Rows of Earth

You begin with a handful of survivors and a patch of untamed earth. Everything after that is up to you: the shelter you build, the crops you sow, and the survivors you recruit. Rows of Earth is a zombie-survival colony sim that simulates a world down to the cubic-metre and tracks every bullet from creation to firing. Workers in your settlement have memories, skills, faults and goals of their own.

The World

Each settlement area is built from over a million voxels, and it has depth. You can dig down through it, build up on it, cut into a hillside and terrace it for crops. Build a hill for a castle or carve a deep vault. Light is fully dynamic and functional, so nights are genuinely dark and torches are much more than just decoration. Plants themselves can shape their own conditions, with their roots changing the soil beneath them.  

Seasons will come and go, and can shape the terrain, wildlife, and vegetation. Water pools, runs, and falls as rain. A flood can cause a landslide. Rivers can be diverted as irrigation. Every island is generated fresh, with its own climate, soil, altitude, and clusters of walking dead, from near-empty arid grassland to rainforests teeming with zombies.

The People

Each survivor has skills, needs, a schedule, and relations with everyone else in the camp. They come to you as strangers, as family, or alone, and across a run they form bonds; working alongside each other, celebrating together, and crying for those who don't make it.

The Day and The Night

With your walls raised and trenches dug, you can start to stock water and medicine, then craft or scavenge your own guns, post your defenders on the wall, and find out whether you can survive hordes of hundreds of zombies attracted by all the noise...

The Ruins

The colony can't easily live on only what's inside the walls. Send survivors on risky missions to salvage what the old world left behind, haul back materials, and research what comes next.

The Chronicle

Every run has its own written record. As your survivors work, fight, bond, and die, the game writes it all to an event log that becomes unique prose each time, the camp's Chronicle: whether it's the hard winter where two of the founders starved, the time a solo knight in armour punched a horde to death, or the child born in a barn with the chickens who grows up a bit odd. When a run ends, the Chronicle is what's left.

The Books

In the game, knowledge is a resource you can lose and recover. Books can be scavenged from the ruins or written by your own people from Inspirations. The old world's technology, from guns to electricity to armour, has to be rediscovered before you can make it. A library expedition can be as valuable as an old fortress. A worker who used to be an electrician can be as valuable as a former soldier.