First-person survival MMO · in development
The volcano is 25 km north. The hard part is the walk back.
Everyone on the server walks the same 25 km of ground at the same time. The dead hunt by ear and the north gets worse the further you push it. What's at the top is only worth something once you've carried it all the way back.
No lobbies, no instances, no server browser. There is a single 25 km map and one match running on it, somewhere between thirty and sixty minutes long, with every player on the server standing on the same ground at the same time.
You can walk in on a match already under way. A run can still be won by somebody who turned up late and kept quiet.
The volcano sits at the very top of the map, and reaching it is only half the job. The artifact inside counts for nothing until you have carried it the whole way back south and over the trench you started at.
From the moment you pick it up, every other player gets a rough fix on where you are, refreshed every couple of seconds. The walk home is the game.
There is no chat window and no map ping. Reaching another player means making a noise, and a noise carries to everything in range — the person you were signalling, and whatever else was listening.
A trench runs east to west across the whole map, and it is the only rule the world enforces for you. Plank bridges cross it every few hundred metres: seventy metres of open deck with a lamp burning at the south end, and no cover on it anywhere.
Anyone can kill you out here and take what you're carrying. The dead get denser and meaner the further up you push, and there is no way back to safe ground except walking it.
Nobody can touch you here. You can stand in the grass and watch the volcano smoke on the horizon for as long as you like. There is also nothing down here worth having.
You cross it going out with nothing on you, and you cross it coming home carrying the artifact, with every player on the map holding a rough fix on where you are. It is the same seventy metres both times.
One screen, the whole run
Everything you can see is somewhere you can walk to.
This is one frame, untouched. The meadow you are standing in, the desert past it, and the volcano smoking on the horizon are all the same continuous world — 25 km of it, streamed as you go, with nothing loading in between.
Green forest, grassland and old city ruins. Calm, mostly. This is where you learn the map and snap your first stick off a bush.
Dune seas you can spot from kilometres off, and canyon mazes you get lost inside. Water is rare and cover is rarer. You cross it, or you go around and lose the day.
Snow hills, tundra, dark taiga. Pale open ground between the pines, and anything moving across it shows up from a long way off.
Dead forest and bare mountains, barely any light. The horde is thick here and the storm clouds hanging over the map make it worse. This is where most runs end.
One colossal peak with a lava caldera, sitting exactly on the goal, smoke standing off it high enough to see from the safe south. It is as far north as the world goes, and every other player on the map is headed there too.
After dark
They hunt by ear, and you are never quiet.
But they will not come near a burning lamp, and in daylight they are half as dangerous. So the day is for covering ground and the night is for sitting inside a light you found and lit yourself.
A ring on the ground around you shows exactly how far your noise is carrying. Sprinting, jumping and swinging push it out; crouching pulls it in; a yell blows it wide open. At nightfall it swells on its own, because the dead hear better in the dark. The ring is drawn from the same number the zombies steer on, so the circle on the ground is their earshot exactly.
Difficulty climbs with latitude. Packs get denser and meaner the further you push, worse again at night and under the storm clouds that sit over about a fifth of the map. Past roughly the four-kilometre mark, elites start appearing among them: the ordinary dead take orders from one while it lives, and scatter for a few seconds when it goes down.
Bow, sword, shield. You start with a stick broken off a bush and find the rest out there. Arrows arc and drop, so range is a guess you get better at. Bodies are real physics: a corpse you knock back bowls through the pack behind it, and a blow from inside somebody's rear arc does double.
The moment anyone gets an artifact home, a ten-minute countdown starts for everybody and the match becomes a race. Everyone who finishes after that is ranked by how far behind the winner they came in, counted from their own arrival — so a late joiner can still place.
An augment is a permanent upgrade you pick up mid-run and keep for the rest of it. Open a chest and you are offered three at random; take one. There are twenty-eight across three families, and every chest rolls its three from the seed, the match and who is opening it — so two players standing at the same chest are not choosing from the same list.
Chests at lit safe spots and inside ruined compounds, one gift each per match. The dead drop one now and then. Claiming the artifact at the volcano grants a big one outright.
Your second pick in a family is worth one and a half times the first, your third is worth double, and it keeps climbing from there. Spreading yourself across all three leaves you mediocre at everything, so the real decision is which family you stop taking from.
You choose which safe spot to come back at, from a map of the ones you've reached. Your build rolls back to whatever you were carrying when you last stood there — so how far you push between safe spots is a bet.
Three clips recorded out of the running game at 30 fps. The only thing done to them afterwards is the compression that lets them sit inside this page.
Grassland gives way to deep forest, forest to the ruins of a city, ruins to dune seas and canyon mazes, then boreal pine, then tundra, then bare mountains with almost no light left in them. The whole thing comes out of one seed and one recipe, streamed under your feet as you walk; there is no level boundary anywhere in it. It plays multiplayer today, on a custom Elixir backend that shards itself as players crowd in, with the zombie simulation split across everyone's machines.
Nine days, 189 commits: the dead got real bodies and elite pack leaders, the bow arrived, chests and a 26-pick augment pool turned a run into a build, matches gained a clock and a finishing order, and night got dark enough to be a problem.
It's an early prototype and it already runs. No store page yet, no release-date theatre. Just a map that gets meaner the further north you push, and one artifact worth walking back for.