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May the Best Craft Win
Send four adventurers into a dungeon while you are away. Come back to a haul of sealed loot and rare ore, then gamble it all at the forge: refine, socket, enchant, and sell the surplus on a living market. An idle party RPG where the dungeon is the input and the crafting is the game.

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Features
Single-player
Family Sharing
Steam is learning about this game 
Languages:
Interface Full Audio Subtitles
English ✔
Content
Includes Interactive Elements

In-game chat, Online interactivity

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?

“May the Best Craft Win is an idle crafting RPG built by a very small team. The core loop is complete and playable: send a party into simulated dungeons, then spend your real time at the forge refining, socketing, rolling and enchanting what they bring back. What we can't finish alone is the balance. An economy with a player-run market, an alliance layer and an endless Hell descent only settles once real players push on it in ways a spreadsheet can't. Early Access lets us tune those numbers with you rather than guess at them.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“We expect roughly six to twelve months. We would rather leave Early Access when the economy, the alliance wars and the late Hell floors feel right than on a fixed date, so treat this as an estimate and not a promise.”

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

“We plan for the full version to broaden rather than replace what is here: more biomes and boss rotations for the World Dungeon, more skill variations and card sets to craft around, the Arena and its seasonal rewards, and deeper alliance features such as raids and wars with proper seasons. We also plan to keep expanding the shopfront (staff, regulars, night trade) and to ship more languages. Balance passes, quality-of-life and art upgrades will continue throughout. None of these are guaranteed; they are what we intend to work towards.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“The game is fully playable from the first dungeon through to the endless Hell descent. Everything in the current store description is in the build: the party and class system, the simulated dungeon runs with run reports, the full crafting chain (refining, sockets, cards, runewords, enchanting, affix rolling), the village and shopfront, the guild with recruitment and the memorial, Hell with checkpoints and permadeath, and the online layer with accounts, alliances, the World Dungeon and the trade network. Windows and macOS builds are available. Expect placeholder art in places, rough edges in the alliance and market screens, and balance numbers that will move as we learn from you.”

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

“We plan to keep the Early Access price low and to raise it modestly when the game leaves Early Access, reflecting the content added along the way. Anyone who buys during Early Access keeps the game, of course.”

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

“The Steam Community Hub discussions and our Discord are where we will read feedback, post patch notes and run balance polls. Every run produces a run report, and we will ask players to share reports from runs that felt unfair or too easy so we can tune from real data. Alliance and market changes will be announced ahead of time and discussed before they ship. We are a small team, so expect direct replies from the people writing the code.”
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This game is not yet available on Steam

Planned Release Date: Q4 2026

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About This Game

The forge is the game.

May the Best Craft Win is an idle party-management RPG. You never control a fight directly. You pick four adventurers, set their tactics, choose a dungeon and a run length from a five-minute foray to an eight-hour campaign, and send them off. While you are away they clear rooms, drink from their belts, push or pull back at checkpoints, and fill a loot feed. When you come back, the real game starts.

Every gain is gated behind a risk you chose.

  • Refine a weapon from +7 toward +10 knowing each strike past +8 can destroy it, or hedge with a Blessed Seal and settle for a downgrade.
  • Socket, enchant and re-roll affixes with orbs that drop once in a thousand rooms.
  • Identify sealed rares one scroll at a time, and learn which bases are worth the anvil.
  • Push at a checkpoint for better loot, or extract and keep what you have. A wipe loses what was never sent home.

Six classes, twelve branches, skills that fork.

Knights, mages, priests, rogues, berserkers and rangers each choose a branch, and every mastered skill opens a variation of its own. Buffs and auras reach the whole party, elemental marks left by a caster are set off by a physical hit, and the Run Report tells you afterwards exactly what happened and why.

Twelve dungeons, then Hell.

Twelve painted dungeons across sixteen tiers, each with its own bosses, retinues and mimics. Below them all is Hell: an endless descent with no tier, only depth, where the last team to fall at a checkpoint stands there as its guardian for every other player. From room 45 on, nobody comes back. What a lost team pays for is souls, and the scrolls that let you skip the waiting.

A market, a shopfront, and other houses.

Sell surplus to a simulated trade house that moves with what players sell, run your own shopfront with villagers who haggle, and when the World Dungeon departs on the hour, walk it alongside other houses. Found an alliance, declare a war, and trade on a floor where every item is held in custody until the deal is done.

Absence is respected.

Being offline never punishes you. It just does not advance you as fast as a well-configured party does. The numbers stay legible: two items side by side, and you can tell which is better.

Some of the game's art and sound was generated with AI tools under human direction; the full disclosure is on this page.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

Most of the game's visual art and sound was pre-generated with AI tools and then selected, edited and placed by the developer: the dungeon panoramas, room props, floors, town and building plates, character portraits, walk and combat sprite sheets, monster, boss and villager sprites, item, skill and stack icons, combat and reward effects, and the store page art were generated with the FLUX.1 image model through fal.ai and animated with AutoSprite; the sound effects, ambience beds, voice barks and music were generated with ElevenLabs. Every generated file, the tool that made it and the prompt that asked for it are recorded in the game's files (assets/README.md and assets/PROMPTS.md). All game text, design, rules and code are written by people. Nothing is generated while you play: the game contains no live AI generation and calls no AI service at runtime.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

This Game may contain content not appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work: General Mature Content

System Requirements

Windows
macOS
    Minimum:
    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    • OS: Windows 10 64-bit
    • Processor: Any 64-bit dual-core, 2 GHz
    • Memory: 4 GB RAM
    • Graphics: Any GPU with OpenGL 3.3 support (integrated graphics are fine)
    • Storage: 1 GB available space
    • Additional Notes: The game runs on the OpenGL compatibility renderer. Online features (the World Dungeon, alliances, the trade floor) need an internet connection; everything else plays offline.
    Recommended:
    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    Minimum:
    • OS: macOS 11 Big Sur or later
    • Processor: Apple silicon or 64-bit Intel dual-core, 2 GHz
    • Memory: 4 GB RAM
    • Graphics: Any Mac GPU with OpenGL 3.3 support (integrated graphics are fine)
    • Storage: 1 GB available space
    • Additional Notes: Universal build for Apple silicon and Intel Macs. The game runs on the OpenGL compatibility renderer. Online features (alliances, the World Dungeon, the trade network) need an internet connection; the core loop plays offline.
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