What is the strength icon in Sons of The Forest? – Explained

Sons of the Forest is the follow-up to the cult-classic The Forest. In this game, you’re tasked with surviving on an island while searching for the missing billionaire Edward Puffton and his family. While you’re on the island, you’re tasked with multiple things to manage. These include activities like building a base, farming materials, going exploring, and last, but not least, fighting off mutants and cannibals. One of the things you’re going to be managing your status, seen as the little circle icons next to the minimap. These icons are indicative of how much food, water, and energy you have. There’s also another bar, which is pretty vague, being just a strong arm. So what is the strength icon in Sons of the Forest? Here’s our guide on that matter.

Sons of the Forest: What does the strength icon mean?

The strength icon in Sons of the Forest is almost exactly as it says on the tin. This icon dictates how much strength you have during the game. It indicates how easy it is to chop down trees, how much damage you deal, and it affects your vitality too. Increasing this stat means background stats relating to these are leveling up.

Screenshot by PC Invasion

How to increase your strength

That then leaves the question of: “How do you improve your strength stat in Sons of the Forest?” The simple way of doing this is to just do more activities related to strength. When you use your ax to chop down trees for example, the red bar around the strength icon will increase. When you’ve chopped down those trees, maybe carrying those logs around will also increase the red bar. Defending yourself from enemies is also a good way to increase this stat.

When you increase this red bar to the top of the strength icon in Sons of the Forest, you level up. Leveling up means increasing the amount of strength you have. In other words, tasks you were doing before will become just a little bit easier as time progresses.

Don’t forget: while leveling up the strength stat, actions you take will indeed lower the other bars. Therefore, if you plan to grind strength, make sure to have enough food, water, and shelter/energy consumables to offset the decrease.