As survival game Sons of the Forest continues to dominate the Steam charts, developer Endnight Games has been working on making the early access experience a bit smoother for players. A new hotfix arrived today, and while it’s a small one it addresses a couple of big requests from the community.

Sons of the Forest didn’t have a hotkey system at launch, so players could only get an item into their hands by opening their inventory and clicking on the item they needed, or by adding items to their backpack, then holding their backpack up and choosing the item or weapon they wanted from that. The system wasn’t exactly user friendly and felt a bit awkward, especially when being chased around by enraged cannibals.

But a hotkey system has blessedly been added in today’s hotfix. Now you can assign items to your number keys (0-9) while using your inventory. Just hover over something like a pistol, shotgun, or bow, and you’ll see a small empty UI box appear over the item. Press a number between 0 and 9 and it’ll be assigned to that key. While playing, just tap that number and the assigned item will pop right into your hands. Ahh, so much better.

Another few small but welcome tweaks: tapping Escape will now close the construction manual, the ‘grab bag’ (when you’re holding up your backpack), and the tutorial book, which improves the clunky interface a bit. Cutscene prompts have also been improved for more visibility, and some more hints have been added to the loading screen.

Note: If you happen to be using mods, such as the debug console mod that lets you play around with Sons of the Forest cheats, you may have trouble running those mods following the hotfix. At first I couldn’t launch the game with mods, but a quick exit and restart of Steam and the Thunderstore mod manager sorted that out, and everything seems to be working as it did before.

Here are the full notes for today’s hotfix:

• Added hotkey system for keyboard/mouse. Assign hotkeys in inventory by pressing numerical keys 0 through 9 on hovered items in inventory
• Added hint for hotkeys to loading screen
• Improved cutscene skip prompt; will now appear briefly at start or show when common skip keys are pressed (esc, space, etc)
• Added heavy attack tutorial to loading hints
• ‘Back’ (default Esc) will close Tutorial book, Construction book and Grab bag interactions