Depraved Build a town that survives the frontier

You begin with a single carriage of resources in a procedurally generated world, and the first real decision is where to stop. Near a river for water, on good grass for crops, close to a train track for trade: the spot you pick shapes everything after it. From there you gather building materials from the land or buy them, lay out roads and buildings, and watch your settlement grow. Happiness is the engine: content residents attract more colonists, so a well-run town fills up on its own. Let food or law slip, though, and people leave until the streets go quiet and empty.

Your pioneers have needs, and the basics are unforgiving: food and water, or they starve and die of thirst. Every population type prefers its own food, and if the preferred food runs short you can feed them an alternative, but their mood takes a hit. Clothes and firewood protect them against weather and illness, and in the snowy regions a steady wood supply is the difference between winter being hard and winter being fatal. Happy residents draw new colonists in; unhappy ones commit raids and crimes or simply walk out of town. Keep the stores full and the fires lit, and the town grows itself.

The West does not want your town to succeed. Storms and illnesses strike, wolves and bears can injure or kill residents who wander too close, and bandit camps in the area rob your people and raid your stores, which shakes their sense of safety and costs you resources. Each region brings its own challenge: in the desert the constant problem is food and water, in the snow it is firewood. You can arm your townsfolk and control them directly, RTS style, to hunt and to defend against attacks, or try to keep the peace by other means. Survival here is a balancing act, not a given.

If you like city builders that let you draw rather than fill in squares, this one is gridless: buildings go where you put them, and you can rotate them freely while placing. Paths form on their own where your townsfolk walk, so the layout of a town grows out of use rather than out of a plan. You are not limited to one settlement either: you can found several towns across the map and move goods between them, setting up outposts to harvest resources your first location lacks. It is a lighter, more freeform take on the genre, less about deep supply chains and more about shaping a place that looks and works the way you want.

This is a colony sim in miniature: your pioneers are individuals with needs and moods, and the story of a run comes from what goes wrong. Neglect them and the consequences are concrete: unhappy residents turn to raids and criminal offenses, the town's reputation sours, and people leave until what was a settlement starts to resemble a ghost town. Even the dead matter: bodies left unburied spread disease, so a cemetery is not decoration, it is infrastructure. There is no hand-holding tutorial, so you learn by losing a harvest or a resident, and the next run starts smarter. Mistakes are part of the deal, and recovering from them is where the game gets interesting.

You arrive with almost nothing and take the rest from the world: chop trees, work the soil, hunt, and build up the shelters and stores that keep your people alive through the seasons. Seasons change how the land looks and what it gives: crops grow in the warm months and stop in winter, so a town that coasts through summer can starve in the cold. Wild animals are a resource and a threat at once, with wolves and bears dangerous enough to kill. You can also arm your settlers and command them directly, sending a group out to hunt or to hold off bandits. It is a slower, more deliberate kind of survival, played at the pace of a growing town.