A small jerboa in goggles and a red scarf stands on a burned-out car, watching the sun go down over a desert of wrecks.

Animal Wasteland

250 years after the Great Wars… it’s actually pretty cute out here.

What it is

A cosy life sim in a desert that doesn’t care how cute you are

You owe a great deal of aluminium to a badger with a crown. In the meantime there is a camp to keep, a garden to water, fish to pull out of a poisoned pond, and six neighbours whose days run on a clock you can learn.

Nothing here is placed by hand at runtime and then forgotten. The world is built fresh every time you load it, from a single continuous heightfield six hundred metres across. Walk east far enough and the sand turns to standing water without a loading screen.

A dust storm over the camp: the light goes flat and orange, visibility closes in, and the villagers head for the lee of the shack.
A dust storm closes the world down to thirty metres. The cast stops what it’s doing and takes shelter.
The restored floodgate, water running through the channel, machinery turning.
The Floodgate, six seconds after you finally get it turning.
The Drowned Exchange: concrete ruins and a bus wreck standing in shallow green water.
The Drowned Exchange. Somebody shopped here once.
The camp at night under a blue moonlit sky, lanterns burning.
Night in camp. The owl is awake; everyone else gave up hours ago.

The shape of a day

Everyone keeps hours

Poppy gardens in the cool part of the day and hides at noon. Gilly fishes at dawn and dusk. The professor is an owl and sleeps through all of it.

Turn up and help

Catch someone mid-task and you can lend a hand — once a day, only while they’re actually doing it. Miss the window and it’s gone until tomorrow.

They tell you things

Get close enough to somebody and they stop being a shopkeeper. Everyone is carrying one thing they haven’t said out loud yet.

The sky is weather, not a filter

Storms dim the sun, close the fog in and put grit in the air. You can’t do your rounds in one. That’s the point of them.

It runs in a browser

No install, no account. Give it a minute to pull the desert down.

Play now