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 · playable in the browser
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.
Free · nothing to install · sign in with a Solana wallet, and your colony follows the wallet
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 map is private and persistent. What it becomes is the product of the hours and the planning you put into it — which is exactly what makes it worth owning later.
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-one goods, one shared road network
Twenty-nine workshops turn one good into another; eight more sit on a deposit and pull raw material out of the ground. 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
→
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-two buildings, every one hand-painted
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
Expedition mine
Geologists' guild
Cairn Mine
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 — and it is the only thing that mints $CAIRN.
Three stages
Ruin → Shored (30 stone, 30 planks) → Awakened (200 marble, 200 platinum). Each stage raises the shaft's Strike. That is all it does, and it is enough.
Strike is your share
The network mints a fixed amount per day and splits it by Strike. Your share is your Strike over the whole network's — so the pot never grows when players arrive, the slices just get thinner. Emission is bounded by construction, not by attendance. And the divisor has a floor: on an empty network what nobody claims is not handed to the few who are there, it stays in the reserve for the players who come later.
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 12. You buy that efficiency with diamonds — and with comfort. Push the rig further and the bill widens: stone and planks past 150 added Strike, iron and copper past 400, wages past 800. A big rig is an industrial estate, not a purchase.
Comfort buildings — the second lever
A miner who 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.
Run the numbers
What a pick actually pays
Every figure below is read straight from the game's balance file — not a marketing estimate. Move the sliders and check it yourself.
The world
Finite ground, renewable forest
Rock deposits run out for good. Fishing waters run dry. Forests, on the other hand, grow back — but only if a forester replants faster than the woodcutter fells. Every map pushes you outward eventually, which is what makes territory matter.
You start with ten colonists. More are recruited with coins — 8 apiece, which is the reason to bother minting money at all.
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.
Where this is going
Ownership later — fun first
Cairnheim is designed to end up with real ownership of land and rare goods on Solana. It is also built on one rule that outranks that plan.
The golden rule of the project: the game has to be worth playing on its own merits. The blockchain adds ownership and trade — never fun. If you removed the crypto and the game stopped being enjoyable, we would have failed.
Not a faucet
No token rains down for logging in. What you can sell is what you actually built: a developed map, a surplus of rare goods, a trained specialist. Value comes from time and skill, not from emission.
Not pay-to-win
Paying buys land, cosmetics and time — never logistics advantage. Route planning stays the only thing that separates a good colony from a bad one.
Not a pyramid
Studio revenue comes from marketplace fees and cosmetics — activity that already happened, not new entrants arriving. Capped emission, real sinks, a ceiling on offline production.
Tokenomics
Where the billion goes
Fixed supply, no private sale, and every share fixed at creation — verifiable on-chain from the first block. The figures below are generated from the launch configuration itself.
Roadmap
Where the project stands
Built in the open, in order, with no step skipped.
Done
Design document
Pillars, loops, economy, tokenomics and the guardrails that come with them.
Done
Playable prototype
Cairn-and-road transport, 44 buildings, 41 goods, workers who walk out to the resource, population and morale, tools, an army, cloud saves tied to your wallet. Everything on this page is running today.
Done
Depth — expeditions, trade, the mine
Instanced expedition islands with bandit camps to take, explorers and geologists with their own skill tree, a player-to-player market, and the Cairn Mine 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.
In progress
Server authority
A headless copy of the engine runs on our own machine and re-checks what every client reports. It is live today in shadow mode — it logs disagreements and punishes nobody. When the ledger it keeps becomes the one that counts, no client can invent a balance.
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. Today diamonds are bought with CAIRN; out there they will be taken.
In progress
Ownership on Solana
Sign-in with Phantom is already how you play. The reward program is written and its full test suite passes against a real chain — the 48-hour timelock, the two separate authorities, the rate limit, the network floor, the pause and the 75/25 recycling. The $CAIRN claim works end to end: clicked in game, signed in Phantom, tokens delivered to the wallet, all against a live chain.
What is left is the part no local test can stand in for — a public network under load. Then the marketplace and its fees, and land as NFTs. Nothing is initialised on mainnet before the cold authority split has been rehearsed end to end.
FAQ
Straight answers
Do I need a wallet to play?
Yes. You sign in with a Solana wallet — Phantom — and the game starts once that session is open. Nothing is installed, nothing is charged, and no transaction is signed to play: the wallet is your identity, and your colony follows it from one machine to the next. It also means the same browser can serve several players without them ever seeing each other's map.
Is it free?
The prototype is free. What access to the full, on-chain game will look like is detailed at the token launch, not before.
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. Players meet through trade, chat, mail and expeditions — no real-time synchronised world, which keeps it cheap to run and pleasant to play.
What is Strike?
Your mining power at the Cairn Mine, and the only thing that sets your share of what the network mints. Your share is your Strike divided by the whole network's, yours included — so growing your own Strike dilutes the pot a little for everyone, yourself included. Nothing here scales for free.
What stops someone from cheating the balance?
A headless copy of the game engine runs on our own server and replays what each client reports. Today it runs in shadow mode — it records disagreements and sanctions nobody. It goes live before any real value moves, and it is the reason the market is not open to strangers yet.
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.
What does the token actually do?
It is a utility token: premium crafting, rare recipes, lower marketplace fees, light governance. Capped supply, burned by the crafts that use it. It is not distributed for playing and it is not a yield promise.
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 prototype, the art direction and the economy are being built and balanced in public, one system at a time.
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.