping around when boiling
- Tuned some high max instances on ambient events and mutant footsteps
- Made water splatters max distance a lot shorter and edited volume curve
- New audio for Demon Boss sequence; more synced impacts and grappling sounds, and Demon Boss jump and vocals
- Better pot fill with water audio
- Added sound for hug in chopper leave sequence
- Made Knight V on mud and water not play water splash when stopped
- Added sounds of emptying cooking pot and flask
- Altered gold room vista lightning audio
- Fixed guitar playing audio stuck on when interrupted by crash or knockdown
Patch notes sourced from https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1326470/view/3701441496593523270
