The Forest gets a final final final pre-launch update

The Early Access folks are getting one last chance to help uncover secrets (and technical bugs) of The Forest, as the last final penultimate pre-launch update for the game hits. The Forest is just about almost out, with less than 24 hours remaining til v1.0, and there's still mysteries and twists being added. Like... uh... there's a new locked door on a ship. I adore that this is the kind of information given out in a mostly bug and errors based update, but The Forest does love to bury its surprises.

The devs released an acceptably vague announcement regarding the update:

This is our first pre-release patch, expect a few more in lead up to release as we try and fix up the last remaining issues.

This patch contains a ton of fixes, changes, optimizations, new items, new story elements, some new buildables, and a ton of surprises we don’t want to spoil via changelog. We’ll release the full list of changes on Monday along with release.

Oh and there’s now a locked door on the yacht.

My time in The Forest was super enjoyable (that’s not the word for mutant cannibal island) but knowing that so much content was locked off until now, I’m ready to dive back in. Some of what I've seen of the end game is absolutely wild, but (as I learned from trying to cover Hello Neighbor pre-release) who knows what lengths devs are willing to go to in order to create red herring pre-release content at this point.

Update: In the time it took to even write this piece, another update was released. Release 02 is detailed here. Lots of little bug fixes contained within: so for those of you not able to mix bow and flashlight, fear not, the issue is corrected!

The For Realsies 1.0 version of The Forest launches tomorrow. Hope you're ready.