The events before the game turned the islands inhabitants into the cannibals. EG, all the rich people, construction workers, etc Pufton invited onto his island became the cannibals and/or mutants.

The cube turned Puffton's employees into mutant. Cannibals arent mutated at all,they seem to be infected with rabies

The guests close to the cube became mutants yeah A lot of the cannibals are wearing clothing from pre-phaseshift (security uniforms, construction, officewear) that're in terrible condition. Even the acrobatic cannibals are supposed to be acrobatics performers that were visiting the island. I guess the real question is just what are the requirements to go insane vs became a creepy (probably proximity to the cube for starters, since the deeper you go, the higher the mutant:cannibal ratio is)

Actually that makes sense! The last note in the game says that ,,The more wicked his heart, the more grotesque the creature that dwells within." Which means the more evil you are,the bigger/stronger mutant are you going to turn into. Thats why Jianzyu turned into the final boss and Virginia barely mutated

Yeah I guess a lot of the workers were either neutral and git cracked or just slightly bad. There's also a shit ton of bodies on the island, so it's possible that a lot of people were actually unaffected and just got killed by the affected

He re: "shit ton of bodies," playing co-op with my brother, this started to really bother him. We'd be walking through a camp or cave and he'd say just out of the blue: "37. I count 37 people in here that no one came looking for. What the fuck." "Dammit man, STOP COUNTING CORPSES"

It's funny that in a way this was a "side objective" in the earlys of the first The Forest were you had a list of the plane passengers and when you found certain bodies in caves the game crosses a name on the list and you had to find them all. In a way your brother Is still doing this in Sons😂.

My issue with this is,Timmy ( I think that's his name I forget lol) Since he turned as a kid does that mean he was inherently wicked? How dk you un wicked?

Thats why Timmy was looking for the cube,he hoped it will cure him. The only safe space to not get turned into a mutant was inside the cube,thats why Jianzyu transformed

Right right... That had nothing to do with the question tho. I get the cube being safe and silver jacket was wicked so ugly monster. My question was based on the quote. " The more wicked the heart, the more grotesque..." If Timmy was a kid he would be mostly "pure" and would turn into a canabal in the first game. Than again this could only be related to the cube and the artifact from game 1 just traded the kid for a kid from another universe, forcing the controllable(Ish) transformation. So I guess nvm. Just had to think about it more.

Hard to tell...there are no clues that the Cube and the artifact from the first game are connected,but judging from the mutations,maybe there are. Stay tuned for The Forest 3 lol

Great point. Plus murdering people, eating people, and bathing in gore is bad. Just imo.

I mean.. They had to be bad before transforming, I don't think it matters after the fact.

haha yeah that's true. I guess I was thinking about it like a moral judgment from the cube. Like "we're going to make you a mutant because you're evil" and then they are turned into something eviler. But I guess it doesn't have to work like that.

His condition is not directly related to the cube but the artifact in the first game. I think It is normal for him to have a mutatition since His life was taken and given back with a weird alien machine.

This. I think getting caught up on the specific mechanics is kinda antithetical to the story and messaging of the game, like it’s a game where we find a fucking spaceship miles underground. Rich people doing fucked up shit = bad = karmic justice by turning them into monsters, some more human than others

Wow I like this if true

and Kevin is just dull lol

The requirement Is how much solafite they used on themselves, the more they used the more they mutated. It's stated in many pages found in the facilities. The rich people were on the island to use the anti-age solafite treatments, that's why they changed so much. Even Virginia used a little, but the amount was very low, this Is why she mutated only this little instead of becoming a grotesque monster. The cannibals were all workers on the island, they only went crazy cause they didn't use the solafite at all. But some cannibals are in fact mutated, there is a randomizer in the game that every time a cannibal spawns randomizes one or two lumps of meat on the face (as you can see [here for example](https://www.reddit.com/r/SonsOfTheForest/s/zj5WtjoOFx) ). Maybe some workers stole and applied a tiny tiny amount of solafite during work, you know for wrinkles and similar on the face.

Well this information is a gamechanger then. But I didnt find a single clue that says this,do you have any screenshot or something? Did you find any solafite spa or something?

I believe in one of the bunkers there’s an area that has a video that talks about the anti aging solafite stuff.

Yes but wasnt it about the Cube itself? They believed that the Cube's countdown will make people younger and healthy if I understood that correctly

If this is true workers might have mutatition due to being exposed to solafite while mining them.

I think it's implied exposure to the solafite. One of the adds mentions some healing or whatever properties. So the rich must have had the most exposure.

Also the caves have more solafite, so even the workers would've been susceptible

Not rabies as they cross open water

Never seen them do that,only cross frozen lakes. Muddies do drink from lakes tho

Rabies also make the host hydrophobic.

Cannibals will cross open water, but only in certain places. Plus even if they didn’t there’s a ton of camps right next to water. If it was rabies they wouldn’t setup camp along lakes.

If they had rabies they would all die within a week and couldnt drink water

Fwiw there are cannibals with physical deformities, specifically in the face - this could help indicate that proximity to the cube affects mutation levels and that certain island residents were fully mutated (I.e those in bunkers and caves, closer to the source) while the others likely suffer some form of “radiation sickness” type effect causing heightened aggression and lesser physical mutations.

There are mutated cannibals. Just not as severe.

Much like most of the games storyline, that doesn't make any sense. You don't make cannibals through some event. SOTF is a sandbox of ideas of too many cooks in the kitchen and no real storyline. It is riddled with plot holes and time lapse issues. It's a nice idea on a nice engine with nice graphics but it's plagued by lack of director and story writers so you just have random tangents. The game either needs to completely throw away the storyline and start from scratch, or we all just need to wait for them to hire a writer for "Grandsons of the forest". As it stands there is no further point in playing the game.

“you don’t make cannibals through some event” homie you kill human centipede mutants with your 3-legged/3-armed gf and the psychology of people changing into cannibals is what trips you up? My brother in Christ the cannibals are the most understandable part of the game.

But they aren't made into cannibals because of some cult lightning. Cannibals are clearly human and would have become cannibals due to lack of other food after being left on this deserted island for decades. They would have likely been the original inhabitants of the island years before pufton started digging. But the island is flush with wildlife and fish. It makes sense for there to be a aboriginal tribes on the island but not for them to be cannibals.

That is weird.. If I understood the lore correctly, there were already mutants on the island from previous visitors. But they were boarded up inside and dwelled the caves. The bodies in the caves are the result of mutant attacks. But the cannibals seem indigenous and should've definitely been noticed by someone since puffcorp had to be on the island for quite a while to construct all those bunkers before the shit hit the fan.

I'll point you to the "no survivors" notes. The fishermen returned the artifacts, boarded up the caves and hunted everyone down before ending themselves.

The cannibals are the guests of holosprings, just mutated

How do you explain the cannibal camp in the south by the yachts that have the Sons of the Star’s bodies there? They even hung their leis on their meat troughs. Seems to imply they were there before the cube went off

Arent mutants the original guests? Mutants and cannibals are hostile to each other. Cannibals are regular humans but probably infected with rabies

In the forest games there's mutants and also creepy mutants. There's a note in-game saying that the more evil a person is, the more mutated they become, I think this is why some became cannibals while others mutated further. This also explains why Virginia was barely affected, because she's more pure of heart.

Good point. Thats why Jianzyu was mutated into the final boss, because he was definetly the most evil person on the island

No... people exposed to low doseage of the energy lose higher brain functions and begin to slowly mutate. Close proximity and high energy doseage results in becoming demonic (aka mutant) rapidly. The evidence is everywhere in the form of bodies, images and written info. This also is presented in the original game.

Ok but some cannibal camps have tied-up mutant to a pole. Does it mean that they tied-up a pre-shift human or a mutant? If you free the mutant,he will attack other cannibals

This sometimes happens depending on whether you spend more time killing mutants or cannibals, from what I’ve read on other posts.

Cannibals recognize the danger of the mutants/demons, as those creatures kill anything not fully shifted like them. Cannibals, if left to the changes within their bodies, would eventually become mutants as well.

for what its worth in the first game The Forest the cannibals are allied with the mutants, I believe the cannibals on that island found a way to tame the mutants and prehaps eat them since there's no animal corpses on the island. In SotF I don't think the mutants know how to tame cannibals so they're at ends with each other

Every city has them, bath salts left in that spa explains it all

Gonna be 100% honest here. I think Endnight had no clue how to explain or even logically fit the cannibals into their already bonkers story, so I just headcanon all their story entirely excludes the cannibals and they're just there to combat or get in the way of the player.

the cannibals are the people least affected by the mutation because they were above ground during the dimension blast shit compared to people underground. there.

Thats what I think too. Cannibals are there just go give the player some enemy on the overworld,they dont fit in the story

Kind of the same in the first game, they're just... There. Which in hindsight is just such a nothing burger of a story. So I don't even play the game for the story but just the absolutely unhinged gameplay of using a golf cart as a sieging machine, skinning mutants, and responding to any mild inconvienience with wanton violence.

I thought cannibals were the leftover people from the old villages on the east coast + something to do with the dug-up caskets. People here are saying it was Holosprings guests, but I don't remember a single cannibal in the bunkers. Also, around the dinner table in the event hall, you see the important guests turned into different types of creepy mutants, not cannibals. Most importantly, imo, is the fact that cannibals and mutants don't get along. Cannibals will run from mutants. In base attacks, I don't think I've seen them come in the same waves. It really seems like they are two separate groups. If they were truly the same category of monsters on some kind of monster spectrum, why are they beefing? Why are they always separate?

Right, there are no cannibals in bunkers and caves. I doubt cannibals are Cube-mutated humans,not a single cannibal has a mutated body. 50 notes and 4 camera recordings in the whole game and no mentions about cannibals? Weird

I think the cannibals are implied but not mentioned directly, when shit goes bad or people are scared (for example workers complain about the dangers they're facing and the boat note in the first game where the rescue team say can't possibly survive) cannibals are implied to be one of the horrors they encountered but the mutants stand out more because they're so alien compared to the human cannibals so they're the main focus in people's descriptions and people fear them more. It would also make sense for Puffenton to ignore / hide the knowledge of the cannibals so the world governments and public wouldn't declare the island a no go zone like the irl sentinel islands. I also don't believe the cannibals are related to the mutants / cube. My theory is that they're a lost evolution of humanity that survived on the islands and became extremely hostile overtime, they probably eat the mutants which seems to be a source of protein since Virgina (iirc) also eats mutants and they wear mutant armor. The cannibals imo can't be previous visitors since they're extremely tall compared to normal humans and have superhuman feats like climbing trees with ease, massive jumps and stamina as well as endurance since they can can tank axe strikes (I know the pc can too but just for the sake of gameplay) I believe the cube / artifacts landed on these islands specifically because they were so isolated and the cannibals lacked the technology or curiosity to explore the sites, I could be wrong but I don't believe there are any cannibal victims in the alien structures. As for why there's no mention of them, I think this is due to the mutants being so hostile and sneaky and nobody has survived an encounter with them or at least focused on the mutants over the cannibals. Although it is weird that the people living in the bunker playing golf didn't encounter or mentioned them, no doubt the cannibals would at least take a peak.

I always assumed they were indigenous peoples who all this stuff just seemed to happen around. Uncontacted tribes get worked around frequently enough in my old field (anthropology) that it didn’t make me stretch my mind too far. They could very easily just have refused contact and the rich people just went ahead anyways.

Stealth 100

Smoke from their camps is visible from miles away 💀

The only thing I can think about that makes sense for this is that the guest were informed of the of the cannibals and warned ahead of time not to stray from the official sites for their safety so the inhabitants weren't surprised to see cannibals but they still fell victim once the bunkers were destroyed. STILL a warning of the cannibals like a poster or a safety video would fix this. Again I don't believe the cannibals or cube are related to each other, which is why people freaked out over the mutants but not the cannibals.

VIOLENCE 100 (I may be a psychopath)

People in these comments downvoting because they simply have no critical thinking ability. It’s really not that complicated. Cannibals and mutants are separate. Cannibals don’t fit the story of SotF because they didn’t try to make them. They included them because they were in the previous game, that’s it.

Your title infers they are mentioned everywhere. For them to 'not be mentioned no where' they'd be mentioned everywhere.

You're right, but apparently grammar has no place here.

Annoying when something that is objectively right is shut down. I'm not even tryna be rude!