MeltwaterAfter the Great Thaw

Quick Start · Alpha 1

Your first expedition.

From the starting ship to the first export: follow the colony loop, then begin making it your own.

Source alpha · No packaged public download yet

Depart

Find a shore.

  1. Begin the expedition. Choose New Game for defaults, or Custom Game to choose world settings, difficulty, nation and player name.
  2. Sail towards land. Select the starting caravel and move with the arrow keys. Explore the coastline before committing to a landing.
  3. Make landfall. Use L to open the landfall prompt. Choose a passenger to send ashore; repeat for the other passenger when appropriate.

Settle

Give the expedition a home.

  1. Found the first colony. With an eligible colonist selected at a suitable location, use B to build or found.
  2. Assign workers. Use C at the colony to open its screen. Assign people to productive tiles or buildings, and make food part of the plan.
  3. Improve useful terrain. Give a pioneer road or plough jobs with R or P, where the job is available.

Produce

Build something worth carrying.

  1. Develop the colony. Build up construction, storage and manufacturing. Watch the inputs your workers need and the goods accumulating in stores.
  2. Load the ship. Transfer goods between colony and ship manually. Cargo space is limited; decide what the voyage should carry.

Trade

Make the return voyage count.

  1. Visit the external market. Sail to the Old World with E when available. Sell goods, buy supplies or recruit colonists, then sail home.
  2. Build on the first loop. Expand to more colonies while managing food, storage, migration, civic influence and Legends.

Keep this chart nearby

Essential controls.

Select a piece to give it orders; inspect a tile to see what is there. The two actions are different.

← ↑ ↓ →
Move the selected unit or ship.
Left click
Visit a visible colony, activate an owned piece with movement, or pan on empty terrain.
Right click
Inspect a tile without changing the active piece.
B
Build, found or join a colony.
C
Open colony or cargo at the selected location.
L / E
Make landfall / sail to the Old World.
W
Wait: move the piece to the end of the queue without spending movement.
Space
Skip the selected field unit for this turn.
Enter
End the turn.
Esc
Open the menu, close a modal or cancel a drag.

A few useful field notes.

Cargo, selection and landfall

Use Shift for a larger cargo transfer amount, or Ctrl for the maximum allowed by the current drag. Cancel or Escape discards the transfer.

The landfall prompt takes priority over map clicks. Select the passenger in the prompt rather than clicking the map behind it.

Waiting, holding and ending turns

W rotates the current piece to the end of the queue. S sets Sentry and F sets Fortify; these spend its remaining movement and hold it for future turns.

When all pieces are exhausted, the game asks whether to end the turn. Choose No if you still want to inspect the map or visit colonies. Turn confirmation can be changed in Options.

Saving the expedition

Manual saves and two rotating autosave slots live in the platform's save directory. New-game creation and the beginning of a new game year can create an autosave; exiting or loading does not.

On Windows the default location is %APPDATA%\meltwater\saves. Incompatible saves are refused explicitly rather than loaded into a different ruleset.

Running an existing source checkout

This is for developers who already have the project source, not a public download. Use Python 3.11 or later. From the Meltwater project root in PowerShell:

Set-Location .\current
py -3.11 -m venv .venv
.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m pip install -e ".[dev]"
.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m meltwater.main

Clean source checkouts have no local audio installed and are expected to run silently.

Know the current stage

Alpha 1 is the foundation.

See what is implemented, what remains unfinished and how the later design work fits around it.

Development status