Aftergrowth

Wake with nothing

You start with a notebook and a salvaged tablet carrying a hand-drawn map of the country. It fills in as you walk. Nothing else.

Keep fed, watered and warm. Night, winter, rain, snow and wading through rivers all chill you; clothes and a fire warm you, and a fire goes out if nobody feeds it. Cuts keep bleeding until you bind them.

Find it, learn it, build it

• Research without levels: find notes and schematics in the ruins, then work them out at a bench to learn new crafts. Knowledge is shared by the whole camp. No XP bar.

• From stone to steel: tools and weapons start as wood and stone; later you smelt steel from ore and scrap at a forge. Armour goes from cloth to leather to plate.

• Weapons: craft blades, spears, bows and crossbows. Revolvers and rifles are rare finds.

• Build a camp room by room: walls upgrade from wood to stone to steel, and doors from wood to steel.

• Defend it: raise lookouts, store water, cure meat in a smoker, and run a generator for an electric fence, a wired gate, an alarm bell and floodlights salvaged from town walls.

• Go further: bigger packs for longer trips, and bicycles found chained in towns that you can mend and ride.

Live off the land

• Grow potatoes, beans, squash and more through four seasons. Summer is good, autumn is slow and nothing grows in winter.

• Hunt, set snares and traps, fish, butcher, cook, and preserve food on a drying rack, in a smoker, in pickling jars and in a larder, because food spoils.

• Barter with traders, walled farms and travellers across the map.

• Tame a wild dog by feeding it night after night. It follows you, carries saddlebags and fetches.

• Travellers you help can come to live at your camp. They keep the fire fed, tend the crops, mend damage and fight off attackers, and they can die for good.

Enemies who keep count

• Rival factions hold the towns and camps. Each keeps its own count of how loud and violent you've been on its ground, and remembers where it lost men. Push one too far and it sends a raiding party after you.

• Raiders hear you in every direction but only see what's in front of them. They come at you from several sides, some of them carry grenades, and if you're home, they come to your camp.

• Take their camps to cool their anger, or clear them all and the raids stop.

• Weather is cover: rain and storms drown out your noise, and storms and fog cut everyone's sight.

• Not everyone is hostile. Some will trade, some want payment to let you pass, and some will tell you once to leave.

Somewhere to go

• Two story threads lead you across the map and beneath it.

• Side jobs from traders, cabins and people on the road, paid in supplies, schematics and standing deals.

• The road east ends two ways. Neither of them is the good one.

Your world, your rules

• Co-op for up to five over Steam's relay network: join through a friend's lobby, and nobody ever learns another player's IP address. One persistent world, hosted by whoever started it.

• Set the rules for each world: what happens on death (drop your pack, keep it, or Hardcore, where a dead survivor is gone for good), raids, night packs, day length, seasons, regrowth, appetite and friendly fire.

• 31 Steam achievements, and the game is fully translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Polish and Russian.