If you fancy sharks and setting birds on fire, you may want to consider returning to The Forest. The game is still in Early Access, but it’s now a little less rough and has a few new features courtesy of patch 0.02, which adds a slew of features, bug fixes, and tweaks to what is, to me, already a very strong contender for scariest game of 2014. There’s nothing quite as unsettling as foraging for precious resources only to look up at the treeline and notice that you’re being watched by a tribe of cannibals. That’s deeply unnerving.

Oh, you want the full patch notes? Okay then:

New features and gameplay tweaks:

Sharks
Simple raft now buildable via book (No Sail yet!)
Walls can now snap to form floors and roofs (experimental, can defy gravity)
New suprise item added to yacht
When being knocked out for first time you will now wake up in a random cave
Lowered fall damage amount
Birds can be killed with fire
Stamina recharge now takes longer
You can now block attacks with the red plane axe by holding down right mouse button
Timmy taken scene a little more dramatic, better lighting, sparks
Lowered intensity and range of fire light
Lowered health on turtle
Improved fish movement
Increased range of lighter
Enemies will drag downed friends out of danger again
Females will sometimes freak out at dying family members

Performance:

Improved load times
Reduced stutter
Overall performance increases
Big memory optimizations, should help crashing on some pc’s
Improved cave wall memory usage
Dropped sticks and rocks are now pooled and shouldn’t increase memory over time
Optimized hud rendering (10% faster on cpu)

World:

Improved lake water swim zones
Ocean swim zones now correctly rise and fall with tide
Underwater visuals improved
Improved terrain in some areas, reduced lumpiness in rocky area, fixed issues with caves poking through terrain
Fixed super deep ponds that could kill players by falling into them
Small old boat collision added
Plane exterior collision added
Improved balance on some grass textures (less bright)
Lowered top heavy pine tree to be easier to cut
Lots of small material/texture tweaks
Sunset/sunrise made brighter
Beach cave entrances made bigger and easier to enter
Improved world collision in some areas
Improved low resolution mountain textures
Improved terrain rendering and missing specular
improved cave lighting and details (caves 4,5)

Bugs:

Fixed countdown timer not taking different time zones into account
Fixed some spelling mistakes in tutorials and in survival book
Fixed shelter on fire spawning infinite logs
Fixed bug where day count was 1 more than it should be
Fixed issue where sticks,rocks and logs needed could go to -1
Fixed not switching back to default weapon after holding lizard, rabbit or fish
Fixed player not colliding with things tagged ‘Prop’
Fixed light leaking into parts of some caves
Fixed bug where you couldn’t cook multiple times on same campfire
Fixed spear being able to cut down trees
Fixed ponds flickering at certain distances
Fixed some items not being saved in inventory when game is loaded (some might still vanish, expect more saving fixes/improvements soon)
Fixed log holder not saving logs on load/save
Fixed twinberries not having eat icon and having wrong leaf texture
Fixed bloody tables in cave not being cut out of nav mesh
Fixed lizard and rabbit skin triggers not being connected to ragdoll body
Removed extra set of teeth and eyes appearing behind Timmy
Chopping dead bodies no longer results in player flying into the air
Animals no longer spawn multiple copies if on fire
Cannibals shouldn’t run underwater or follow player out to the boat (they might run a little bit into water however)
Fixed some bushes missing vertex colors when cut
Fixed birds landing in sky, improved bird a.i. and performance

You can grab The Forest here.