Planned Release Date: 2027

About This Game

Learn the land. Make a life in it.

At first, an unfamiliar plant is a question. A cold night is a problem. The forest beyond your camp is somewhere you are not quite ready to go.

With experience, things change. You recognize useful plants, prepare better meals, and become more capable at the work that once exhausted you. Your camp begins to feel like home. You venture farther, try more ambitious ideas, and discover that the wilderness has relationships—and mysteries—of its own.

Then you fall asleep, and find yourself somewhere familiar rules no longer apply.

Adaptive Wilds is a hardcore survival RPG built around deep character progression, experimentation, and the stories that emerge from interconnected systems. Develop practical skills, work with your character’s strengths and limitations, and learn how your body, mind, equipment, and surroundings affect one another.

Death resets your core attribute growth. The capability you develop during a life is worth protecting.

Adaptive Wilds is actively in development. The features below distinguish systems in the current development build from planned additions.

Current Features

• Deep RPG progression. Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Constitution, and Charisma influence your capabilities alongside character traits and learned skills. Improve practical disciplines through use, including cooking, healing, identification, foraging, woodcraft, and stonework. Effort followed by nourishment and recovery also develops physical conditioning.

• A body and mind that affect how you play. Hunger, thirst, fatigue, temperature, injuries, and psychological pressure interact with your abilities. Preparation can give you an advantage; poor condition can make familiar work more demanding. Experiment with food, remedies, clothing, exertion, and rest to understand what helps—and what comes at a cost.

• Knowledge with practical value. Discover what unfamiliar plants and materials are, learn their properties, and find new ways to use them. Study recipes and develop the expertise to put them into practice. Recognizing a resource is only the beginning of understanding it.

• Dream realms, puzzles, and strange discoveries. Explore quiet dream spaces and psychological realms where observation matters and familiar surroundings can behave in unfamiliar ways. Follow clues, experiment with each realm’s rules, and work toward moments of understanding. Certain authored challenges can leave lasting effects after you wake.

• Predators, prey, and shifting populations. Animals hunt, feed, reproduce, and disperse. Hungry predators seek places that can support them, while prey populations respond to survival pressures. Your hunting can change local populations and indirectly affect the creatures that depend on them. Growing food also gives hungry wildlife a reason to visit.

• Tools shaped by your own work. Knapped stone toolheads retain the individual shape you create. Assemble heads, handles, and fastenings into useful tools, then maintain them through use. Materials, working edges, weight, skill, and wear influence how effectively you can work.

• Physical building and a reshapeable landscape. Dig, fill, flatten, and carve terrain. Join individual parts into physical structures using material-appropriate connections such as nails and lashings. Experiment with how pieces fit together and turn a chosen patch of wilderness into a place of your own.

• Everyday survival with room for creativity. Gather ingredients, tend crops, cook over heat, and preserve food. Turn plant fibers into textiles, make clothing, and experiment with dyes. Practical improvements give you more possibilities for how to live, prepare, and explore.

Planned Features

• Useful NPC companions. Develop relationships with people who can contribute meaningfully to your life in the wilderness, with practical companion roles beyond conversation and trading.

• Expanded dreams and discoveries. More psychological puzzles, peaceful experiences, and encounters, with planned teaching and discovery systems connecting dream experiences to knowledge in the waking world.

• Broader physical contraptions. Expand the player-facing building workflows around moving assemblies, hinges, sliders, and mechanical connections, giving you more ways to turn an idea into a working construction.

These are development goals. Their scope and implementation may change as the game develops.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Used in placeholder assets which empower me (single dev indie) to produce a game I am proud of.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Players may experience non-gory cartoon violence. Herbal remedies and fermented beverages may be consumed in traditional ways.