This is a guide to downloading and installing either for experimental purposes or in the future if the older version is faster.

Step 1, enabling the console and allowing depot downloads.

You're going to want to first type in "steam://open/console" in your web browser of choosing, for me im using chrome.

You will be greeted with this message, go ahead and hit "Open Steam Client Bootstrapper"

You'll now notice you have a new tab on your steam client.

This will allow us to download the depots later, but first we need to enable this feature using Cheat Engine. Go ahead and download it if you dont already have it. There are other ways of enabling this feature but for us we'll focus on cheat engine because of how straight forward it is.

Go ahead and follow these steps to enable depot downloading.

1. Run Cheat Engine.
2. File -> Open Process -> Steam
3. Set the right-hand settings to the following:

• "Memory Scan Options": steamclient.dll (just keep pressing S when the drop-down is open to iterate through each and find it quicker)
• "Value Type": Array of byte
• "Hex": checked
• "Writable": unchecked (!)
• "Array of byte": D0 84 C0 0F 85 2E FF FF FF

4. Click "First Scan". You should get a single Address and the searched Value next to it.
5. Right-click the Value -> Change value of selected address(es)
6. Enter new value: D0 84 C0 E9 2F FF FF FF 90
7. Click OK.

You're good to close cheat engine and this should stay in effect until you exit steam.

Go ahead and head on over to Steamdb.info and search up "The Forest" on the top bar.

Go ahead and scroll down until you find Depots on your left. Click on that and then click on the 242761 Depot.

Scroll down again and on your left you should have a manifest tab.

These are all versions of The Forest released by the developers to the public steam version.

But these numbers dont really mean anything to us and the dates dont help that much either. So now open a new tab and head on over to https://theforest.gamepedia.com/Updates This is really helpful tool to tell us which version was released what date. so for an example lets go ahead and pick "V0.55" Scrolling down we can see V0.55 was released February 16th, 2017.

now going back to the steamdb manifest we can see two different versions that were released February 16th.

The older version, ID 429974~ was released earlier which would translate to being our V0.55, the later one 180309~ is no doubt the hotfix patch, V0.55b

So now we have our information we go back into the steam console, and will be using this command: "download_depot "App ID" "Depot ID" "Manifest ID" "242760" is The Forest's App ID. "242761" is the main branch depot ID and "429974931570940864" is our target version, V0.55's Manifest ID

so our command should be: download_depot 242760 242761 429974931570940864

if done correctly you should see Steam downloading the depot.

if not and you are getting the error "Manifest not available" you did something incorrect in cheat engine or this option may not work for you and will need to investigate alternatives.

once finished steam will download the data to the target location: Program Files(x86)\Steam\steamapps\content\app_242760\depot_242761 depending on what drive your steam install is.

Copy all files in this folder and then head over to your main installation folder. which should be: Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\The Forest Go ahead and paste all files and hit yes to all overriding files. and you're pretty much done! Go ahead and test it out by going into your library and launching the game. if done correctly you should see your work.

Some side notes: THIS WILL NOT ERASE YOUR SAVE DATA. That data is kept in your %Appdata% folder.

if you need to undo everything you did and reupdate to the latest version of the forest, go ahead and right click the forest in the steam library. Click Properties, and locate the local files tab and hit "Verify Integrity of Game Files" this will override what you did and allow you to play the most current version of the game.