Village Roots

Orb2bit

About this game

Village Roots is a village-building game in pixel art, where the real resource is people.

You start with a claim at the edge of a wood: a few turned beds, a handful of villagers and very little else. Fell the trees, dig out the stumps, break the boulders and turn the ground. The farm grows exactly as fast as your people can work it.

Every villager counts
• Give each villager a trade: farmer, logger, miner, builder, fisher, cook, trader or explorer, or swear them to the Thornguard.
• One tool is one worker. Two axes means two loggers, however many people are waiting.
• Villagers are born, grow up, grow old and die. Each has a name, a mood, an appetite and traits of their own.
• Beds are limited. Crowd too many people into too few houses and the village turns on itself.

Farm, cook and store
• Every crop wants its own soil. Sow it, water it, and bring the harvest in before it spoils.
• Cook in the kitchen: a dish feeds more people than the raw food that went into it.
• Watch the larder. Food runs out, food goes off, and a hungry village works slowly and falls ill.

Trade by boat
• Nothing sells at the gate. Load your trader's boat with produce, fish or timber and send it to a market across the water, then wait to see what it brings home.
• Keep your coins in the vault. What is left lying in the chests is what raiders take.

Defend the village
• Raiders come at night. The Thornguard, swordsmen and archers, meet them on the road, blow by blow.
• When a raid breaks through, a window counts out exactly what it took.

Explore the world
• Send a party out past the wood with food, bags and a lamp. The world goes on all the way round.
• Hunt, gather fruit, catch hens and ducks, mine ore and gems, and find the camps the raiders come from.
• Take a villager in hand yourself: walk them with the thumb stick, swing the axe, cut the harvest.

A game that waits for you
• A day lasts twenty minutes, with night, weather, and music that changes when the sun goes down.
• The village rests while the game is closed. Reminders, which you can switch off, tell you when it needs you.
• Earn titles like Well Fed and Prosperous, or ones nobody wants, like Famine.

One price, the whole game
No ads. No in-app purchases. No account and no internet connection needed. Your village is saved on your phone.

What’s new

• Street lamps now light the farm corners at night. Upgrade them in the builder: wooden, pale wood, then ivy.
• Chests can be upgraded: a basic chest becomes a brass chest and a locked chest an iron locked chest, and each holds more.
• Night looks new: fires and lamps cast shadows, and buildings glow in the firelight.
• New flower art in the meadows.
• Only oak, elm and cherry trees grow inside the farm fence.
• Zooming out now stops at the edge of the village.