Welcome to Reclaimed

Hey everyone,

This is the very first post on our new website, so it felt like the right moment to properly introduce Reclaimed. Grab a drink, this one's a bit longer.

The world, twenty years later

Nobody really agrees on what happened. Some say it was a war, others blame an experiment that went wrong. Most survivors just call it the Collapse and leave it at that.

What we do know: one day the lights went out, the cities emptied and something changed in the soil. Plants started growing ridiculously fast. Within a few years forests had swallowed the highways and deer were wandering through shopping malls. Some animals came out of it a little... different.

You spent those twenty years in Shelter 9, an underground bunker built for a few hundred people. Now the supplies have run out, and the big steel hatch opens for the first time since you were a kid. You step outside with a backpack, a rusty pickaxe and no idea what's waiting for you.

It's kind of beautiful, honestly.

How you play

Gather everything

Pretty much everything you see can be harvested. Trees, rocks and berry bushes, but also old cars, vending machines and washing machines full of scrap. Every hit gives you resources and experience, so even just walking around feels useful.

Craft and build

You start with a campfire and a workbench and work your way up to furnaces, a scrap recycler and solar panels. Later on you can build collector drones and conveyor belts, until your camp basically runs itself while you're out exploring.

Reclaim the land

The world is divided into plots of land. You buy new plots with Caps, the currency everyone uses now (yes, actual bottle caps). Every plot belongs to a region with its own look, resources and secrets:

• The Overgrowth: the suburbs where it all starts, full of trees and quiet streets.
• Rust Valley: one giant junkyard and the best place to find scrap and spare parts.
• The Frozen Highway: a snowed-in stretch of road with a traffic jam nobody ever left.
• Sunken Mall: a flooded shopping center where you'll have to fish and dive for loot.
• The Glow: a crater that lights up at night. Nobody goes there. You probably will.

Pick your skills

Every level gives you a skill point to spend in the skill tree. It has four branches:

• Scavenging: more loot, better luck and faster harvesting.
• Engineering: machines, automation and power.
• Farming: crops, cooking and animals.
• Tinkering: gadgets, weapons and the weird stuff.

You can't unlock everything at once, so the choices you make really change how you play.

Explore bunkers and vaults

Hidden around the world are old bunkers, research labs and locked vaults. Inside you'll find puzzles, traps and chests full of rare loot. Some doors only open once you've found the right key card somewhere else.

Fight some very weird bosses

Every region has its own boss. Think of a giant raccoon that has been living on canned food for twenty years, or a robot lawnmower that simply never stopped mowing. Beat them to unlock new blueprints and new areas.

Defend your camp

At night the critters get braver. Build walls, turrets and traps, or you might wake up to find your crops eaten and your generator chewed through.

Meet the survivors

You're not the only one who made it. Along the way you'll meet survivors with their own (often slightly strange) problems. Help them out and some of them will move into your camp, where they run a shop, look after your fields or give you new quests. And every few days a traveling trader called the Caravan rolls by with things you can't find anywhere else.

Fill your museum

Everything from before the Collapse is a relic now. Cassette tapes, game consoles, a garden gnome, a rubber duck. Collect them and put them on display in your museum. Finish a collection and you get a permanent bonus.

The Signal

On your first night outside, your old radio picks something up. A short message on repeat, coming from somewhere far beyond the Glow. Someone out there knows what really happened during the Collapse.

Following that signal is the main story of Reclaimed. We'll tell you more about it later, no spoilers yet.

What's next?

We're still early in development, so a lot of this can (and will) change. We'll keep posting here: dev blogs about how things are made, new regions and bosses, and probably a few bugs that were too funny not to share.

Want to follow along more closely? Come hang out on our Discord. We share sneak peeks there, run playtests and we really do read your ideas.

Thanks for reading, and see you by the campfire!

The Reclaimed team