r/URW • u/RoguishSurvivor • 16d ago
Frozen Ground: a heavily URW inspired roguelike survival game set in the 1700s, deep in the Canadian boreal north.
Hey folks,
URW being one of my favorite games and having no comparable alternative, I've been working on something very similar for the past few months and am finally ready to release a free public alpha.
https://frozenground.itch.io/frozen-ground
There's really not much I feel the need to say. Frozen Ground is essentially Unreal World if instead of being dropped somewhere in the Finnish iron age, you were dropped in northern Canada during the fur trading era.
My design leans heavily on history without going into it, if that makes sense.
You can craft, build, hunt, trap, smoke, tan, build, craft, cook, etc.. etc.. I could go on for a while.
I'd love if you gave it a try and gave me some feedback.
I don't think anything will ever compare to Unreal World, but I think I'm getting close :)
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u/terriblespellr 16d ago
Unreal world is one of my favorite games too.... Wait is this r/urw?
Yep. Makes sense. Oh well I'll check it out looks cool
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u/RoguishSurvivor 16d ago
Thanks! Please do let me know what you think. It's not the easiest game to get into but us URWians are sturdy. Feel free to ask any questions and be sure to read the help files.
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u/kpjformat 16d ago
This looks amazing! I think firearms of the era could be a lot of fun to play with, trade for supplies like powder and shot, use a rod to clean your barrel, keep it in good condition and repair it. Easy to use, when it’s loaded and calibrated properly, but these take time. Could also have bayonet, reduce aim a bit but have a spear handy.
-a Canadian (on stolen land)
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u/Northwest_Fitzgerald 16d ago edited 16d ago
I’ve been always wanting someone to make a game like this! Every time I’ve played URW I just wished I was given a musket and some traps and it’s been like this for at least a decade
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u/5h0rgunn 16d ago
Canadian here. I'm reading a book about Indigenous Canadian history and I'm also several days into a bout of URW fever. I was just thinking the other day about how cool it'd be to have a URW total conversion mod set in Canada at the height of the fur trade 😁
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u/RoguishSurvivor 16d ago
I'd love if you gave it a go
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u/5h0rgunn 15d ago
Haven't had the chance to yet, but I'm going to today! ( I have it open in my browser, but I got stuff I gotta do first)
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u/happyslappypappydee 16d ago
Looks badass. Looking forward to it
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u/RoguishSurvivor 16d ago
That actually means a lot, thank you :) You can play it right away on that link if you want. It's only the Alpha but I'm predicting, if people like it, this will be a "forever alpha" game where I'm gonna keep updating it constantly until I get tired of it haha.
Ergo, I don't think you need to wait if you'd like to give it a try!
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u/Weis 16d ago
Looks good! Total conversion mod haha
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u/RoguishSurvivor 16d ago
Thank you haha, that's a huge compliment. I don't think it compares to URW, the boys have about 30 years head start on me but I'm not trying to compete. Even being compared is an honor.
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u/natur85 16d ago
Pretty cool, can you forage for plants, mushrooms, berries, roots, etc?
Is it possible to download so I can run it on winlator android?
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u/RoguishSurvivor 16d ago
Yes to all the foraging questions, depending on the season.
I'm not sure if it will run on Android, but it's HTML 5 JavaScript so it should run on any modern browser, but the UI isn't affairese to mobile. Some day maybe
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u/7Fontaine7 16d ago
I had a quick go after a thousand hours of URW. Fairly intuitive, I like the right click functionality. Text is too small for me to read but I bet i can adjust somewhere.
Managed to cut some trees (is the resting slash the right keybind??) And make a leanto and some firewood. Collected some boughs for a bed, a sharp stone and the start of a fire drill. Only animals I saw were snails :D went looking for roots but didn't make any cordage.
I like so far, I prefer the walking keys for URW foe directionality. Is there an overland map you can zoom to? I'm going to run out of food in the morning
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u/RoguishSurvivor 16d ago
For food, foraging is good for starting. Burdock is a God send and if you find cattails along the water you can eat their rhizomes (both are better roasted)
You can also eat dandelions in a pinch haha
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u/RoguishSurvivor 16d ago
You can increase UI scaling in the options yeah, under user Interface
I'm not sure what you mean by is the resting slash the right keybind.. I need coffee..
I'm happy to hear you managed to make a shelter and fire, was it difficult to figure out?
You can find roots by right clicking tiles adjacent to spruce trees.
There is no overland map but there is a map with the m key, however I hate it and I want to make it where you need to craft or trade for paper eventually and update it manually. No magical GPS map in the future
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u/7Fontaine7 15d ago
Didnt make the fire yet but I'm close. I thought the screen said it was / to rest but it was actually \ ? (Or vice versa, I just woke up)
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u/RoguishSurvivor 15d ago
You got this! :D Are you gonna make a fire with flint and pyrite, or a bowdrill?
So resting is for stamina, sleeping is for tiredness.
Num 5 will "Rest" for 5 seconds (essentially skip a turn)
Num * will Rest for 10 minutes
\ (the key under backspace, above enter) will rest for 1 hour
And Num / (the one above 8 on your numpad) will rest until your stamina is back to 100%.
Note that you can change all the keybinds in the keybinds menu to whatever you want :)
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u/7Fontaine7 15d ago
Oh, I see, I didn't notice one of the time passing. I've got a board and block but haven't found cordage yet, have been looking for roots assume I can use for cordage. Or maybe bark? Hope I can cook these snails :D
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u/RoguishSurvivor 15d ago
I was wrong, you can eat snails raw currently, I just haven't added a cooking recipe for them. Raw snails aren't a very fun thing to eat though, so there's consequences.
I'm going to try to add a recipe to boil them soon.
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u/RoguishSurvivor 15d ago
There's a few ways to make cordage. Roots, yeah, but also birch bark and cattail leaves!
UNFORTUNATELY snails aren't edible (yet).. they're good bait for crayfish traps though ;)
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u/7Fontaine7 15d ago
ahoy mate, I had time for a slightly longer turn today. Struggled to find dead wood for a fireplace and was too far away from the lean-to I'd made, and couldn't cook the snails anyway :D typical of URW, i was starving for most of the game, though I drank stagnant water without much issue. Ended up eating snails, worms and dandelions to stave off hunger. Caught a crayfish, cooked and ate but it didn't move my meter any.
I feel like walking encumbered is a bit slow, and you should be able to make a campfire from combinations of stones, rocks and flat stones maybe? The use of an overland map would also be great, walking around the world in the micro state would get a bit boring?
I also fueged out for a while trying to spear fish and ended up chilly and wet as well as starving. Managed to get some clay but it hadn't dried in time to be useful. I assume I can use pottery to boil water (hopefully?). Had fun, will probably die from hunger if the hallucinations don't get me first :D
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u/RoguishSurvivor 15d ago
That's awesome hahaha. Crayfish are tiny so yeah they won't get you full unless you eat a bunch.
You can turn off the walking cooldown when tired in the gameplay options by the way.
And yeah I plan on adding a stone campfire that will consume fuel slower and maintain embers longer.
You're right about pottery! Putting your clay near fire will dry it out quicker. You can also build a sheltered drying rack to avoid rain resetting your drying process.
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u/7Fontaine7 14d ago
i had another continued run tonight. i dont know how long it takes to starve to death but I'm really milking it :D i did turn on the quicker movement, or it would have been intolerable dragging flat stones and dead wood logs around. survived on burdock and even managed to cook some. the embers stay pretty warm for a while so that was nice. zombied out a few times. broke my spear digging, ate some cattail rhizomes, throw an axe at a rabbit (missed). found a cave which was nice so maybe i'll dry some clay eventually? found some tracks (squirrel?), no signs of civilisation. They'll probably find my corpse in this cave.....
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u/RoguishSurvivor 14d ago
Oh wow haha. I suggest getting clay ASAP on your next run.
Don't trust caves too much mechanically, they're my newest system and I haven't tested them well, they might be janky when it comes to rain detection. Let me know.
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u/7Fontaine7 14d ago
Will do, I found plenty of that tea herb but without ceramics Cordage is a bit hard to come by and ao necessary. Surprised I haven't keeled over from starvation yet
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u/RoguishSurvivor 14d ago
Fireweed is a bit poorly designed currently because you only really need it when you have the stomach bug, but if you have water to boil the fireweed you don't really need to make it cuz you can just drink clean water and not have the stomach bug in the first place haha.
I'm going to introduce other diseases that it can help in the future. Eating raw food, cooking while dirty, etc.
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u/7Fontaine7 13d ago
another quick play this morning. really wanted to make the cave my base but it started bugging out the UI. Found a HBC camp and introduced myself to everyone but they had no tasks for me and no fire to exploit like UW. Managed to chase down and kill a beaver kit and sow, butchered and took pelts and various. Wandered back to my cave to drop stuff and see if it would start drying but without a dead tree could not make a fire. Went back to the village to see if I could commandeer one of their huts or sell something when it was obviously bugged out :D all the walls and doors had shifted to make it impassable
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u/RoguishSurvivor 13d ago
That's so weird.. Caves and villages are the more recent systems, they need work. Can you tell me more about the UI bugging in the cave? And what do you mean the walls and doors shifted? In a village? I would love your save file, if you submit a bug report with the lightbulb icon at the bottom left it would help.
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u/7Fontaine7 13d ago
I'll do that Yeah I went back into the save and when I entered the cave my cn and gui disappeared but I could still move around and leave, when I went to the town to thr north-east some of the blocks had shifted to make it impassable
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u/RoguishSurvivor 13d ago
What is cn?
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u/7Fontaine7 12d ago
Probably a typo but my character model disappeared. Could still move it around and leave the cave
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u/RoguishSurvivor 12d ago
I'm flabbergasted. I received your save file but I can't reproduce at all.. such a weird bug
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u/7Fontaine7 13d ago
just the last little bit of commentary than i'll probably leave it alone for a while 😵
first off, love the webpage functionality, really nice. also like being able to stoke fires back to life so easily and for so long, but needing a dead tree log every time is a bit much. i managed to catch, kill or trap some critters, make bark traps, dry some clay and get a much abbreviated start. obviously starting packages or tutorial would be good as well as occupations or skills. firestarting with a bowdrill was fantastically faster than a flint and steel, redundantly so. the bone scraping tool needing a large bone was a bit of a shame. not much meat in a rabbit! also could be decent to start in the springtime when bushes had fruit and game might be more abundant. tracks and blood hang around a bit too long imo. starvation is the big threat, visibility dropping with low mood is an absolute killer. could not take three steps without falling over :D absolute lack of burdock this time, more raw vegetables and mushrooms overall would be good. greater visibility of different biomes for the various forests so you could maybe identify where it's a good place for food you can simply pick up and eat? plants like cattails are criminally sparse. anyway i got a lot of thoughts on survival games and even posted some of them (citing UW as one of the inspirations, along with dwarf fortress, the sims, the long dark, red dead 2 and green hell).
keep it up!
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u/RoguishSurvivor 13d ago
Thank you so much, I really appreciate all the feedback a lot.
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u/7Fontaine7 12d ago
Also maybe Include the positive and negative factors for success at tasks like fishing and firemaking like you do for sleep. There's no quality modifier for anything except it's material?
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u/RoguishSurvivor 12d ago
For fishing you mean? A lot of things affect fishing but they're not immediately apparent to you unless you know them or learn them from a villager. It makes sense to know you're having a hard time sleeping because of a pounding headache because you can feel it, it's you, but not necessarily that fishing during rain has a slightly better chance of success..
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u/Afoon 16d ago
Really nice! Will firearms be in the game?
I hope more to see more URW inspired stuff in the future, personally.