Visible logistics
Goods travel hop by hop between cairns, each leg walked by its own carrier. A saturated cairn queues up in front of you — congestion you can see, not a hidden modifier.
Isometric colony builder · early access on itch.io
Nothing moves
unless someone carries it
Cairnheim is a colony builder in the lineage of The Settlers. There is no abstract inventory: every plank, every loaf, every iron ingot is a physical object that a settler picks up and walks to its destination, cairn by cairn, along roads you drew yourself.
Windows desktop game in English, French and Simplified Chinese — $12.99, sold in waves of fifty seats; the first wave is open. Steam comes later.
Three pillars
The flow is the spectacle
Most builders hide logistics behind a number that goes up. Cairnheim puts it on screen: you watch the bottleneck happen, and you fix it with a road.
Decisions under constraint
Workers, tools, food and road capacity pull against each other constantly. There is always an interesting bottleneck — split a route, add a cairn, or reroute the whole district.
A colony that is yours
Your colony is persistent, and it keeps working while you are away. Other players can walk through it; nobody but you can change a thing. What it becomes is the product of the hours and the planning you put into it — a colony you build the hard way, and keep.
The core loop
Cairns, roads, carriers
A road links two cairns — the stone markers that play the role of flags in The Settlers. One carrier serves one leg, and only that leg: goods are handed over from cairn to cairn like a bucket chain.
That single rule produces everything else. A long route is slow because it has few carriers. A busy cairn backs up because it holds eight goods at most. Adding a cairn in the middle of a road doesn't just shorten it — it puts another pair of legs on the network.
When several workshops want the same good, the game uses the original Settlers arbitration: the highest-priority claimant is served first, and its priority halves with every unit it already holds. A favoured workshop can't starve its neighbours forever.
Production
Forty-three goods, one shared road network
Eighteen workshops turn one good into another; eleven more pull raw material out of the land — trees, rock, ore, fields, water. Every chain is short enough to read at a glance and long enough to fight over transport — and they all draw on the same carriers, which is where the game actually happens.
Wood — the backbone
Woodcutter
→
Log
→
Sawmill
→
Plank
→
Every building
Bread — feeding the colony
Farm
→
Wheat
→
Mill
→
Flour
+
Water
→
Bakery
→
Bread
Iron — tools, then weapons
Iron mine
→
Ore
+
Coal
→
Smelter
→
Ingot
+
Plank
→
Toolmaker
→
Tools
Gold — the only source of money
Gold mine
→
Ore
→
Smelter
→
Ingot
→
Mint
→
Coins
Plus stone, fish, meat, copper, platinum, charcoal, bows, swords and the rare expedition gems — the full table is in the docs.
Forty-four buildings, every one fitted to the grid by hand
CastleHouse
WarehouseWoodcutter
ForesterSawmill
Quarry
WellFarm
Corn farmMillBakery
Fisher
Fish farm
Pig farm
Chicken coop
Butcher
Kitchen
Provisioner
Coal mine
Charcoal burnerIron mineIron smelter
Copper mine
Copper smelterGold mineGold smelter
Platinum smelterToolmakerMint
Weaponsmith
Fletcher
Training camp
Military school
Explorer hut
Expedition camp
Builder's hut
Digger's hut
Expedition mine
Geologists' guild
Rune Shaft
Chapel
Bathhouse
TempleThe monument
One ruin on your map, and it is the whole endgame
Every colony starts with a collapsed shaft it did not build. Restoring it is the long project the rest of the economy exists to serve — the clearest measure of how far a colony has come.
Three stages
Ruin → Shored (30 stone, 30 planks) → Awakened (200 marble, 200 platinum). Each stage raises the shaft's Strike; awakening it also opens the charcoal burner, the platinum smelter and the comfort buildings.
Strike is your standing
Strike is the shaft's output, and the plainest badge of a mature colony. A deeper working is a bigger achievement — built the hard way, one pick and one supply line at a time. It is the endgame the whole map works toward.
Thrift is the sink
The base shaft burns nothing and never stops. Every pick you set beyond it eats emberwood — charcoal from the burners, never the mountain coal your smelters need: 40 per hundred strikes at first, down to a hard floor of 20. You buy that efficiency with diamonds — and with comfort. Push the shaft further and the bill widens: stone and planks past 80 added Strike, iron and copper past 250, wages past 500 — and it grows faster than the Strike it pays for. A deep shaft is an industrial estate, not a purchase.
Comfort buildings — the second lever
A crew that lives well works cleaner. Three buildings, one of each per colony, close a share of the gap between your current Thrift and its floor:
- Chapel — 3 % · 40 planks, 40 stone, 60 coins
- Bathhouse — 5 % · 60 planks, 60 stone, 40 copper ingots, 80 coins
- Temple — 6 % · 80 planks, 80 stone, 30 gold ingots, 120 coins
They are the reason the copper and gold chains exist past the toolmaker. All three unlock only once the shaft is Awakened.
The world
Nothing refills itself
Every resource on your map runs out — and every one of them can be brought back, by somebody whose whole job that is. A forester replants what the woodcutter fells. A fish farmer restocks the lake the fisher empties. And an exhausted rock, coal or ore deposit is reopened on the spot by a geologist: 25 coins a mission, five minutes of digging, and the seam comes back full — not patched, full, so you decide when to send one instead of being nagged.
Nothing on your own ground is therefore lost for good, and nothing is free either: every renewal costs a worker, a walk and a wage. The exception is platinum, with marble: beyond what the two bandit camps on your own map hold, they come only from the expedition isles, and no geologist sails. What you bring back from out there, you will not be making at home.
You start with ten colonists. More move in on their own when there is a free bed and the food keeps up — a varied larder, a full treasury and decorations all draw them. Coins pay for generals and geologists, and they are what a large rune shaft pays its crew in wages, so a working mint stops being optional the moment it gets serious.
Hunger never kills anyone. Running out of food slows production down to half speed and no further: the game punishes you with a bad hour, never with a death spiral you can't escape.
Beyond your own map there are expedition islands — instanced, hostile, and the only place some materials come from. You send a general, you land, you take camps off bandits, and you mine what you came for.
A living world
Day, night and weather, on the colony's own clock
A day in your colony lasts twenty-four minutes. Evening comes, lanterns come on along the roads and fireflies drift over the fields. Weather rolls in on top of that: cloud shadows sweep across the map, rain darkens it, a thunderstorm cracks over the rooftops, fog settles in.
And there is the colony film. Every few minutes of play the game photographs your colony, and plays the pictures back as a time-lapse — from the first woodcutter to the last road.
Roadmap
Where the project stands
Built in the open, in order, with no step skipped.
Done
Design document
Pillars, loops, the economy and the guardrails that come with them.
Done
Playable game
Cairn-and-road transport, 44 buildings, 43 goods, workers who walk out to the resource, population and morale, tools, an army, cloud saves. Everything on this page is running today.
Done
Depth — expeditions and the mine
Instanced expedition islands with bandit camps to take, explorers and geologists with their own skill tree, and the rune shaft with its three stages and its emberwood sink. The two isles are hand-authored maps, not generated ones — Marble at 96 × 96 tiles and Platinum at 48 × 48, each with its own veins and camps placed by hand.
Done
Your colony keeps its own hours
The same engine you play runs on our server and carries your colony on while you are away: carriers keep hauling, workshops keep producing, builders keep raising what you laid out. It decides nothing in your place. A world the server cannot read is set aside instead of stalling everyone else's, and every colony keeps a history of earlier versions to come back to.
Done
A new engine, the same colony
The game was rebuilt in Unity. The rules did not move: both engines play the same scenarios and are compared at every checkpoint until they agree to the byte, and the server that runs your colony while you are away still uses the original. What came with it: day and night, weather, the traffic map, the colony film, and the game in English, French and Simplified Chinese.
Done
Other colonies: a market, channels, an account
Version 0.2. A market between colonies, a chat channel per language, and a name and a password that reach your colony from any computer — no e-mail, no recovery code to copy down. And one clock for everyone: no pause and no speed-up on the shared server.
Now
Out in early access, on itch.io
Cairnheim is on sale as a desktop game: a one-time purchase, no subscription and no crypto. It is sold in waves of fifty seats at $12.99 — the server has never held more than eight colonies at once, and each wave opens only after the last one has held. Steam comes next; the store page is not up yet, so there is nothing to wishlist today.
Next
The harder isles
Two more expedition tiers beyond the marble and platinum isles: heavier garrisons that a single kind of soldier cannot answer, two new troop types to answer them, and diamonds as the prize — the one thing that takes a shaft's fuel bill all the way down to its floor, and today something you can only buy, at 125 runestones each.
Later
The land behind the ridge
A second stretch of your own map, past the portal ridge, with what your first ground never had: vines, honey, clay, marble, platinum, titanium. Every colony's land is different, so what you lack, someone else has — which is what the market is for.
Later
Guilds
Colonies that band together, with a channel of their own.
Later
Weather that matters
Today the sky is scenery. It will get a say in the economy.
FAQ
Straight answers
How do I play?
Buy it on itch.io, download it, launch it, build. It runs on Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit) and needs an internet connection: your colony lives on our server, which keeps it running while you are away. The first time, you name your colony and choose a password — that is how you reach it from another computer. No e-mail is asked for. Steam comes later, and every itch.io purchase includes a Steam key the day one can exist.
How much is it?
$12.99 on itch.io, once. No subscription, no microtransactions, nothing to grind for real money. Seats are sold in waves of fifty, so the server is never asked to hold more players than it has already shown it can.
Which languages?
English, French and Simplified Chinese. The game starts in your system's language, and you can switch at any time in the settings.
Is this multiplayer?
Not in the sense of a shared map. Each player builds on their own map, the way The Settlers Online did it. What connects players is a directory of every colony that has been played, the ability to visit any of them — look around, change nothing — a chat channel per language (English, French, Chinese; a guild channel comes with guilds), and a market: you put a lot of goods up for sale at the price you choose, in runestones. Listing costs 20 gold coins, not returned; an offer stays up 24 hours; a sale is delivered at once. There is no co-op.
Can I pause, or speed the game up?
No — not on the shared server. Every colony runs on the same clock, whether you are watching it or not. With a market between players, a colony running three times faster would sell three times more than everyone else, so pause and the ×2 / ×3 speeds are switched off online, and taking a photo no longer freezes the world either.
What is Strike?
The output of your rune shaft — how much the restored pit brings up. It is the endgame measure of a colony: the deeper the working, the more it took to build. Nothing here scales for free; every point of Strike is paid for in construction and upkeep.
What stops someone from cheating?
Less than you might think, and here is exactly how much. The server checks that every colony it receives is well-formed and safe to open, and it checks every market offer against the goods actually stored in the seller's saved colony — not that every plank in that store was earned. Pause and speed-up are off online. Goods now change hands between players, so checking the economy itself — that a colony could really have produced what it holds — is the next guard on the list. Until then, the Report button in the chat and the Support button on the title screen reach me directly.
How close is it to The Settlers?
The transport model is ported deliberately: cairns stand in for flags, one carrier per road leg, distribution priorities that decay by half per unit in stock. Several timings come straight from the original — a farmer's harvest, for instance, takes 7.8 seconds because that is what it took in Settlers 1.
Can I lose my colony?
No. Starvation slows production to a floor of 50% and never removes colonists — there is no state you can reach that you cannot climb back out of.
Who is building this?
A small independent project. The game, the art direction and the economy are being built and balanced in public, one system at a time.
Devlog
Made in the open, by one person
The decisions that were hard, the bugs that were embarrassing, and the numbers behind both.
5 October 2026
0.2: other colonies, and one clock
A market, a channel per language, a password instead of a code to copy down — and why pause and speed-up are gone from the shared server.
3 October 2026
A new engine, the same colony
The game now runs on Unity. The rules were not touched — the server still uses the original, so both had to agree to the byte. What changed is everything you look at.
11 September 2026
How the art actually gets made
The sprites are generated. Here is everything that happens between the model's output and something a game can actually use — said plainly, before anyone has to ask.
Draw a road. Watch it fill.
The first ten minutes are a woodcutter, a sawmill and the road between them. It gets complicated on its own after that.