Coming soon

About This Game

You awaken in a dying world where nearly anything is possible, and you don't know how to do any of it (yet). 

An omniscient storyteller decides what happens in your game, based on what you've done (and what's been done to you)

You pick from 3 storytellers: the Keeper, the Warden or the Harbinger. The Keeper protects your habits. The Warden incentivizes changing them. The Harbinger punishes them. They know everything about you and the world as a whole, and they decide what happens. Some examples:

• Natural disasters and catastrophes, what kind, and where. Earthquakes, meteor strikes, firestorms.

• Live crafted quests and encounters that it thinks would interest you. Conquests and raids, political negotiations, trade routes. 

• Political strife that may happen to you, or near you. Mediate tensions between local settlements, or plead another faction to spare yours from death. 

You can talk to anyone

Type whatever you want! NPCs answer in character based on their trade, their mood, and your past actions. A local, lightweight language model is grounded by roughly 100,000 dynamic lines of dialogue so the world and its people stay in character, know what they should know, and act as their personality dictates.

Rob a shop in Khaldurim and the guards at the lower gate will already know by the time you sprint there. Khaldurim is an isolated, cynical Dwarven stronghold - show up as an Elf and the gatekeepers will search your pack, mark up prices, and speak to you like you're five.

The world doesn't forget

There is no ending and no victory screen. Get a family exiled from the city and they will pack up, settle elsewhere, and hold a grudge indefinitely. The world state tracks your footprint for as long as you play, which can be a very long time.

The simulation doesn't wait for you

• Living economy: Settlements produce goods - mines mine as deep as they can go, villages harvest building materials, farms maintain crops. Caravans buy the extras, and sell the settlement what they can't make on their own.

• Organic expansion: Settlements and worksites actually grow. A mining colony starts as a simple shack with a few bedrolls, and grows in size, wealth and population from there. Growth is driven by the city's needs - NPCs arrive, or leave, as the colony requires.

• Massive political system: Every group has a political structure, leadership, customs, conflict, and whatever they consider "fair" courts. You may see it happen, hear a rumor, or fall victim to it.

• Real logic circuits: Wire automated machinery or assemble a working computer. You can make a screen, calculator, or automation for just about anything you can think of.

• Realistic mining: Everything follows its own version of physics. Ceilings collapse without support beams, mines cave in if they don't particularly like you, and the sensitivity and repercussions are determined by what fell, and by how high.

• Five powerful deities: Each represents a unique domain of power, and offers powerful abilities to their followers. These relationships take a mix of appeasement, maintenance and a lack of hubris. If any of these are not enough for their favor, the abilities are gone.

• Farming & livestock: Enclosed animal pens and functional field laborers, tied directly to local food stocks. Farms maintain crops that grow in stages, and you can watch them harvest. Setting up a farm of your own is a great food supply.

• Unforgiving enchantments: You can enchant anything, with anything. Enchant a leaf with a pickaxe, and see what happens. Consequences range from a stronger weapon to a reality-warping explosion.

• Persistent devastation: Meteors, tremors, and severe weather leave real terrain scars that never despawn. 

• Harmonics: A local tavern card game where the townsfolk are more than happy to stake their unique collections against your coin.

Difficulty is about information, not damage sponges

• Casual: Clear UI callouts and extensive tooltips explain systems as they happen.

• Intermediate: Expects you to figure out mechanical interactions through experimentation.

• Complex: Logs only what you have personally witnessed, closes the tutorials, and stops holding your hand.

Modding

Items, blocks, crafting recipes, structures, and encyclopedia entries are structured data files. Add your own content without needing to dig into core source files. The full release will ship with a suite of modding tools.

The Demo vs. The Full Game

The demo gives you the Dwarven mountain city of Khaldurim and its immediate surroundings. The full game is the rest of the continent, which is much larger.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

The demo's NPCs use a local LLM that runs with the game for chat responses, in addition to prewritten lines. NPCs respond based on their personality, past player interactions, job, location, etc.

Some art assets and sounds are initially generated with AI tools.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Epoch Forge is a grim, low-fantasy game.

Violence. Melee combat with blades and tools, injury, and death.
Wounds and bodies are described in text and shown in small-scale
pixel art. Violence is not graphic, and there is no gore system.

Abduction and captivity. The player character can be seized by a
criminal crew and wakes chained in a cell beneath the city, held
for an indefinite time. A fellow prisoner has been chained there
for eleven weeks. Harm is threatened and implied rather than
depicted; the player is not shown being physically abused.

Poverty, hunger and exploitation. Much of the game takes place in
a slum district. Debt bondage, forced labour, hunger and people
trapped by circumstance are recurring themes, and the story does
not resolve them cleanly.

Alcohol. Taverns serve drink and some characters are drunk.

Generated dialogue. Conversations are written as you play by a
language model running on your own computer, so exact wording
differs between playthroughs. Output is filtered against a list of
prohibited terms, including profanity and slurs, but it is
generated text and cannot be guaranteed word-for-word in advance.