From Embers

About This Game

From Embers is a survival city-builder where every villager has a name, a family, and a story. Starting from a single campfire, you'll assign workers, construct buildings, research technologies, and guide your people through harsh seasons, monster raids, and difficult choices - advancing from a tribal camp through four distinct ages of civilization.

Every run ends. Every run matters.

Know Your People

Your villagers aren't numbers. Each one has a unique name, up to three personality traits, ten trainable skills, and family connections - parents, spouses, children. They marry, grow old, and are remembered in eulogies when they fall. Click any villager on the map to see their full history. When your most legendary citizens die, their story doesn't end - they become ancestors whose traits echo into future generations.

Survive the Seasons

Spring is for growing. Summer is for building. Autumn is for stockpiling. Winter will test everything you've built.

Food production drops sharply in the cold, blizzards can cripple your entire settlement, and if your stores run dry, your people will starve. Every year is a crisis waiting to happen - and surviving the harshest winters permanently hardens your villagers.

Rise Through Four Ages

Advance your civilization across four eras - Tribal, Settlement, Kingdom, and Empire - each unlocking new buildings, technologies, resources, and threats. Watch your humble campfire grow into a castle surrounded by academies, markets, and monuments.

Build With Intent

Place 30 unique buildings across a 70×40 isometric grid, where strategic positioning matters. Thirteen district bonus pairings reward thoughtful layouts - farms near granaries boost food production, libraries adjacent to academies accelerate research. Every placement decision shapes how efficiently your settlement runs.

Make Hard Choices

Dozens of narrative events challenge you throughout each run - welcome refugees or hoard supplies, fund the scholar's research or put everyone to work, negotiate with raiders or rally your defenders. Multi-event storyline chains unfold differently based on your previous decisions, ensuring no two runs tell the same story.

Defend Your Home

When night falls, monsters come. Wolves prowl the wilderness, bandits raid the settlement, and as your civilization grows, trolls and siege ogres threaten your walls. Train soldiers, build barracks and guard towers to strengthen your defenses, and set rally points to direct your warriors. Your hunters patrol the fields by day while your soldiers hold the line after dark.

Prestige and Begin Again

When you're ready, reset your civilization and carry forward Legacy Points to unlock nine permanent upgrades for faster gathering, larger starting stockpiles, reduced building costs, and more. Your greatest villagers become legendary ancestors. Ghost outlines of your old settlement echo across the new map. Each run starts stronger than the last.

Features

• Four eras of civilization: Tribal, Settlement, Kingdom, and Empire

• 30 unique buildings with 13 strategic district placement bonuses

• 18 technologies forming a branching research tree

• 40+ narrative events with multiple outcomes and branching storyline chains

• Six resources, ten worker types, 13 personality traits, and ten trainable skills

• Full day/night cycle with seasonal survival pressure

• 10 weather types plus three catastrophic mega-weather events

• Five huntable animals and six monster types with scaling difficulty

• Nine prestige upgrades and legendary ancestor inheritance across runs

• 34 milestone achievements and 11 dynamic settlement titles

• Three difficulty levels with autosave

• Hand-painted isometric pixel art with animated villagers and weather effects

Credits & Attribution

From Embers is built with art, music, and tools from talented creators whose work made this game possible.

Isometric Buildings & Terrain Hand-painted medieval sprites by JP Cummins -

UI Art Citadel RPG GUI by Kodiak Graphics - kodiakgraphics.itch.io

Creature & Villager Sprites Sourced from the Wyrmsun project by Andrettin, with sprite art by b_o, Jinn, Kwaliti, Gregor-Mack, and Wildfire Games. Licensed under GPL 2.0 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 / CC0.

Ore Sprites Ore Pack by CaptainSkeleto

Music Free Fantasy Music Pack and Firewood Music Pack by TomMusic - tommusic.itch.io

Sound Effects Free SFX Fantasy Pack by TomMusic - tommusic.itch.io

Fonts Source Sans Pro by Paul D. Hunt (Adobe) - SIL Open Font License Gentium Book Basic by J. Victor Gaultney and Annie Olsen (SIL International) - SIL Open Font License Rooters by Twicolabs Fontdation -

Steam Integration GodotSteam GDExtension by the GodotSteam community - - MIT License

Engine Built with Godot Engine 4.5