CindervaleCindervale

Cindervale  is a first- and third-person voxel sandbox about survival, building and engineering. Start on the square of a big starter town, chop your first logs and work your way from a wooden pickaxe to your own industry. Ore becomes metal, metal becomes parts, and parts become machines you assemble yourself.

Every new world begins in a town of 181 × 181 metres: Peace Avenue, a square with an obelisk, a House of Culture with a cinema, a post office, a grocery, a pharmacy, a hotel, a canteen, a fire station, a school with a stadium, a park with a pond, a farm, a water tower, a sawmill, a machine yard and a wind farm. Power already runs down the streets, and the bank and the market have working computer terminals.

Settle in, set up a workshop — or head out beyond the last fence. A cosy homestead, an industrial complex, trading with your neighbours or travelling: the goal is yours to choose.

• Smelting and alloys. Furnaces, channels and casting moulds turn ore into steel, bronze and copper wire.

• Mechanics. Shafts, gears, gearboxes and governors carry the turn; conveyors and loaders move the goods.

• Fluids. Pipes, tanks, valves and pumps. A distill column splits crude oil into diesel, naphtha and lubricant.

• Machine tools. A sawmill, a power hammer, a lathe and a crusher make the parts for your next machines.

Every new machine is a reason to go back down the mine, grow the workshop and work out how to haul everything in.

Put up wind turbines, water wheels, steam turbines or solar panels. String wires across insulators and wire in batteries, switches and circuit breakers. Street lamps light up at dusk, while electric furnaces, pumps and machine tools take over the work.

And yes, there are computers. The AlegorPX desktop holds documents, mail, chat, a network map, a bank and a market. The Power Grid and Factory programs show the load and let you run machines remotely, and Automation switches equipment on IF–THEN rules.

Grow wheat, potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, corn and cabbage — crops need water and healthy soil. Food spoils, so keep it in an electric refrigerator or can it. Hunt, beware of wolves and bears, and get a roof over your head before nightfall: a day lasts 40 minutes, and the weather turns from a clear morning to a thunderstorm.

Industry changes the land around it. Smoke, oil spills and waste pollute the air, the soil and the water. Fit chimney filters, clean the water and the ground — and keep the factory away from your fields.

Build a CV-46 freight truck for heavy loads, the Kestrel motorboat, the Survey hot-air balloon, a powered hang glider, a walking tractor or a diesel locomotive with freight wagons. Vehicles need fuel, maintenance and a planned route, and cargo changes how they handle.

Make your settler your own: 16 jackets, 8 pairs of trousers, 10 hairstyles, 8 skin tones, an ushanka, a cap, a hard hat or a beanie, build and height. Play in first person or switch to third person with F5.

Open your world to friends over the network or run a dedicated server. Build a shared settlement, split the work between the farm, the mine and the workshop, trade through the computer market and put up signs with your own words. Survival mode is for those who like it hard; Creative mode is for free building and experiments with machinery.

Nine original music tracks follow the place and the time of day: morning meadows, the workshop, the night, deep caves, the town square. More than 400 sounds, from footsteps on ten surfaces to the hum of machinery. Nine animal species with their own voices, twenty kinds of plants, grass and treetops swaying in the wind. Ore is scarce on the surface — you will have to go down into the deep caves for it.

Early Access

Cindervale is in active development and has already received several major updates during its open beta. Expect bugs, changing mechanics and lower performance on weaker PCs and in very large factories. Your feedback helps us decide what to improve first.