Sixty days of dark are coming. They come for everyone on your shard at once — and everything you do until then is preparation.
There is no energy bar that refills while you wait. Every action burns calories, and calories come only from land you worked, game you took, or trades you made. Run your body down and you get less done tomorrow. It is a world that rewards patience, planning, and a full larder.
Plant to the season, hunt the herds, render fat, and put food up before it spoils. Fresh food rots; only what keeps will feed you through the Dark — and fat keeps you warm in it.
When the light fails you get four hours a day — the rest you burn wood for. Heat is mandatory. No fire, and the cold takes you.
No coins. Barter in .22 rounds on an open market where goods carry their shelf life with them. Salt is scarce on purpose, and no one can grow everything they need.
No homesteader can master it all. Lean into a craft — a hunter, a grower, a smith — and the shard comes to know you for it. What you can't make, you trade for.
Pool labour with others: a shared granary, a woodpile against the Dark, a clinic, a palisade. A community survives what a lone homestead can't.
Take a rival's stores if you dare — but never their land, and never the poor. Scout first, and expect them to come back for you.
You can lose your stores.— the promise the whole game is built on
You can never lose your land.
One year is about fifty real days. You can check in for a few minutes or settle in for an evening — the world moves whether you are watching or not.
Break ground, plant, raise stock, and dig in. The hungry early days separate the prepared from the hopeful.
The long middle. Grow dense, storable food, cut wood, and build your preserving. The mast falls once a year — don't miss it.
Fifteen days of pure panic. Butcher what you can't feed, render fat, fill the woodpile. The light is already going.
Sixty days. Four hours of light. Ration hard, keep the fire lit, defend your stores — and come out the other side into a new Thaw, alive.
Survive one Dark and the world opens up. The longer a shard lives, the stranger and larger the things it grows — and the best of them take more than one homesteader, and more than one winter.
Past your own land lie the wilds — common ground the whole shard forages and hunts. Work them and they thin; leave them and they return. You'll read the traffic of others in how picked-over the ground is.
shared, and quietly contestedNow and then something great moves through the wilds — more than one hunter's work to bring down. Run it together and the meat and fat are shared by every hand that helped. Wait too long and it's gone.
the first thing you'll do togetherWeather enough Darks and you can hand the land on — the cellar you dug, the soil you built, the buildings you raised, all of it passing to the one who comes after. Some homesteads have stood for generations. Ask their keepers how.
what you leave behindThere are works no single homestead could ever raise — a great granary, a bell-tower, a bridge into the deep wilds. A shard raises them together, over many winters, and every hand that set a stone is remembered. What they change is felt by everyone.
generations in the makingA persistent shard you share with everyone else. Earn a name on it — climb the leaderboard of who's best prepared for the Dark, build standing as a trader or a neighbour worth having, and be there when the whole shard turns out for a festival or a hard season together.
Ranked by what you've laid in for the Dark — and known, over time, for the kind of homesteader you are.
Trade tips, call for help, or plan the season with your settlement.
Hard winters, sickness on the wind, a trader caravan, a festival — shared events that hit the whole shard at once.
Share a link and bring people onto your shard. Survival is easier with neighbours.
Every homesteader on the shard is laying in what they can before the Dark. There's a lot to do, and the first winter comes for everyone the same day. Best not to start it empty-handed.
Break new ground — it's free