Choose your foothold.
Move the expedition by ship, discover the coast and make landfall. Found a colony where the surrounding terrain can support your plans.
Gameplay · Alpha 1
A shore. A settlement.
An economy.
Explore, establish and connect. Meltwater's decisions reach beyond a single tile: the people you assign, the goods you produce and the cargo you carry all shape the colony.
Start with the land.
Before the workshops and warehouses, there is a coastline and a choice of where to begin.
Keep people fed.
Food is part of the colony's economy, not an afterthought. Assign workers to productive land or fishing, and keep an eye on consumption and stores.
Make work matter.
Assign colonists to tiles and buildings. What they gather and manufacture determines what the settlement can build and export.
Connected production
A resource becomes an opportunity.
Raw materials feed construction and manufacturing. More output is useful only if the colony has the workers, inputs and storage to support it.
From timber to construction
The current Alpha 1 recipe turns lumber into hammers: the construction output used to advance projects.
LumberHammersConstruction
From furs to an export
Furs can be manufactured into coats. Producing them, keeping them in storage and getting them aboard a ship are separate parts of the same plan.
FursCoatsMarket
Build around a purpose.
Construction, manufacturing and storage compete for attention. A growing settlement gives you more possibilities, but also more to keep supplied.
Roads and ploughing let pioneers improve useful tiles. Plan those jobs alongside the colony's other needs.
The sea connects the colony
Load. Sail. Trade. Return.
Move cargo manually between the colony and its ships. Sail to the external market to sell goods, buy supplies or recruit colonists, then bring the expedition home.
Alpha 1 uses fixed market prices. The challenge is managing your colony and its shipping, not predicting a simulated global market.
Protect what you have built
A colony can also need defending.
Alpha 1 includes land and naval combat, terrain defence and fortified colonies. Its four factions have a minimal AI presence: rivals stop developing after founding their first colony.
What the combat patch adds
The v0.1.1 patch adds terrain and fortified-colony defence modifiers, naval loss outcomes, passenger-first capture decisions and automatic repairs for damaged ships returning to an eligible shipyard or home port.
Combat exists today; diplomacy, a full rival economy and a formal victory or defeat system do not.
Learn by following the loop
Your first colony starts with landfall.
The quick-start guide takes you from the starting ship to your first trip to market.