A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux

Your ship capsized in a terrible storm but you managed to swim ashore. Exhausted, bruised, and alone, you stand up on the beach, feeling the cold wind against your drenched clothes. How long can you survive?

Building a shelter and acquiring water are your top priorities. To avoid parasites, boiling the water is the sensible thing to do. However, getting a fire started without lighter or matches will be a challenge.

Hunger will be your next problem. Forage for plants and fruits, craft bow and arrows to hunt the local wildlife or focus on trapping or fishing. Bears, wolves and other predators may roam the island so be careful that you do not end up on their menu!

Make sure your diet is varied or you will eventually suffer from nutrient deficiencies.

Loneliness will be your worst enemy long-term. Challenging yourself mentally will be important to avoid descending into insanity.

Scenarios

The above is the "Shipwrecked" scenario. Other scenarios include:

  • Volcanic eruption: While monitoring a volcano as part of a research mission, your plane suddenly malfunctions, forcing you to parachute. With your plane crashed somewhere in the ocean, you manage to land safely in the caldera formed from the previous volcanic eruption. While everything seems quiet at the moment, your last scientific reading gave a high likelihood that a major eruption will occur in 40 hours! Can you escape the island before it is too late?
  • The descent: You finally managed to rappel to the bottom of a ravine. Suddenly you notice your long rope on the ground. Did someone at the top cut it? The steep cliffside makes escape impossible. How long can you survive down here?
  • More scenarios will be added.

Realism

X-Survivor attempts to create a survival experience that is as realistic as possible in a world of ASCII symbols. Here are some examples of realism:

  • All wildlife on the island and in the ocean is simulated in real time - this includes herbivores foraging and carnivores hunting prey. Animals can both see, hear and smell.
  • The scents of animals and of your character are simulated and are dispersed by the wind. Hunting an animal is therefore better done with the wind against you.
  • Plants and trees are affected by the seasons - for instance, blackberries can only be harvested during autumn.
  • Bacterial growth in foods, in water etc. is simulated and depends on various factors including temperature.
  • Tissue growth and infections in wounds are simulated as is healing of bone fractures.
  • Accurate food composition data are used and nutrients include a range of vitamins, minerals, protein and carbohydrates; lacking any of these will have actual effects on your health, such as scurvy when lacking vitamin C.
  • Weather changes dynamically and includes rain, snow, cloudy weather, clear skies and varying wind speeds following a realistic distribution.
  • Accurate moon and sun positions in the sky, depending on the date, time of day and latitude.
  • Tidal effects are calculated from the current positions of the moon and the sun.
  • The ambient temperature is not only affected by the latitude, time of year and day and the weather but also by your height above sea level, nearby fires and whether you are outside or in a shelter or underground cave.
  • Rivers are formed during world generation by simulating millions of years of erosion from rainfall.

Customize your world

Each world is randomly generated but you can control a number of parameters:

  • Island size
  • Island type: single island, multiple islands, volcano, ravine
  • Humidity
  • Terrain type: flat to mountainous
  • Tidal effects: height difference between low and high tide
  • Latitude: play anywhere from a tropical environment to the extreme freezing cold of Antarctica or the Arctic

How to play the game

The game interface (and the game in general) is heavily inspired by the fantastic (and free!) game Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. In-game, press H to access the "Survivorpedia" which gives basic information about how to play the game. Press Shift+H to get a one-page overview of all the keyboard shortcuts in the game. The Settings menu allows you to reconfigure key bindings to suit your needs.

You are always welcome to get in touch if you have questions about how to play the game. If you are already familiar with a game like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, you should not have any major problems playing X-Survivor.

Issues with the game

As the game is still under development, a number of features are still missing or not fully implemented, and be aware that game crashes may occur; in case this locks up your computer, make sure you do not have any important software running in the background.

One common issue I have seen is that the game has the wrong resolution the very first time it is run. Usually, this is resolved by simply running the game again. If the problem persists, try changing your screen resolution or (if you use Windows) change scaling to 100%. You can also try to change the default resolution under Settings from the main menu.

Game development

X-Survivor is a spare time project that I have been working on since late 2019. It will likely always be under development but I have decided to release it as I find it mature enough to be playable. Unless otherwise stated, new releases and devlog messages will appear frequently.

Feedback

If you experience a crash, I would be very grateful if you would contact me with a description of how the crash occurred.

Also, feel free to contact me if you would like to see a particular feature in the game. Although I cannot promise that I will add it, I will definitely take it into consideration, and feedback is always useful to me.

I am not a bushcraft or survivalist expert and I get my information and inspiration in part from reading and in part from watching survival shows like Alone and Survivorman. I would love to hear stories from you if you tried bushcraft/survival living yourself since such stories could give me inspiration for the game. Also, let me know if you find some survival trick in the game to be inaccurate.

You can get in touch with me by e-mail: cwulnil@gmail.com

Technical details

For those who are interested, the game is being developed in C++ on an Ubuntu Linux machine and uses SDL2 for graphics, sound and keyboard input, Boost for serialization and RapidJSON for JSON parsing.

Except for the main menu and a few line segments in the in-game menus, all graphics are from the Codepage 437 character set, also known as "extended ASCII".

Data about items, animals, plants, crafting recipes etc. are specified in JSON files, making it fairly easy to mod parts of the game.

Cross compilation to Windows is done with MXE and to Mac with osxcross.

Download

Download
x-survivor-linux.zip 35 MB
Version 36 Apr 06, 2024
Download
x-survivor-windows.zip 34 MB
Version 36 Apr 06, 2024
Download
x-survivor-mac.zip 26 MB
Version 36 Apr 06, 2024

Install instructions

Linux: run the game.sh script from the bin folder. If for some reason the game won't run (it has only been tested for certain versions of Ubuntu), you can try the Windows version through Wine; in that case, you might need to first execute:

export SDL_AUDIODRIVER="directsound"

Windows: run game.exe from the bin folder.

Mac: unzip and move the XSurvivor app to the desktop. Then double click the app. You might get a pop-up window saying that the developer cannot be verified (the reason is that I am developing the game on Linux and cross-compiling to Mac so I am not an official Apple Developer). If this happens, click on "Cancel". Then, go to Settings > Security & Privacy > General. Click on "Allow Anyway" near the bottom. Click the "Run" button again. You should get the same error message, but now the message box should have an "Open" option which will start the game. This should only be needed the first time you try to launch the game. If you still have problems running the game, you might consider running the Windows version through Windows emulation (such as Wine) on your Mac.

All platforms: if the screen resolution is incorrect during the first execution or if the game fails to load, try to run the game a second time. This will likely fix the problem. The resolution can be changed under Settings from the main menu. The main menu might be difficult to navigate with the wrong resolution but you can quit the game by pressing Escape.

If the problem persists, try changing your screen resolution to 1920 x 1080 or something close to it. In Windows, try setting scaling to 100%.

Development log

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Comments

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I'm not sure if you need any suggestions, as you are probually already busy, but I was wonder if you could change the way carrying works, because at the moment unless you have the backpack, you can't carry anything, so maybe the other characters should at least have some pockets, or be able to hold things in their hand(unless they can hold stuff in their hand and I just don't know how).

Always happy to get suggestions. You can hold an item in a free hand if you press w to wield the item (note that Shift + w is used to wear an item). Pockets I would like to add at some point.

Ok, thanks

Sorry this keeps on happening, but i have another bug. This could just be my computer acting up, but when I try to load my game, this message appears, and the I get "game.exe has stopped working."

Now it won't close, so I will have to avoid opening it for now.

Sorry to hear about the issue. I have some questions that I hope you can answer. Does it happen even if you save a game right at the beginning of a game (before you have done any action with the character) and then try to load it? When you save the game with Shift+S, does it say in the game log (on the main game screen) that the game is saved? And is there a file Game.save in the Save folder after you saved the game? If you can send the save file to me (for the latest version of the game), I can check if it works for me. It seems that itch.io allows links to files to be added to a message but you can also send the save file to my e-mail address (cwulnil@gmail.com). If all of that fails, it would be nice for me to know the size of the save file.

I havn't been able to play the game, because in the menu after opening, I click load and the message appears. I will send the file if I remember, but it's  23.1 MB (24,279,958 bytes)

I will try to save a game just a sec

There should be a email from stewmay

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I have a bug report. If you attempt to harvest a saw-sagetto, the game crashes. I have tried twice now to harvest, and both times it Immediately brought up the message "game.exe has stopped working".

Thanks a lot! I just uploaded a new version with the bug fixed. If you'd like, I can add your name to the Credits screen under "Game testing". Just let me know if you'd be interested in that and if so, what name I should use. Then I will add it to the next version that I upload.

Thank you for fixing the bug. If you feel like it, put my name as BurningCrow(A.K.A. W.A.R.)

Also I would appreciate it of the game had some basic tutorial, to explain how to build and craft thing. The guide of commands is useful, but I still don't know how to do some things, such as how to craft. Thanks.

Oh sorry, my bad, I missed the craft command. But a guide of some sort would be helpful. Maybe when you spawn you have a survival guide of some sort in your backpack, just to explain some of the the goals of the game.

also I am having trouble figuring out how to access the materials in the backpack, because when you go into inventory and go down, it skips over all the stuff in the backpack, though this could just be me not understanding how to work the game.

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The game doesn't fit my screen as my screen resolution doesn't go up to 1920 x 1080 and scaling is already at 100%, is it impossible for me to play or am I dumb?

edit: this is on windows.

Currently, the game wants a resolution of 1920 x 1080. Can I ask what your max resolution is? Then I will experiment with that and hopefully ensure that the next version of the game will run on your computer.

My max screen res is 1366 x 768, do let me know if you find any success as I'm a sucker for roguelike games like CDDA. :)

Yes, CDDA is the best :) I have just uploaded a new version which should be able to automatically detect the resolution of your screen. If there are still problems, try changing the desired resolution in the file bin/JSON/Gfx.json. Let me know how it works for you.

The game is working fine now! Thank you very much.
Though I have pressed '?' numerous times (i suppose that is shift + /, at least on my keyboard. ) but it didn't open the help menu. Is there a documentation of the keybinds anywhere else? i noticed some of them are just like in CDDA but not all. 

So far the game looks great, though! It's very detailed and quite immersive.

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Great to hear! Regarding "?", you are not the first to have problems with it. I had hoped it was fixed in the latest version but apparently not. On my keyboard, it is shift and the "+" button just to the right of "0" and above "p". Maybe try shift and "+" on your keyboard and see if that works. Also, can I ask if you also have problems quitting from the game screen back to the main menu using shift + "q"? That might help me track down the issue. In the worst case, I will have to disable shift until I am able to make some tests on a computer with issues similar to yours. Regarding documentation for the key bindings, that's the "?" menu which is problematic since you cannot view it, but here is a screenshot:

Uh... the "?" feature doesn't work. I have pressed SHIFT-/ multiple times and it won't work. Also, I can't save the game. Really like the gameplay, though the levels are a bit annoyingly realistic. Great work so far.

idk why people's game won't open or close. mine works fine.

multiplayer would be cool

with combat and whatnot

Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad you like the game but those annoying issues that you have need to be fixed, so let me try that. Can I ask if you use Windows and if you have problems with SHIFT in general? On my laptop, "?" requires me pressing SHIFT so maybe it is the same for you. For instance, can you SHIFT+Q to quit back to the main menu after you have started up a game? If the only issue for you is the SHIFT key not working, I might have a fix that I can add to the next version (I believe the issue is a certain library function that I use which does not detect modifiers like SHIFT on some OS'es).

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yes, shift-q works, but  specifically shift-? doesn't work. I have tried the update, but it appears to not work. I have expirienced problems with the /? key so it could be misbehaving again, but it usually only doesn't work a while after booting a game. Thank you for trying. I am using windows. I have also noticed that load doesn't work, but once again, my computer is garbage.

Another player has reported the same problem with shift-?. I have changed it to shift+h instead which should work. In case you also had problems accessing the crafting menu, I changed it to "c". Regarding load: you wrote earlier that you can't save so maybe the problem is there? If saving works, it should write a message in the log on the game screen about the game being saved and also it should generate a save file called Game.save in the Save folder. If that file is not there, loading will not do anything. If you have more info on the load/save bug, let me know and I will see if I can figure out the issue. Note that the save file will be very large on larger maps so maybe try it with a small map and see if that works.

Yeah, I just thought it autosaved because I couldn't access HELP, but saving works fine now.

Today, I uploaded a new version in which the issue with SHIFT has hopefully been resolved. Let me know if there are still problems.

so today i decided to finally play the game and as soon as i opened it i found out that the game at least as it currently stands is not only literally unplayable (because it won't start) but also can pose a risk to people prone to seizures because if you try exiting the game it will start flashing your screen which can be life threatening to photosensitive people, luckily i was able to close it after struggling with the blinking screen(which was just really annoying and hurt my eyes a little so nothing even remotely serious) and the game acting pretty much like it was a virus

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Sorry to hear about this. Can I ask which OS you are using and maybe some info about pc model, resolution, etc (of course only what you are comfortable sharing)? I of course want to fix this issue and any feedback is useful. I develop it in Linux and cross-compile for Windows and Mac so it can hard for me to test it for those systems. I have tested it on some Windows computers and one Mac and it worked fine on those. It's really annoying that such problems pop up, so sorry again for the issue. P.S. I just made a devlog announcement about this so hopefully this issue can be fixed asap. P.P.S. My game is of course not a virus and what you describe does not sound like one, so such a comparison is totally uncalled for,. Note also my warning under "Issues with the game".

When is the update planned, if it's not a secret?

Hi gorbem! I am currently finishing a demo version of another game that I spent all my time on these past few months. I plan to continue with X-Survivor from around Christmas or early January. Regular updates should then start appearing a few weeks after that. This is just an estimate as it is hard to predict how much work is left on the demo of the other game.

Nice, but very hard game!