A top-down survival game for one to five. Wake with nothing, research your way from a stone axe to steel, build and upgrade a camp worth defending, and follow the road east to one of two endings. The other survivors keep a ledger of what you do to them.

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Coming Soon To Early Access

The developers of this game intend to release as a work in progress, developing with the feedback of players.

Note: Games in Early Access are not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access?

“Aftergrowth is made by one person in evenings and weekends. The game is playable end to end already — you can wake with nothing, build a camp, work up from a stone axe to steel, provoke a faction into coming for you, and do all of it with four friends. What I cannot do on my own is find out how that holds up across hundreds of worlds and playstyles. A survival game's balance is settled by how people actually play it rather than by how it was designed, and I would rather that feedback arrive while the systems are still soft enough to change.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“I expect around a year to eighteen months. I would rather say that plainly and be wrong slowly than post a date I cannot hold to — this is evenings and weekends, and I am not going to ship a rushed release to hit a number I put on a page.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“The intention is more of what is already here rather than a different game: more of the map's places built out, more to craft and build, and more variety in how the factions come at you. None of that is a promise. What is in the build the day you buy it is what you are paying for, and everything past it depends on what the year teaches me.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Playable and complete as a loop, not as a content library. In the build today:
▎
▎ - A forested map generated from a seed, with six named towns, a central city, roads between them and a hand-drawn map in your pack from the first minute
▎ - Hunger, thirst, stamina, health and warmth, where night, rain, deep water, what you are wearing and what is burning nearby all argue over how cold you are
▎ - Gathering, farming, cooking, food that spoils, and fires that have to be fed
▎ - Crafting from bare hands through stone, iron and steel, gated by knowledge you research or find written down rather than by levels
▎ - Grid-snapped base building — walls, doors, floors, stations, storage, repair and traps
▎ - Raiders who hear you through anything, see you only in front of them, arrive in parties that surround rather than queue, and are sent by a per-faction ledger of what you have done
▎ - Downed-and-revived rather than killed, injuries that take the top off your health until they are treated, and your pack left on the ground where you bled out
▎ - One to five players, over Steam's relay, so nobody in the session learns anybody's IP address
▎ - Fourteen achievements, Steam Cloud saves, and full controller support”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“ Yes. Aftergrowth costs less during Early Access than it will at 1.0, and the price goes up when the game is finished rather than on a date picked in advance. The lower price is what it costs to buy a game while it is still being argued with, and every update between now and then is included.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“Bug reports and balance arguments both reach me, and the second kind is the one Early Access is for. I read the Steam discussion boards, and I would rather hear that a night is too long or a raid arrives too early from somebody who has played forty hours than decide it alone. Where a change comes from a player I will say so in the patch notes.”
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About This Game

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.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

Aftergrowth's code was written with the help of an AI coding assistant, and some of the game's text — including parts of this store page — was first drafted with it and then edited by hand.

Nothing you see or hear is AI-generated. Every sprite, tile and icon is drawn by deterministic Python scripts rather than by an image model. The music is synthesised and the sound effects are CC0 recordings by Kenney, both credited in the game's CREDITS file. No generative AI runs while you play: nothing is generated live, and the game makes no request to any AI service.

System Requirements

Windows
SteamOS + Linux
    Minimum:
    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    • OS: Windows 10 64-bit
    • Processor: Dual core x86-64 at 2.4 GHz — Intel Core i3-6100 / AMD FX-6300
    • Memory: 4 GB RAM
    • Graphics: Vulkan 1.0 capable GPU with 1 GB VRAM — Intel HD Graphics 520, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750, AMD Radeon R7 260X
    • Network: Broadband Internet connection
    • Storage: 500 MB available space
    • Sound Card: Any Windows-compatible audio device
    Recommended:
    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    • OS: Windows 11 64-bit
    • Processor: Quad core — Intel Core i5-8400 / AMD Ryzen 5 2600
    • Memory: 8 GB RAM
    • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 / AMD Radeon RX 560 or better, 2 GB VRAM
    • Network: Broadband Internet connection
    • Storage: 500 MB available space
    • Sound Card: Any Windows-compatible audio device
    Minimum:
    • OS: SteamOS 3.0, Ubuntu 22.04, or any 64-bit distribution with glibc 2.28 or newer
    • Storage: 400 MB available space
    • Sound Card: PipeWire or PulseAudio
    Recommended:
    • OS: SteamOS 3.0 or Ubuntu 24.04 64-bit
    • Storage: 400 MB available space
    • Sound Card: PipeWire or PulseAudio
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