Planned Release Date: Mar 3, 2027

About This Game

Every hole is a lottery ticket

You arrive in a sun-baked cartoon desert with nothing but your bare hands. Under the sand: rusty cans, lost wedding rings, old revolvers, gold nuggets, meteorites and a pharaoh's golden mask. Also under the sand: rattlesnakes. Dig anywhere. Something is always maybe down there.

Hands-on. Very hands-on.

Your hands are real physics bodies. Grab a scorpion by the tail, punch a lizard across the dune, wrestle a snake off a friend, throw a stick of dynamite a little too late. Knives, a machete, a slingshot, a revolver, a shotgun and a tranquilizer rifle help. A little. No two fights go the same way.

Everything has a price

Haul it all back to the trading post. Relics, junk, gems, pelts and live critters in a jar all turn into cash. A clean kill sells for more than a messy one, and a rattlesnake caught alive is worth the most of all. Spend it on steel shovels, a pickaxe, a sieve, metal detectors that beep louder as you get close, snake tongs, a UV flashlight and plenty of dynamite.

Five zones, three bosses

The Rolling Dunes, the Red Canyon, the Dry Riverbed & Oasis, the Salt Flats and the Buried Ruins, each with its own loot, critters and dangers. Pay the road toll or earn your way in, then face the Queen Scorpion under her nest, Old Diamondback, a 6 m rattlesnake that swallows your shovel, and the Mummy Pharaoh and his scarab swarms.

Better with friends

Play solo or in online co-op for 1-4 players through Steam. One of you digs while another guards the hole. Lift a 150 kg find together, hand your buddy a shovel, high-five over a gold find, talk with proximity voice chat and drag a downed friend back to town before it's too late. Friendly fire is on. You'll find out why.

Life in town

Between digs, the trading post is home. Take jobs from the quest board, fill the field journal and donate your best finds to the museum, follow legendary treasure maps to the big X, and pet Biscuit, the town dog, who sniffs out buried loot and digs it up with you. KDUST 99.1 plays all day with Cactus Pete on the mic. When the sun goes down, light a campfire, try the shooting gallery, arm-wrestle Dusty or lose your wages at the Tent's roulette table.

Features

• Fully physics-driven hands: grab, punch, stab, throw and shoot anything that moves

• Dig anywhere: the sand is fully deformable, and in co-op everyone sees (and falls into) the same holes

• 9 kinds of desert critters, from lizards and tarantulas to coyote packs, vultures and scarab swarms, plus 3 bosses

• 24 tools and weapons, from a trowel to dynamite and a tranquilizer rifle

• 5 hand-made zones, a daily Hot Spot event and a day / night cycle

• A trading-post town: shops, quest board, museum, legendary treasure maps, a dog, a radio station, hub games and a casino tent

• Online co-op for 1-4 players through Steam, drop in and out, proximity voice chat

• Make your own digger in the character creator

• Polaroid camera: snap photos and pin them to the town photo wall

• Steam Achievements and Steam Cloud saves

• Xbox controller or keyboard and mouse with rebindable keys

• Colour-blind signal colours, subtitles, camera shake and "less gore" options

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

Some 3D models, item icons, textures and UI art, sound effects and music were made with generative AI tools