Cairnheim

A colony builder in the lineage of The Settlers

Nothing moves unless someone carries it. Every plank, every loaf, every ingot is picked up by a settler and walked from cairn to cairn along roads you drew yourself.

Draw the roads. Watch them fill.

One carrier per road leg, goods handed along like a bucket chain. A long route is slow because it has few carriers; a busy cairn backs up right in front of you. Congestion you can see — and fix with a road.

A colony that keeps its own hours

Close the game and it carries on, on our server: carriers keep hauling, workshops keep producing, builders keep raising what you laid out. It decides nothing in your place — the colony you come back to is exactly as well run as the one you left.

Sail for what your island does not have

Marble and platinum only come from hand-authored expedition isles, held by bandit camps. Recruit a general, load him with swordsmen, spearmen and archers, and sail. You arrive with enough, or you do not arrive.

Features

• 44 buildings, 41 goods, one shared road network
• Workers who walk out to the tree, the field and the seam
• Every resource runs out — and every one can be renewed, by someone whose job that is
• A ruined rune shaft to restore: the whole endgame
• Nothing can kill your colony — a bad call costs you an hour, never the colony
• Visit any colony that has been played, and talk in one global channel

Calm, and made to be streamed

Cairnheim is slow on purpose: most of the time you are watching your network work. It is calm enough to hold a conversation over, readable enough for a chat to follow, and your viewers can come and walk around your colony. Before you go live, launch the game once off-air: the very first screen shows your recovery code, and whoever reads it can take the colony.

Early seats, in waves of fifty — $12.99

• The game now — Windows 64-bit, and every update after it. No second purchase.
• A Steam key once I can issue one. Steam is still verifying my account, and until it clears no key exists for anyone. I cannot give a date, and I am not going to invent one.
• If Steam refuses the game outright, you keep this version: the same game, and every update after it.
• Why waves: the server has never held more than eight colonies. Each wave adds fifty, and the next one opens only once the last has held.

Before you buy

• It needs an internet connection. Your colony lives on the server, not on your disk.
• One colony, and no save files. No reloading an hour ago: you live with your decisions.
• It is early access. Complete from the first tree to the restored shaft. Two harder isles and a balance pass are still to come, and the balance will move under your feet.
• A reset is possible. If an update ever makes existing colonies unplayable, I may have to start every colony over. It is a last resort, not a routine, and you would be told in the game before it happens.
• Much of it is made with generative AI. Sprites, icons and key art are generated, then reworked by hand. The music and the narrator's voice are generated. The code and the text are written with an AI assistant. The design is mine, and nothing is generated while you play — the long version is on the devlog.
• Refunds are handled by itch.io, under their own policy — a purchase that will not run, or that is not what this page describes. Write to their support. If something is simply broken, tell me first: that is usually the faster fix.

Everything else — the player's guide, how the transport network actually works — is at cairnheim.com.