DeepHolt

You are not a character. You are whoever decides where the colony goes.

Place the Heart and three settlers turn up with it. They have no classes and no skills — you give them a job by building the block that job is done at, and telling somebody to stand there. A pickaxe makes a miner. A workbench and a crafter makes everything else.

Everything you build comes out of the ground you dug it from, and everything you dug is a hole that stays dug.

What the game is actually about

• The neighbours are only as angry as you made them. Nests are permanent fixtures of the world, and the threat meter is fed by ore taken, people hired and things built — never by a clock. A colony that sits still is never raided. One that strips a hillside finds out why the ore was there.
• A wall is only as good as what it is made of. Raiders walk the straight line to your Heart and eat whatever is in the way, at a fixed rate per point of block hardness. Dirt is seconds; stone brick is half a minute. You made that choice hours earlier, out of materials that had other uses.
• You can't see what a colonist couldn't reach. Sealed rock renders as featureless unknown stone. There is no peeking at ore veins through the cutaway slider, and no spotting a nest before you dig into it.
• Winter is a planning problem. Berries grow in three days and rot in four. Grain takes seven and keeps for twenty. Only one of those answers a winter, and you had to decide which to plant a season ago.
• You don't buy people, you deserve them. A recruitment post attracts new colonists at a rate set by your colony's morale and what is in its larder.

Some things that are in there

Hierarchical pathfinding under a hundred-odd colonists · fog of war you lift by walking · prospecting that gives you hot-and-cold and never a direction · a forge with real heat, fuel and a molten reservoir · research that costs materials as well as time · trader caravans · a tech tree · texture packs where the filename is the whole contract · four seasons on a hundred-day year

⚠️ This is a work in progress, and it is buggy

I am putting this up so friends can play it, because the game is far too big for me to test on my own. Please go in expecting rough edges:

• There are bugs I know about and bugs I don't. One that shipped for a while had clay claiming to be cotton. That class of thing is what I need help finding.
• The balance is barely tested. Some numbers are guesses I have never seen a real player push against. Food demand in particular was changed recently and is probably too generous.
• There is no tutorial. There are hints in the interface and a lot of the design is meant to explain itself, but if you get stuck, that is a bug in the game and not in you — please tell me where.
• Saves may not survive updates. There is one save per world and no autosave rotation. Duplicating a world from the menu is the backup mechanism and is worth doing before anything you would be sad to lose.
• Unsigned builds. macOS and Windows will both complain the first time. Instructions below.
• Performance should be fine on anything recent, but the settings screen has a full quality page if it is not — view distance is the big dial.

What would help most

Tell me where you got stuck and what you thought was supposed to happen. That is more useful than a bug report. Crashes, colonists doing something obviously stupid, and anything you couldn't figure out how to do are all worth sending.

Getting it running

Windows — unzip, run Deepholt.exe. SmartScreen will warn you it is from an unknown publisher: More info → Run anyway.

macOS — unzip, then right-click the app → Open (double-clicking will be refused). If it still refuses, run once in Terminal: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /path/to/Deepholt.app

Linux — unzip and run Deepholt.x86_64. Mark it executable if your extractor dropped the bit: chmod +x Deepholt.x86_64

Controls

Left click	Mine · click a colonist to see who they are
Right click	Place · or open a job block, stockpile or colonist
Shift + right click	Place against something instead of opening it
E	Inventory and hand crafting
B	Build mode — zones, blueprints, inspect
1–0	Hotbar, or build tools while in build mode
Escape	Back out one layer, then the pause menu
Middle drag / Q · E	Orbit the camera in 90° steps
Scroll	Zoom · the slider on the right cuts the world away by height

First ten minutes, if you want a nudge

1. Chop a few trees and mine some stone by hand. It is slow on purpose.
2. E → lay a log in the 2×2 grid for planks. Make a Colony Heart and place it. Three settlers arrive with it.
3. They will not work until each of them has a bed. Make beds and place them. The line at the top of the screen tells you when this is the problem.
4. Make a Mine Post and a Farm Post, then B and paint a quarry and a field. Click a colonist to send them to a post.
5. Everything else needs a Workbench and somebody standing at it.