Answers
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. These are the questions people ask before their first run and during their first ten, answered against the shipping v2.0 build.
Forest Survival asks for nothing up front — no payment, no installer, and no account unless you want to play with other people.
Forest Survival is free, with nothing to buy at any point — no ads, no in-app purchases, no monetization code anywhere in the build. The game is MIT licensed and its source is public on GitHub. The shipping version is v2.0, and every map, weapon, class and mode described across this site is in it.
No — Forest Survival runs entirely inside the browser. Opening forestsurvival.live loads the game as a web page: no installer, no launcher, no plugin, no store account, no admin rights. Rendering is WebGL2 through Three.js r180, which any current desktop or mobile browser supports, and your settings and key bindings live in ordinary browser storage.
Solo and Tutorial need no account at all — pick a mode and you are fighting within seconds. Only Multiplayer asks you to sign in, because lobbies and account progression (eight rank tiers, Bronze up to Legend at 160,000 XP) have to be tied to an identity. To just shoot robots, skip the sign-in entirely.
Forest Survival is an on-foot wave shooter against machines: no crafting, no base building, nothing to pilot.
You fight robots. The forest has been overrun by hostile machines, and every enemy is one of them — armour plating, sparks, metal dents that accumulate as you shoot. There are 10 archetypes: Normal, Fast, Tank, Ranged, the Overlord boss, plus the solo-only Revenant, Bulwark, Leaper, Howler and Splitter. Stationary Ranged Sentinel turrets are a separate system (2 on Medium, 4 on Hard, none on Easy), and a Tank can arrive as the Crowned Elite mini-boss with 4× health on waves divisible by five.
There are 8 weapons — Pistol, Rifle, Shotgun, SMG, Sniper, Minigun, Launcher and Subverter — unlocked with score as a run goes on. The Pistol is free from the first second; every other weapon has a base score requirement multiplied by your difficulty:
| Difficulty | Unlock-score multiplier |
|---|---|
| Easy | 1.3× |
| Medium | 2.5× |
| Hard | 3.5× |
| Adaptive | 1.2×–3.4×, live, scaling with how well you are playing |
So the Subverter's base 2,200 becomes 5,500 score on Medium. Seven of the eight aim down sights (the Subverter cannot), five can melee for 60 damage in a 120° frontal arc, and each weapon carries its own mastery track from L0 to L10.
There are 8 classes, each with one active ability on Q and one always-on passive. Ranger dashes and bowls robots over on a 5-second cooldown; Scout's Adrenaline gives 1.75× speed for 4 seconds; Heavy raises a frontal riot shield; Operative's Overclock adds fire rate, damage and unlimited ammo for 5 seconds; Pyro's Firestorm scorches everything nearby; Medic heals and regenerates 0.5 HP per second; Engineer wires a barrel into a remote bomb; Phantom cloaks for 4 seconds and genuinely drops enemy tracking.
There are 8 maps, one distinct biome each: Deep Forest, Scorched Wasteland, Frozen Tundra, Desert Canyon, Toxic Swamp, Military Outpost, Twilight Vale and Ancient Ruins. Only five are forest-adjacent, so it is eight biomes rather than eight forests, and Desert Canyon and Frozen Tundra are the two largest. Every map has its own signature storm out of six species, and its hazards hurt robots on exactly your terms: lava 26 damage per second, toxic sludge 9, ice none but slippery.
Forest Survival targets whatever browser you already have rather than a particular machine, which is why the graphics presets carry so much of the load.
Forest Survival genuinely plays on phones and tablets rather than shipping a cut-down version. Touch gets the full control set — virtual joystick, fire, jump, crouch, reload, weapon selector, ability, pause — plus haptics and a drag-to-arrange editor for moving HUD buttons under your thumbs. There is no separate aim-down-sights button on touch: FIRE auto-aims at the nearest robot before it shoots. The game runs in landscape, and three of the 31 achievements are touch-only — Touch Trooper, Pocket Operator and Thumb Warrior.
Yes, as long as the machine has a reasonably current browser with WebGL2. Forest Survival ships five graphics presets — Ultra Low, Low, Medium, High and Ultra — plus a custom mode, and Ultra Low exists for hardware that cannot carry the full post-processing stack. Start low, play a wave, then move up one tier at a time. The combat is identical at every tier; only the effects thin out.
Forest Survival runs entirely in the browser with nothing to install, so it works on a managed laptop as long as your network allows forestsurvival.live and the browser supports WebGL2. There is no installer to run and no admin permission to request. If the site does not load, that is a network policy decision on your end — ask whoever administers the network rather than trying to work around it.
Forest Survival's multiplayer is peer-to-peer between browsers, which shapes both how you join and what a lobby can hold.
Yes — Multiplayer has two modes, Co-op Survival and Last Man Standing, and you join by sharing a lobby link. Connections are genuine browser peer-to-peer over WebRTC using PeerJS, with the host simulating enemies authoritatively and guests mirroring; there is no game server in the middle. Multiplayer is the one mode that needs a sign-in. Several systems are deliberately solo-only: the Revenant, the four tactical archetypes (Bulwark, Leaper, Howler, Splitter), Mystery Box wave perks, achievements, daily challenges, the Tactical Director and critical-health bullet-time.
A lobby holds up to 8 players — the host plus 7 guests. Because the host machine runs the authoritative enemy simulation for everyone, a full lobby goes best when the host is the strongest computer in the group with the steadiest connection.
Forest Survival has no campaign and no ending screen to reach — every run is a score attempt that stops the moment you go down.
The waves are endless — Forest Survival has no win condition and no final wave to beat. Enemy damage and speed ramp upward until they clamp at wave 40, but waves keep arriving after that, and from the boss era onwards a boss comes with every one. The run ends when you die, and your score and wave number are the whole scoreboard.
The boss era starts at a different wave on each difficulty: wave 5 on Hard, 7 on Medium, 8 on Adaptive and 10 on Easy. From then on an Overlord arrives every second wave, plus on every wave divisible by five, where two arrive at once; from wave 20 onward one appears in every wave. The Overlord has 900 base HP and a per-hit damage cap of 14% of its maximum health against bullets, so nothing kills it in fewer than 8 rounds. Explosives, irradiated-core detonations and ability bursts ignore that cap, which is why a Launcher rocket or a well-placed barrel beats raw rifle damage. The Overlord is also immune to the Subverter.
Forest Survival has two mechanics that come up constantly, because neither behaves like anything else in the game.
The Subverter is the eighth weapon, a hacking deck that deals zero direct damage. It throws virus chips up to 17 metres, holds 4 chips per magazine and cycles every 850 ms. A hacked robot turns on its own kind for 6.5 seconds at 2.4× its melee damage, then detonates as a 6.8-metre, 110-damage EMP. The Subverter cannot aim down sights but can still melee, bosses are immune, and the Revenant cannot be hacked directly. Its base unlock is 2,200 score — 5,500 on Medium.
The ARK-07 relay network is a set of pre-collapse spires standing on every map that supercharge any robot inside their radius. Each map holds 3 spires — 4 on Desert Canyon and Frozen Tundra — each projecting a 55-metre field. Robots carry the radiation for up to 45 seconds after they leave: up to 90% more damage and up to 45% more speed, capped at 1.75×. Kills made inside a field pay up to 50% bonus score. Standing in one costs you, though: after a 2.2-second grace window you take radiation damage, your optics distort, and an equipment jam force-expires whatever power-up you were holding. Barrels that spawned inside become irradiated cores with a 32-metre blast the Engineer cannot wire. Two wave events run off the network — Overdrive Surge and Null Wave, which cuts your bullet damage by up to 25% — and the whole system works in multiplayer, but not in the tutorial. The in-game lore reads:
“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.”
The wiki keeps its own FAQ alongside full system documentation. It is maintained separately from this site and kept in step with the code.
The fastest answer to most of these is a run — the how-to-play page and the full guide cover the rest.
Solo and Tutorial need no account; you only sign in to host or join a multiplayer lobby.