REASONS GAMES
Craft, build, and push back the dark
You can now craft at a ladder of stations, put up a base piece by piece, upgrade it from wood to metal to reinforced, and defend it with a turret. Recipes have to be discovered, and the world is hidden under fog until you go and look.
What's new
- Crafting stations in tiers: by hand, campfire, workbench, forge and electronics bench. Each station unlocks the next.
- Recipes for nails, metal plates, weld rods, walls, doors, crates, beds, campfires, a basic turret, a pipe club, a machete, ammo, bandages, cooked food and repair kits.
- A recipe book. Most recipes start locked. You learn them by experimenting at a station (near misses give you a hint), by reading blueprints found in crates, lockers and caches, by salvaging items to learn how they were made, and from level-ups.
- Build mode with a grid-snapped preview that turns green where you can build and red where you can't. Place floors, walls, doors, storage crates, beds, campfires, workbenches, forges and turrets.
- Upgrade any wall, floor or door from wood to metal to reinforced. Each step costs more and holds more damage.
- Take pieces down again for a partial refund.
- The turret finds and tracks hostile targets in range on its own. A training dummy stands in for enemies until they arrive.
- Storage crates hold items.
- Repair kits fix your tools and your walls. Bandages and food heal you.
- Fog of war. Unexplored land is black, places you've seen stay dimly remembered, and only what is in your line of sight is lit. Walls block your view, and buildings show only their outline until you step inside.
- A world map that fills in as you explore and marks you, your base and the buildings you've found.
- Crafting and building both give experience.
- Everything works on a controller as well as a keyboard.
How it was made
- The new art started as Higgsfield generations through Asset Forge and was finished by hand in Aseprite, locked to the same palette as the rest of the game. No art was drawn with code.
- Line of sight uses a shadowcasting pass from the player each time they move. The fog is drawn with a shader so its edge is soft.
- Automated tests cover crafting, building, recipe discovery, repairs and the fog. One of them builds a wall using nothing but controller input.
Screens
Tools used
| Godot 4.7 | The game engine. All the new systems are GDScript. |
|---|---|
| Asset Forge + Higgsfield (Nano Banana Pro) | Generated the new item icons, the turret, the target dummy and the base pieces. |
| Aseprite | Finished every new sprite by hand on the pixel grid and locked it to the game's palette. |
| Claude Code | Built and fixed the features in its own branch. Every change was re-tested before it went in. |
How to try it
- Start the game and gather some wood and scrap. Hold LMB or R2 on trees and rocks.
- Press C (Square on PS5) to open crafting. Q/E or L1/R1 switch between Craft, Book, Experiment, Salvage and Repair. Enter or Cross crafts. Esc or Circle goes back.
- Press B (Triangle) for build mode. Z/X, the mouse wheel or L1/R1 pick a piece. Aim with the mouse or the right stick, and use the D-pad to nudge one tile. LMB or R2 places, RMB or Circle exits. R or Square takes a piece down, and E or Cross upgrades it.
- Build a workbench next to your walls to unlock metal upgrades.
- Press M (touchpad on PS5) for the world map.
Known issues
- The red tint on an invalid build spot is subtle. The text warning is the clearer signal for now.
- The fog edge is smooth, while the pixel art is crisp. It may get a pixelated edge later.
- Unexplored buildings show as flat dark blocks rather than detailed roof outlines.
- Turrets only shoot at the training dummy until enemies arrive in a later update.
- Saving and loading are not in the game yet. The fog and the recipes you know will be saved once they are.
Ironfall dev log · Update 5 of 18 · All updates