STEADFALL

Private alpha · No date

Start with nothing. Build everything.

Steadfall is a survival and building game with a tech tree that runs from smashing flint into your first tools out to automation, power armour and other planets. Every world runs on a scenario file you can edit: raid other players, survive alone or with friends, or build with nothing in your way.

Join the list See what runs today

Most of that tree is not built yet. The list below says how much.

The manifest

Most games tell you what they will be. This one tells you what it is.

Steadfall is in alpha and a lot of it does not exist yet. Rather than write that in small print, here is the whole list. Every claim on this site carries its state.

Built

A world you can dig

Dig or blast anywhere and it stays dug. Caves, ore, rivers, weather and a horizon six kilometres out.

Built

Starting with nothing

Flint, sticks and fibre off the ground, knapped into four tiers of tools. Flint cannot mine, so the first pick is something you earn.

Built

Building

Eight piece kinds, five frame tiers and thirteen sidings, on a stability graph that decides whether your span holds.

Built

Power, machines and pipes

Real wires and separate grids, an ore refining chain that quadruples yield, fluid networks and pneumatic logistics.

Built

Light that behaves

Day and night, moon phases that change how bright the night is, and underground dark enough that your headlamp matters.

Partial

Multiplayer

A headless server owns the world, clients connect and see each other, and the server settles melee. Prediction and reconciliation are still being built.

Partial

Terrain and exploration

Caves, rivers and ore in depth bands all work, in a 32 kilometre world that loops rather than ending at a wall. Real geology, with sediment layers and tectonics, does not exist yet.

Partial

Modding

A model plus a text file adds an item, with no rebuild. Servers do not sync mods yet, and nothing survives an update by guarantee.

Partial

Scenarios

A world's rules should come from a scenario file you can edit: what is unlocked, what you start with, what you may place and break. Today a world stores two settings, and only one of them does anything.

Partial

Servers

A headless server hosts a world and clients connect to it. It cannot be found in a list, it does not know which scenario it runs, and it has no accounts or admins.

Not built

The tech tree

Stone age out to energy weapons, force fields and power armour. There is no research and no unlock system yet. Progression today falls out of what things cost to make.

Not built

Crafting by hand

Fashioning things with your hands rather than waiting on a timer, until you earn the muscle memory to do it in one motion. Crafting today is a queue.

Not built

Geology

Sediment layers, tectonics, sinkholes, deserts, tundra and arctic. What exists today is a coastline and woodland world with caves, rivers and ore.

Not built

Wildlife

Animals to hunt and be hunted by, each yielding its own materials. No creature exists, and there is no animal AI in the game at all.

Not built

Characters and clothing

Characters you create, name and model, with cosmetic clothing you earn or make and sell. There is one generated body today, the same for everyone.

Not built

Space travel

Every planet in the system reachable, each with its own hazards and materials, gated behind the tech tree. Nothing of this exists.

Not built

Anticheat

Zero tolerance, so that in PvP everyone knows their opponents are playing fairly. The server is authoritative today, which is posture, not enforcement.

What it plays like

One game, three ways to play

Partial

A world's rules are meant to come from a scenario file rather than a menu, and that file is yours to edit. Three ship as baselines: raiding against other players, surviving alone or with friends, and building with nothing in your way.

Because it is a file, a scenario nobody shipped counts just as much. Homesteading, say: you start with tools and some cash, buy property, buy your supplies, and can only dig and build on land you own.

Today a world stores two settings and there is no scenario file yet. It is the shape the rest of the game is being built to fit.

Placeholder. To be replaced by a captured screenshot.

Wires, not magic

Built

Power runs on cable you place, and a grid is whatever your cable actually connects. Isolating a circuit is not a menu option, it is a thing you build. The same goes for fluids and for moving items around: pipes and tubes are real objects taking up real space in a base that is a dug volume, not a factory floor.

Placeholder. To be replaced by a captured machine room screenshot.

Every ore is somewhere specific

Built

Twenty seven ores sit in six depth bands measured from the ground above them. Copper and iron are near the surface. Uranium is in the last sixty metres before bedrock. Getting the good metal out of the ground takes a refining chain, and each step of that chain needs something you did not have yet: power, then piped water, then acid.

Placeholder. To be replaced by a captured cave and ore screenshot.

Devlog

How it is getting made

Written as the work happens, including the parts that did not go well.

Five games, photographed

How the lighting got tuned by building the game five times and comparing the pictures.

All the art is ours

Every model in the game is generated from source, so a model and its icon cannot drift apart.

You start with nothing

Building an opening hour where the first tool is genuinely earned.