Bestiary
Forest Survival is a free 3D first-person shooter where you survive endless waves of hostile robots across eight biome maps, playable instantly in any modern browser. This page is the complete bestiary: 10 robot archetypes, the Ranged Sentinel turrets, the Crowned Elite mini-boss variant, the Overlord boss and the rare Revenant.
Forest Survival’s enemies are machines. The forest has been overrun by hostile machines, and every single thing that comes at you is a robot — procedural armour plating, metal that takes visible dents and scuffs as you shoot it, showers of sparks on a kill, and EMP bursts when you hack one. There is no blood on the enemies by design. The only blood in the game is on your own human avatar when your health drops to critical.
That matters for how you play. Machines do not panic, they do not flee, and they do not need line of sight to keep coming. What they do instead is coordinate, block shots with armour geometry, sidestep your bullets, and get physically stronger when they stand in an ARK-07 relay field. If you came looking for a game where you fight waves of robots, the roster below is what you are signing up for.
Forest Survival ships 10 robot archetypes, and each one is built to demand a different answer rather than just a bigger health bar. Base HP is the value at the start of a run; health, damage and speed all ramp with the wave number until the ramp clamps at wave 40, but the waves themselves never stop.
| Robot | Base HP | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Normal | 50 | Balanced aggression, closes for melee |
| Fast | 30 | Agile, dodges bullets |
| Tank | 150 | Slow, heavy hitter; has a Crowned Elite mini-boss variant |
| Ranged | 40 | Kites at range, fires telegraphed energy bolts |
| Bulwark | 120 | Takes only 12% damage inside its front arc — forces flanking |
| Leaper | 42 | Telegraphed crouch, then a pounce over cover — forces reaction |
| Howler | 55 | Shields nearby robots instead of fighting — forces target priority |
| Splitter | 95 | Bursts into 3 children on death — forces weapon choice and spacing |
| Revenant | 46 | Rare gold apex trickster: shields, blinks, shoots, self-heals |
| Overlord (boss) | 900 | Apex summoner with a per-hit damage cap on bullets |
Forest Survival’s core four — Normal, Fast, Tank and Ranged — make up the standard mix you see in almost every wave, in both solo and multiplayer. They set the baseline rhythm of a fight, and the tactical archetypes further down are designed to break that rhythm.
The Normal robot is the 50 HP baseline unit that closes the distance and swings at you. Normal robots come in the largest numbers, hold no special angle, and die to almost anything — two pistol body shots or a single melee swing at 60 base damage. They exist as the pressure floor, and the danger is never the individual, it is the eight of them arriving from four bearings while you reload.
The Fast robot trades health for speed and is the only core archetype with an extended dodge radius. Fast units carry 30 HP and start reading your incoming fire from 20 m out — every other robot only begins dodging at 15 m. Lead them, or use a wide pattern like the shotgun; tracking one with the sniper at mid range is how you waste a 1,200 ms fire-rate window.
The Tank robot is the 150 HP heavy that walks slowly and hits hard. Tanks give you the most reaction time of anything in the core mix, which makes them the ideal target for a full Launcher rocket or for kiting through a lava field, where terrain hazards chew through them at 26 damage per second on exactly the same terms as they would you. The Tank is also the chassis the Crowned Elite mini-boss is built on.
The Ranged robot refuses to close and shoots you from distance instead. Ranged units hold 40 HP, kite backwards to keep the gap open, and fire energy bolts that are telegraphed before they launch, so a sidestep beats them if you are watching. They are the reason a Siege wave hurts: that shape stacks the spawn with long-range shooters, and the only real answer is to keep moving and break line of sight behind trees and rock.
Forest Survival’s four tactical archetypes each force one specific change in how you fight, and all four are solo only — they never appear in multiplayer. Each is gated behind a wave number and capped at a small number alive at once, so the roster escalates instead of dogpiling.
The Bulwark takes only 12% damage inside its roughly 120° front arc, so shooting it head-on is close to pointless. Bulwarks appear solo from wave 5 with a maximum of two alive, carry 120 HP, and hold a visible shield cap so you can read which way the protection faces from any angle. What makes flanking actually possible is that a Bulwark comes about slowly — it turns like the slab of armour it is, so circling wide genuinely gets you around behind the plate. A Ranger dash or a Scout adrenaline burst turns that from a slow strafe into one clean move.
The Leaper crouches to telegraph a pounce, then jumps clean over the cover you were using. Leapers appear solo from wave 7 with a maximum of three alive and only 42 HP, so they are not a durability problem — they are a timing problem. The crouch is your entire warning; if you read it and move, the Leaper lands wide open with a real recovery window, and 42 HP evaporates in that gap. If you do not read it, your cover was decorative.
The Howler never really fights you at all; it grants 30 overshield every 2,600 ms to every robot within 9 m. Howlers appear solo from wave 9 with a maximum of two alive and 55 HP of their own. Ignore one and the pack in front of you keeps topping itself back up faster than your damage lands, which reads as your gun feeling broken. Kill the Howler first, then the pack. Its aura ring is drawn on the ground at its feet precisely so you can spot it in a crowd.
The Splitter bursts into exactly three children when it dies, and those children cannot split again. Splitters appear solo from wave 11 with a maximum of two alive and 95 HP. The decision is where you kill it: drop one at your feet and you have three fresh robots inside melee range; drop one at distance and you have three separate approach problems. A weapon with spread or splash handles the children cleanly, and the melee swing — 120° arc, 5.2 m reach, up to three targets — is close to purpose-built for the cleanup.
Forest Survival’s Revenant is a rare gold apex trickster that shields, blinks, shoots and heals itself back up. Revenants are solo only, start appearing from wave 6, and roll a 40% chance each wave with a maximum of two alive. It carries just 46 HP, which is the joke: the number is tiny and the fight is still hard, because a Revenant that blinks out of your crosshair and regenerates what you chipped off is not beatable by poking at it from across the map. It also cannot be hacked directly by the Subverter, so the usual “turn it against its friends” answer is off the table. Commit to it, or leave it alone and expect it to be there later.
Forest Survival has one true boss, the Overlord, plus a Crowned Elite mini-boss variant built on the Tank chassis. Both are designed so raw damage output is not the whole answer.
The Overlord is a 900 HP apex summoner with a per-hit damage cap, and the cap is the important part. No single bullet can remove more than 14% of the Overlord’s maximum health, no matter what you are holding — so a boss always takes a minimum of eight rounds to kill, and stacking damage multipliers cannot shortcut that. The cap is proportional to max HP, so it never stops mattering as bosses scale with the wave.
Three things are exempt from the cap: explosives, nukes and ability bursts. That is the whole strategy. A Launcher rocket, an irradiated barrel core, or a class ability like the Pyro’s Firestorm all land their full value on an Overlord, while your sniper shot gets shaved down to the cap. The Overlord is also immune to the Subverter, so save your hacking chips for the escorts it summons.
The Crowned Elite is a Tank with four times the health, and it spawns on waves divisible by 5 before the boss era begins — once Overlords start arriving, those milestone waves belong to them instead. Crowned Elites are not a separate archetype — they inherit the Tank’s slow, heavy behaviour, they just refuse to fall over, turning 150 base HP into 600. Practically, a Crowned Elite is a wave-5 checkpoint: if your current weapon cannot chew through 600 HP while four other robots close on you, that is the game telling you to spend your score on the next unlock before wave 10.
Ranged Sentinels are stationary laser turrets, and they are a separate system from the 10 archetypes. Sentinels do not walk, do not chase, and do not count toward the wave’s enemy total — they sit on the map and add long-range pressure to everything else you are doing. How many you face is fixed by difficulty before the run even starts.
| Difficulty | Ranged Sentinels on the map |
|---|---|
| Easy | 0 |
| Medium | 2 |
| Hard | 4 |
| Adaptive | 3 |
| Tutorial | 0 |
Forest Survival introduces its harder robots on a fixed ladder so a run escalates in readable steps. The core four are the standard mix from the opening waves; everything else has a gate, and the solo-only entries also have a hard cap on how many can be alive at once.
| Robot | First appears | Max alive | Mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Normal, Fast, Tank, Ranged | The standard mix, from the opening waves | — | Solo & multiplayer |
| Bulwark | Wave 5 | 2 | Solo only |
| Crowned Elite | Waves divisible by 5, before the boss era | — | Solo & multiplayer |
| Revenant | Wave 6 (40% chance per wave) | 2 | Solo only |
| Leaper | Wave 7 | 3 | Solo only |
| Howler | Wave 9 | 2 | Solo only |
| Splitter | Wave 11 | 2 | Solo only |
The Overlord has its own schedule, tied to difficulty. Once a run reaches its boss era, an Overlord arrives on every second wave, plus on every wave divisible by five — and those milestone waves send two at once. From wave 20 onward the spacing stops: a boss appears in every single wave. Hard front-loads the whole schedule by five waves relative to Easy.
| Difficulty | Boss era starts |
|---|---|
| Hard | Wave 5 |
| Medium | Wave 7 |
| Adaptive | Wave 8 |
| Easy | Wave 10 |
Waves are endless and there is no win condition. Damage and speed ramps clamp at wave 40, but the waves keep coming after that — your run ends when you die, and the score is the point. See how to play for the difficulty and unlock maths that sits underneath all of this.
Forest Survival’s robots run three separate systems that make them feel less like spawned health bars: a swarm-level director, per-unit line-of-sight perception, and predictive bullet dodging.
The Tactical Director is a swarm-wide brain sitting above the individual robots, and it is solo only. It reads how you are actually playing — camping, kiting, your engagement range, your accuracy, how much damage pressure you are under — and emits one shared directive that every robot on the field reads: flank bias, encircle, rush, prediction lead, hold range. You see it announced in the HUD with lines like “The swarm swings wide to flank you”, “The swarm cuts off your escape” or “Snipers pull back to zone you out”. Its aggression is scaled by difficulty: 0.35 on Easy, 0.7 on Medium, and 1.0 on Hard and Adaptive. It also has a relax beat borrowed from Left 4 Dead’s AI Director — when you are already taking heavy fire, the rush directive is eased so the game does not pile on into an unrecoverable death spiral. Multiplayer robots get no directive at all.
Robot perception genuinely respects the geometry of the map: trees, rocks and walls block sight. The system also models hearing, with a five-second sound memory and a last-seen position, so a robot that loses you does not teleport its knowledge — it goes to where you were. Storms make this measurably better for you, because a sandstorm or a blizzard cuts how far robots can pick you out, and heavy rain masks your footsteps. Which storm you get depends on the map.
Robots run predictive trajectory analysis on your shots and sidestep incoming fire. Detection range is 20 m for Fast units and 15 m for everything else, reaction time varies by difficulty, and the cooldown between dodges tightens as the waves climb — so the same robot type is harder to hit at wave 30 than at wave 8.
An honest caveat: Forest Survival is not a stealth game. Robot vision is 500 m and 360° by design, so there is no cone to slip behind and no way to go unnoticed by standing still. What genuinely works is line-of-sight occlusion — putting solid geometry between you and them — the Phantom’s Cloak, which really does break their tracking for its 4 seconds, and weather that shortens their engagement range.
ARK-07 is a relay network of pre-collapse spires that supercharges any robot standing in its field. Every map has three relay spires — four on Desert Canyon and Frozen Tundra, the two largest maps — each projecting a 55 m radius field. The in-game lore text spells out what the network is doing:
“A pre-collapse relay spire — one node of a network still answering a dead satellite, still running its last order: field-test the units against a live target. That target is you. Inside its field the machines drink raw command bandwidth and stay supercharged long after they leave; your optics fry, your equipment jams, your body cooks. Kills made in the field pay a bounty.”
The mechanical effects are exactly as advertised. A robot that walks through a field keeps its irradiation for up to 45 seconds after leaving — up to +90% damage and up to +45% speed, against a hard 1.75× speed ceiling. Standing in one yourself costs you: after a 2.2 second grace window you start taking radiation damage, your vision distorts, geiger clicks accelerate, and an equipment jam force-expires whatever power-up you were holding. The trade is that kills made inside a field pay up to 50% bonus score, and explosive barrels that spawned inside one become irradiated cores — 32 m nukes that even the Engineer cannot wire safely.
The network also fires two wave events. Overdrive Surge tags the wave “NETWORK EVENT · ALL UNITS OVERCLOCKED” and makes every robot hit harder, move faster and shrug off more. Null Wave tags it “SIGNAL CORRUPTED · FIRMWARE UNSTABLE”, makes the robots stutter through space, and cuts your own bullet damage by up to 25%. ARK-07 is host-authoritative and works in multiplayer, with guests mirroring the host’s simulation. It is switched off in the tutorial.
These are the four questions that come up most about Forest Survival’s enemies. The full game FAQ covers accounts, performance, mobile support and multiplayer.
You fight robots. Forest Survival is an on-foot first-person shooter against hostile machines — armour plating, dents, sparks and EMP, with no monsters, animals or undead anywhere in the game. You are not piloting anything; you are a person on the ground with a gun.
Kill the Howler first whenever one is on the field. A Howler feeds 30 overshield every 2,600 ms to everything within 9 m, so the pack in front of you regenerates faster than you can chew through it until the Howler is gone. After that, prioritise Ranged units, because they are the only core archetype that damages you from outside your comfortable engagement range.
Because bullets are capped at 14% of the Overlord’s maximum health per hit. That cap is deliberate, and it means no weapon or damage stack can kill a boss in fewer than eight rounds. Explosives, nukes and ability bursts bypass the cap entirely, so a Launcher rocket or a class ability is worth far more against a boss than an equivalent amount of rifle damage.
No. Multiplayer runs the core four archetypes, Crowned Elites and the Overlord, but the four tactical archetypes — Bulwark, Leaper, Howler and Splitter — and the Revenant are solo only, as is the Tactical Director. Co-op Survival and Last Man Standing are host-authoritative peer-to-peer sessions for up to 8 players, and the solo-only systems are not simulated across that wire.
The wiki bestiary lists per-enemy damage, speed and score values in full, plus the AI internals. It is maintained separately from this site and kept in step with the code.
Every robot on this page is in the browser build right now, and Solo and Tutorial need no account — only multiplayer requires signing in.