Three hundred years after the Dimming, the old machines still follow their orders. A handful of survivors come to the ruins with a fire, a few tools and a musket. Ember Citadel is a colony sim about building them a home, block by block, and keeping it standing through the night.
Raise walls, floors and roofs level by level, from a log hut to a stone hall. Dig cellars, halls and tunnels into the hills and stack levels under the rock. There are no ready-made houses: a room is whatever your walls, doors and the rock around them close in.
Climb from campfires and homespun to the musket, the lever rifle, the bolt rifle and the service rifle. Mount swivel guns, volley guns, harpoon winches and machine guns on your walls, and set mortars behind them.
Salvage the old world and build machines of your own: a strider that tends the fields, a mining robot that breaks rock and a salvager that cuts wrecks apart for parts. They need no orders. They just work.
Step into any colonist at any moment and walk the home you built in first person: across the yard, through the halls and down into the tunnels, while the colony carries on around you.
When the machines come, draft your people and fight it out. They kneel behind low walls, lean round corners and fire through windows. In the dark they see only a few metres, so light is where you can fight, and every fire and lamp you build pushes the dark back.
Somewhere out there, the Citadel is looking for you. Its scout drones search the land, and once it finds you, its machines come by night: a few at first, then packs, then giants. Some fight from cover, some shield the others, and the Executioner tears your walls apart with its winch.
Settle the worn frontier, the high desert, the red forest of giant redwoods, the tundra, the swamp, the mountains or the ashlands in the Citadel's shadow. Each land is hard in its own way: food in the desert, warmth in the tundra, fever in the swamp. Winter brings blizzards, and the water freezes hard enough to walk on.
Research is a map of lamps in the dark, from the axe and the campfire to steam, electric light and finally Ember. Swear the colony's Oath star by star, and each part changes what your people do.
Play alone, or bring friends into the same colony online. Every friend steps into one of the colonists, builds beside you and stands on the wall when night comes.
Named colonists with faces, traits, friendships, injuries and lost limbs, mended with wood, iron or Ember
Farming, hunting, fishing, cooking and crafting that run through the seasons
Traders, raiders, prisoners and expeditions into the wider world
A world that keeps going while you watch from above or walk it in first person
