Colony survival strategy
Hold the
line
The world was already alive when you landed. How long can what you build endure?
On Steam in November 2026. The free demo is out now: the first six campaign maps, playable in ten seconds with nothing to install.
Send feedback from the demo's menu and you could win one of 5 Steam keys. Draw rules.
The game
Survey
Survey fogged ground. Every survey costs Vigor, and distant ground costs more.
Claim
Claim areas to harvest Biomass, Filtrate, Fiber, and Heat Cells. Turn them into Medicine, Regolith, and Alloy.
Hold
Watch raids develop. Packs gather for days before moving on your colony.
Features
- Build and fight
- Build 40 structures, including beds, farms, labs, walls, and shrines. Send wardens after feral packs. Combat plays out over several days: press the attack, pull the squad back, or draw the pack somewhere else.
- Replayability
- Choose from 18 commanders and 7 traits. Each combination changes how a run develops. Research across 4 tracks and draft 14 technologies. Your toolkit changes from run to run. Seeded runs begin with a draft. Pick your modifiers and choose one artifact from your collection.
- A living world
- Face 140 incidents and colony events, including 41 core incidents with choices that carry a cost. Seasons, the Drift, and blights change the conditions on each map.
- Progression
- Festivals, artifacts, and the contribution shop provide upgrades between runs. Spend stars on artifact rerolls, map reseeds, an extra modifier slot, and permanent commissary items. Each map records its highest cleared difficulty. Commanders earn titles as you play them. Earn 654 rewards: achievements, artifacts, boons, doctrines, regional feats, difficulty badges, mastery titles, commissary items, and secrets. Every campaign map hides one secret. The hint is on the map's card, the find is yours, and each one unlocks a plate and a piece of lore. Today's Drop is a new date-seeded scenario every day, with your best attempts saved on record.
- Learn the game
- An interactive tutorial guides you through your first colony. The in-game codex explains every system.
- At your pace
- Choose a pace from relaxed to sandbox. Pace modes control how much the in-game clock pressures you, or remove it entirely. Pause whenever you want. Runs take about 10 to 30 minutes and save automatically when you quit.
- Any input
- Play with mouse and keyboard, gamepad, or touch. On-screen prompts follow your active input, and you can rebind the controls.
- Plays offline
- The full game installs from Steam and runs offline, on a plane or a train or a dead patch of countryside. No sign-up, and no tracking across other apps. The demo also runs at play.xenobiome.net, so you can try it before you install anything.
Maps
Play through 2 campaigns and 27 handcrafted story maps: the Foothold, from first landing to last stand, then the Carrion, a faction that lives off what it kills. Narration between missions. Then replay 24 scenario biomes, every distinct layout from both campaigns, with seeded layouts, quests, 16 rolled map traits, and adjustable threat. Scenario mode also includes 4 asymmetric factions that change the core loop, not just the numbers.
Trailer
Or watch 99 seconds of gameplay instead.
Gameplay
Surveying and claiming ground, the Outpost sheet, research and a tech draft, an incident resolved, a multi-day battle, and six of the seventeen campaign maps.
Roadmap
The second campaign shipped at launch, so the roadmap starts after it: a hardened new game plus for both campaigns and mobile versions are in development; here is what follows.
