Complete Guide
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 guide is the short version — what you fight, what you fight it with, how a run is shaped, and where to start.
Forest Survival is a wave-survival FPS that runs in the browser with nothing to install. The forest has been overrun by hostile machines, and your job is to hold ground for as many waves as you can. There are three modes — Solo, Multiplayer and Tutorial — and four difficulties: Easy (“Casual”), Medium (“Balanced”), Hard (“Brutal”) and Adaptive (“AI-paced”), which retunes the swarm live based on how well you play. Solo and Tutorial need no account; only Multiplayer asks you to sign in. The game is free, MIT licensed, ad-free, and plays on phones and tablets in landscape. There is also a 57-second Forest Survival trailer.
Forest Survival's enemy roster is ten robot archetypes, and five of them exist to punish one comfortable habit each. The first four are the familiar wave-shooter mix; everything after that is a problem to solve rather than a health bar to empty.
| Robot | Base HP | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Normal | 50 | Balanced aggression, closes for melee |
| Fast | 30 | Agile, actively dodges your bullets |
| Tank | 150 | Slow, heavy hitter; a Crowned Elite variant at 4× HP arrives on waves divisible by 5 |
| Ranged | 40 | Kites at distance and fires telegraphed energy bolts |
| Bulwark | 120 | Takes only 12% damage inside its front arc — you have to flank it |
| Leaper | 42 | Telegraphed crouch, then pounces over cover; wide open on landing |
| Howler | 55 | Never really fights — grants 30 overshield every 2,600 ms within 9 m |
| Splitter | 95 | Bursts into exactly 3 children on death; the children cannot re-split |
| Revenant | 46 | Rare gold apex trickster: shields, blinks, shoots and self-heals |
| Overlord (boss) | 900 | Apex summoner with a per-hit damage cap of 14% of max HP against bullets |
Stationary Ranged Sentinel turrets are a separate system on top of those ten, and their count scales with difficulty. Bulwark, Leaper, Howler, Splitter and the Revenant are solo-only, each with its own entry wave and spawn cap. Behaviour notes and counterplay live on the robot enemy types page.
Forest Survival gives you eight weapons, and you earn them mid-run with score rather than buying them. You start with the Pistol; the other seven unlock at a base score multiplied by a difficulty factor — Easy 1.3×, Medium 2.5×, Hard 3.5×, a live 1.2×–3.4× on Adaptive — so the Subverter's base 2,200 costs 5,500 score on Medium. Seven of the eight can aim down sights and five can melee for 60 base damage in a 120° frontal arc. Two are genuinely unusual: the Launcher holds exactly one rocket and auto-reloads, and the Subverter deals zero damage, deploying chips that turn a robot against its own kind for 6.5 seconds before it detonates as an EMP. Damage, fire rates and the full unlock table are on the complete weapons list.
Forest Survival's eight character classes each pair one active ability on Q with an always-on passive, and the pick changes how you solve a crowd rather than how much damage you print. Ranger dashes through robots and bowls them over on a 5-second cooldown, Scout gets 1.75× movement speed for four seconds, Heavy raises a frontal riot shield, and Operative's Overclock grants unlimited ammo plus more damage for five seconds. The other four are situational: Pyro's Firestorm scorches everything nearby, Medic restores health and regenerates passively, Engineer wires a barrel into a remote bomb, and Phantom cloaks for four seconds — enemies genuinely lose tracking. All eight are compared on the character classes page.
Forest Survival has eight maps and eight biomes, one per map, so no environment is reused: Deep Forest, Scorched Wasteland, Frozen Tundra, Desert Canyon, Toxic Swamp, Military Outpost, Twilight Vale and Ancient Ruins. The terrain fights alongside you — lava deals 26 damage per second and toxic sludge 9, and both hurt robots on exactly the same terms they hurt you, so kiting a pack through a lava field is a real play. Weather has teeth too: a sandstorm or blizzard measurably cuts how far robots can pick you out. Every map also carries three ARK-07 relay spires (four on Desert Canyon and Frozen Tundra), 55-metre fields that supercharge any machine inside them and cook you if you linger. The map and biome breakdown covers how each one plays.
A Forest Survival run is a wave loop that never ends — there is no win condition, only a wave you eventually fail to beat. From wave 4, roughly 45% of waves take a special shape and the same one never repeats back to back: Horde sends half again as many light, fast robots spawning close, Elite Guard sends half as many heavily armoured ones mostly at once, Siege is sniper-heavy at long range, and Ambush arrives very close on every bearing with no warning. The boss era starts at wave 5 on Hard, 7 on Medium, 8 on Adaptive and 10 on Easy; from there an Overlord arrives every second wave, plus on every wave divisible by five — where two of them arrive at once — and from wave 20 onward in every single wave. In solo, a Tactical Director also reads whether you are camping, kiting or holding range and issues one shared directive that every robot obeys. Controls and moment-to-moment tactics are in how to play Forest Survival.
Forest Survival stacks three progression layers on top of a run. Inside a solo run, a blind Mystery Box offers 34 roguelike wave perks, twelve lootable power-ups (you hold one at a time), and seven killstreak airdrop rewards at streaks of 8, 14, 20, 26, 32, 40, 48 and 58. Between runs, an account carries 9 skills across 31 upgrade levels, 31 achievements, eight rank tiers from Bronze up to Legend at 160,000 XP, and one daily challenge per UTC day drawn from a pool of 71. Those perks, achievements and dailies are solo-only by design.
Forest Survival's multiplayer is real browser peer-to-peer over WebRTC with no game server at all — one player hosts and is authoritative for enemy simulation while guests mirror it. Lobbies hold up to 8 players (host plus 7), you join by sharing a link, and there are two modes: Co-op Survival and Last Man Standing. Multiplayer is the one mode that requires signing in, and it deliberately drops the solo-only systems, including the four tactical archetypes, the Revenant and the Tactical Director. Hosting tips are on the co-op multiplayer page.
Start with the Tutorial, then play Solo on Medium. The Tutorial is nine steps — Look Around through to Loot & Power-ups — with every weapon and ability unlocked, no way to be hurt, and a ladder that physically locks each control until it has been taught. Medium is the honest baseline after that: bosses begin at wave 7, unlocks cost 2.5× base score, and two Ranged Sentinels sit on the field. Easy pushes bosses back to wave 10 and makes unlocks cheap; Adaptive is worth trying once you know what you are doing. Anything unanswered is probably in the Forest Survival FAQ, and the tech is on the about page.
The project wiki goes deeper than this site does, with per-system detail maintained alongside the code. It is maintained separately from this site and kept in step with the code.
Forest Survival runs in the browser with nothing to install, and Solo and Tutorial need no account at all.