Forest ambience for D&D
Daytime woodland: a leaf bed, birds every five seconds, and a branch snapping once a minute. Recipe and environment, free.
A daytime forest is a leaf-and-wind loop at 60% with birdsong every five seconds over it, leaves every twelve, and two rarer things further off — a woodpecker, and a branch snapping about once a minute. The branch is the one that matters. A wood with nothing moving in it reads as a recording; one snap reads as a place.
What it sounds like
Forests are busy. That is what people get wrong when they reach for a forest loop and find it oddly dead: real woodland is a constant low churn of leaves with a great many small events on top, and a loop flattens all of it into texture.
So this one puts the events back, and it is not shy about it — birds every five seconds is the fastest-firing layer on any of these fifteen pages. That sounds like a lot and is not, because each bird is short and the wander is wide, so no two minutes sound alike.
Then, at the far end, the branch snap: once a minute, pushed far. Players will not consciously notice it for the first ten minutes. After that, somebody always asks what that was.
The recipe, dial by dial
This is the environment as it ships. Every layer is the same kind of thing — one sound from the library and a set of dials — so there is nothing special about which slot a sound sits in. The names are only names.
| Layer | Sound | How often | Wander | Volume | Distance | Reverb | Echo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forest | Forest, day | loop | — | 60% | close | off | off |
| Birds | Birdsong | every ~5.0 s | 70% | 50% | nearby | medium | 1 bounce |
| Leaves | Leaves rustle | every ~12 s | 70% | 50% | nearby | medium | 1 bounce |
| Woodpecker | Woodpecker | every ~40 s | 70% | 50% | far | medium | 1 bounce |
| Branch | Branch snap | every ~60 s | 70% | 50% | far | medium | 1 bounce |
Master volume 80%. Every number above is read out of the environment that ships in the app, and printed in the words the app prints beside each slider.
- Forest — The bed, at 60%. Louder than a cave's, because a wood genuinely is noisier than a cave.
Forest, day - Birds — Every five seconds, 70% wander. Regular birds are a soundtrack; irregular birds are a wood.
Birdsong - Leaves — Every twelve seconds, nearby. Ground-level movement close enough to be the party's own.
Leaves rustle - Woodpecker — Forty seconds, far. One distinctive sound stops a forest bed from being generic green noise.
Woodpecker - Branch — A minute, far. The layer that makes the wood occupied. Turn it off for a pleasant walk and on for everything else.
Branch snap
What each dial does is covered once, properly, in Environments & layers.
Boards to load with it
The environment is the place; boards are the things that happen in it. These three ship built in and suit this one:
Load them, then press + New scene and the environment and the boards come back together next week in one tap. Scenes covers that.
Make it yours
Night
Forest, Night ships built in, and it is not this recipe with the birds turned down — the bed changes, the events get rarer and further away, and the things that are awake are different things.
Rain in the canopy
Rainy Woods is built in, or add a rain layer here at about 40% and leave it nearby: the rain is in the leaves above them rather than on their heads.
Deep and wrong
Pull the birds out entirely, keep the branch, and add a low drone at 30%. A wood with no birds in it is the cheapest fright in the library.
None of this is destructive: the built-in environments cannot be overwritten. Change what you like, and press Save a copy as… when it sounds right.
The recordings
Every sound this environment uses, and who recorded it. Most of the library is public domain; the Creative Commons Attribution recordings are credited here because that is what the licence asks for. The full list is on Sounds & licensing.
- Forest, day — forest with small river birds and nature field recording by Garuda1982 (CC0)
- Birdsong — Birds Chirping 02 by swiftoid (CC0)
- Birdsong — Single Bird Chirp by alegemaate (CC0)
- Birdsong — bird 1 a.mp3 by esperar (CC0)
- Birdsong — Bird Sound #1 by danlucaz (CC0)
- Birdsong — Bird chirps then takes off flapping wings .wav by Ambient-X (CC0)
- Leaves rustle — bushmovement.wav by j1987 (CC0)
- Leaves rustle — Leaves_Rustling_Edited.wav by AmberdeMeillon (CC0)
- Leaves rustle — looking_in_bushes.wav by vibe_crc (CC0)
- Leaves rustle — Rustling leaves by giddster (CC0)
- Woodpecker — Woodpecker Pecking by Terry93D (CC0)
- Woodpecker — woodpecker.wav by milton. (CC0)
- Woodpecker — gray woodpecker by Garuda1982 (CC0)
- Branch snap — Crack of branch 3.wav by deleted_user_2104797 (CC0)
- Branch snap — branch breaking forest twig snap crunch.wav by kyles (CC0)
- Branch snap — few small branches snapping, close up, high frequency,H6.wav by Bini_trns (CC0)
Related
Open Forest, Day in Thaumaturgy — it is free, there is nothing to install, and nothing to sign up for.
Updated 24 October 2026