Grund Engine Demo

It is late autumn at 61° north. The birches have turned, the nights are getting cold, and you are alone in the forest with an axe.

grund3d is an early look at a cozy survival game set in a Finnish forest. The eventual goal is to finish the day sitting in a sauna you heated yourself. This pre-alpha is the first part of that: the forest, and turning a standing tree into a fire.

What you can do in 0.1.0

• Walk a seeded wilderness. Hills, lakes and rivers run down to the sea, with five species of tree and the forest reaching out to the fog line. Walk, run, jump, crouch, and swim in the lakes.
• Fell a tree. Every swing costs stamina. The trunk tips away from you on its hinge and lands with a crash, and the stump stays where the tree grew.
• Make firewood. Buck the fallen trunk into rounds, carry a round to the chopping block by the woodshed, split it into klapi (split logs) and stack them in the shed.
• Build a nuotio (campfire). Build it from branches and a split log. It lights the clearing at night, crackles, throws sparks, and burns down to embers unless you feed it.
• Watch the day go by. There is a full day/night cycle with a physically based sky, fog and ruska colours. Speed up the clock with T.

How it looks

The whole thing runs on grund, a Vulkan engine written from scratch for this game. On GPUs that support it, ray-traced shadows, reflections and bounce lighting turn on by themselves.

The lakes reflect their shores, the rivers flow, and light plays across the sandy bottom. You can dive under the surface and look up at the sky through the water.

This is a pre-alpha

It is an early build to try out, not a finished game. There is no goal or ending yet, no saving, and not much to do beyond the wood-and-fire loop. Things will break.

Your feedback is the reason this build exists. If it crashes or runs badly, please leave a comment with your hardware and attach your log:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\grund\grund.log
• Linux: ~/.local/share/grund/grund.log

The previous session is kept as grund.prev.log.

Windows players: the executable is unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn you the first time. Click More info → Run anyway.

The Windows build has so far only been tested under Wine, so a report from real Windows hardware, good or bad, is especially welcome.

Controls

• Mouse: look (click to capture)
• W A S D: walk, Shift to run
• Space / C: jump / crouch (rise / sink when swimming)
• Left click: swing the axe, or use what is in hand
• E: pick up, use, build a fire
• 1–5: choose what is in hand
• G: toss what is in hand
• T: clock speed (×1, ×15, ×60)
• R: back to the start
• Esc: pause menu: controls, credits, quit
• F1: developer console (type help)

System requirements

• GPU: Vulkan 1.3 with a current driver. Ray tracing is optional and switches on automatically where the card supports it.
• CPU: 64-bit x86 with AVX2 (Intel Haswell / AMD Excavator or newer)
• OS: Windows 10 (1903) or newer, 64-bit; or Linux with glibc 2.36+ (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 37, SteamOS 3 and newer) on X11 or Wayland
• Disk: about 25 MB

Nothing to install. Unzip the folder and run grund3d.exe (Windows) or ./grund3d (Linux), and keep the folder together. Deleting the folder removes the game.

Credits

Made by Victor Anderssén.

Everything in the world is generated by scripts in the project: the terrain, trees, models, textures and sounds.

Built with SDL 3, Jolt Physics, Vulkan Memory Allocator, volk, stb_image, cgltf and the Spleen font. Their licenses are in the download's licenses/ folder.

Free to play for personal, non-commercial use. Screenshots and videos are welcome. See LICENSE.txt in the download.