Keep the fire burning.
A voxel survival game about one fire, one long night after another, and the person who kept this camp before you.
You spawn beside a ring of cold stones and a note signed only “M.” Everything after that is the same question asked louder each evening: is there enough fuel on the pile?
A burning campfire holds a ten-block radius that nothing hostile will cross. Let it go out after dark and you find out what has been waiting at the edge of it.
Bare hands cannot break rock. Wood gets you a pick, stone gets you a kiln, and the first ingot you sweat out of copper ore opens the next age.
Danger scales with days survived. Goblins climb out of the caves on night two, stalkers join on night three — and every seventh night, the drums.
Maren scratched her tallies in sevens, and gouged every seventh mark deep enough to fit a finger. Under the last group she wrote one word: LOUDER.
The Warchief comes for the fire, not for you — and returns every seventh night after, stronger each time. What he drops is how an age advances.
Terrain is generated region-first: a single large-scale field decides where the land is lowland desert, open plain or rising hill country — so hills climb toward their centre, deserts run unbroken for hundreds of blocks, and biomes never meet at a wall. Basins fill with water you can swim in and drown in.
Ten pages of Maren’s writing are scattered across the world, left where they mattered — beside a coal seam, in a collapsed kiln, under a sun-bleached skull. They are the tutorial, and they are the plot. The fire also gives her words back in fragments as you play.
Kindling is a solo project written in Java on jMonkeyEngine. The source is on GitHub — clone it, build it with Gradle, and light a fire.