Here’s an overview of the what you can expect in terms of gameplay:
Randomized world with hand-crafted locations
-When starting a new game, an island is generated consisting of randomized biomes and natural environments. The island also contains multiple animal towns and human camps at random locations.
-Some areas such as caves or temples are handcrafted for more interesting exploration and dungeon-style puzzles. The world randomization will pick one of the available pre-built areas for each cave and temple generated in the random world. Some scenarios will also force specific areas to be added to the world.
Scenarios
-When creating a new world, you must select a scenario, select the difficulty, and then create your character. The scenario will affect how the world is generated and the events that can be triggered. It will also affect dialogues, objectives, and set the goal of the game.
-For example, one scenario can consist of many small scattered animal towns, where you are encouraged to build relationships with them to convince them to join the rebellion. In another scenario, you will be put at a large town in the middle of the map and need to defend it from waves of attacks.
-It is also possible to play without a scenario for a more randomized world and without a specific goal (Endless mode).
Animal Villagers
Animal villagers can help you complete tasks such as cutting wood, adding logs to the fire, cooking food, hunting, fishing, or defending the towns from enemies.
Villagers can be assigned roles, which will determine what automatic tasks they perform. For example, a forager will cut wood, mine rocks and collect items, a guard will patrol the town and attack intruders, while a farmer will sow seeds, harvest crops and water plants.
Villagers can also be asked a variety of useful questions that help guide your character. You can ask them to show you a specific location and they will walk you to that location. Villagers can teach crafting recipes, and will reward you for completing tasks. When your relationship with a town increases, villagers will start giving gifts.
Animal villagers can be recruited into the rebellion. When they join the rebellion, they can temporarily be summoned into battles to fight at your side by blowing the rebellion horn.
You can trade with any villager. Instead of an arbitrary list of items for sale, the items available are the actual items that the villager has in their inventory.
Each villager has a list of wanted items. Unfulfilled wants will decrease their mood. They also have different kinds of food that they prefer, and different roles that they like to take. Ask a wolf to be a guard or hunter and they will be really happy, but ask the same to a bird and they may get demotivated.
Town Management
Each town has a community box in the middle that holds all the items owned by the town villagers. Villagers will automatically drop items they collect in the box, and pick the items they need. For example, the forager could find seeds in the wild and drop them in the box, the farmer will then go and pick the seed to sow them.
You can increase your relationship with a town by completing tasks requested by the villagers. Tasks are listed on the totem in the middle of the town. When your relation with a town is high, villagers will start giving gifts, let you assign villager roles, increase the amount of rebels that can be recruited, or even let you pick items from the community box. As your relation with a town increases, villagers will be more demanding and have a bigger list of wanted items.
Each town has a mood, which is affected by housing, food, the appeal of objects built in the town, wanted items and many other factors. When the town mood is high, villagers will perform tasks faster, be stronger in battle, and give better trade deals. Mood will also incite villagers to join or leave the town, becoming wanderers. When there are too many wanderers, outlaw gangs will form.
Stealing from the town community box (without establishing the proper town relationship) or killing villagers, will cause the town to become enemy. Villagers will start attacking you on sight.
Some animal towns have a rival town. Animals from those two towns are at war and will attack each other. In some cases, you can negotiate peace and resolve the conflict between those two towns. Doing this will incite them to join the rebellion against humans instead.
Wild animals
-Wild animals are still in their true animal form. Those can be hunted or tamed, and raised for products such as egg or milk. Some animals like the moose can be mounted for faster travel.
-You can use a rope to catch animals in the wild, and bring them to other locations. Wild animals can then be placed inside cages, or within fences, to give you time to tame them. You can craft a collar and equip it on a tamed animal to designate it as your pet. Pets will follow you wherever you go.
– You can transform a wild animal into a villager animal using the morph potion. To craft a morph potion, capturing a spirit of the forest is necessary as their essence is key to the transformation.
Crafting
– You will gain access to a large variety of crafting structures and items, which allows you to customize your world by building all kinds of useful tools and objects. Crafting stations can be built to gain access to more recipes. Even more crafting recipes can be learnt from books or from villagers.
– You can build platforms in the trees, ladders, hang ropes to build suspended traps, or just to hang flower pots. You can build bug traps to catch bugs, craft a bow to hunt animals, make a saddle to mount your moose, craft a potion at the cauldron to increase your attack damage, make fertilizer to speed up the growth of your plants, build a bookshelf to increase the town appeal, and many more.
Combat
-Your character can attack in 4 directions. Using your weapon or blocking attacks requires energy, which regenerates when you stop attacking or blocking. Enemy attacks can be avoided by moving away from the enemy just before they strike, or using a shield. You can craft different types of weapons and armors to increase damage to the enemies and protect your health.
Books
-Books are the main way you can learn new crafting recipes and skills. They are one-time use items, and when used, offer 3 choices of skills or recipes. You can also trade books with villagers for other items.
Mod Support
One of our primary goals is to ensure easy mod support for players to be able to create their own items, scenarios, enemies, underground areas, and more. While mods won’t be supported in the demo version, they are a planned feature for full release.
Co-op Play
Co-op play is another of our main goals. The game code is already structured for network play, and most multiplayer features are already coded, but we want to make sure the game is stable first. Therefore, we may not release co-op play in the first version, to give us time to focus on single player issues. But co-op play will be added at some point during the Early Access period.
Our Plan
We plan to release a free demo in 2026. Once the demo is out, we will collect feedback and prepare for the game release. It will have free periodic updates to add more content and fix issues based on players’ feedback.