Being built first
Landnám
Iceland before anyone came. No roads, no houses, birch woodland still standing across a quarter of the country. You are a settler, and everything you have you made.
1 block = 1 metre · 103,000 km²
Survive the island that never wanted you here.
A voxel survival game where the world is not a procedural fantasy landscape but Iceland itself — built from the national elevation model, at one metre per block, with the real weather blowing through it.
Accounts are invite-only. There are between two and ten of us.
Why it is not a texture pack
Three things you cannot fake
The world is real
Terrain comes from Icelandic national geodata. Walk from Reykjavík to Þingvellir and the mountains are in the right places, the right shapes, the right heights. Your own street is your own street.
The weather really happened
Thirty years of Veðurstofa Íslands observations drive the sky, and the world plays out a different real year every game year — day for day, across five weather zones. The gale that stops you is a gale somebody wrote down. Frost, wind and rain make you burn food faster, and that is the only thing here that can kill you.
The world is Icelandic
Móberg, helluhraun, apalhraun, líparít. Vættir, huldufólk, tröll and draugar, taken from real þjóðsögur with the sources cited. No creepers. No diamonds. No oak forests.
The resource economy
The scarcity is the game
Bog iron from the mires, charcoal from birch, driftwood off the tide, turf out of the ground. Everything you have, you made.
Iceland has essentially no metal ore. Settlement-era Icelanders got iron from mýrarrauði — bog iron, precipitated in mires — smelted with charcoal from birch, the only significant native tree. Timber was so scarce that driftwood was a legally inheritable property right.
- Mýrarrauði
- Bog iron, from the mires. The only iron there is.
- Rekaviður
- Driftwood from Siberia. It arrives on the tide, or not.
- Birki
- Downy birch. Charcoal for smelting — and it stays felled.
- Brennisteinn
- Sulphur from the geothermal fields. Hazardous to mine.
Two world modes
Two islands
Later
Abandoned
Modern Iceland, intact and silent. The towns are there, the power is on, the shops are full. The people are simply not there, and the game never tells you why.
Kvöldvaka
The kvöldvaka was the winter evening in the baðstofa, when the work was done by lamplight and the stories were told. It is how every creature in this game reached us. The folklore is not decoration on top of a survival game — it is the reason the game is worth making.