HOLLOWMAST

You have seven days before the sky turns red.

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Free. No install, no account, no launcher. Click it and you're in.

Survival Base building Singleplayer Desktop browser
What is it

The situation

An island, and everything on it wants you gone.

You wake up on a coast you don't recognise, with a hammer, a pickaxe and a countdown to dusk running in the corner of your eye. Somewhere inland there are three radio masts. If you can get all three back on the air, something out there will come and take you off this rock.

Nothing is going to help you do it. There is no quest marker walking you to the next thing, no shop that stays put, no map you didn't draw yourself by walking it. What there is: trees to fell, ruins to strip, a workbench you have to build before you can build anything good, and a sunset that arrives whether you're ready or not.

Daylight

Everything you'll need tonight, you get now.

Daylight is the working half of the game. You range out, you take what's useful, and you get home before the light goes. Buildings aren't scenery — you walk into them, and the wall between you and the camera dissolves so you can search the room you're standing in.

8:19 AMDay oneClear

A four-storey ruined block seen from a high angle in morning light. The near wall
                has dissolved into a dither pattern, revealing the survivor standing inside on an
                upper floor holding a torch, with floor slabs and a stairwell visible through the
                cutaway. A tarmac road runs past on the left between trees and grass.

Four floors, and something is usually already on one of them.

The loop

Two halves, and one of them is on a timer.

The clock in the corner is the whole game. It tells you how long until dusk, and dusk is not a lighting change — it's when the things in the treeline start walking toward wherever you are.

While it's light

Go out and take things.

  • Chop, mine and strip ruins for wood, stone, scrap and cloth
  • Cook, purify water, and eat — hunger and thirst are real and they slow you down first
  • Craft at a bench, a forge, a fire — better tools open better recipes
  • Push further out for the good loot, knowing you have to walk back

After dusk

Be somewhere they can't reach.

  • Wall it, gate it, light it — they path around what they can't break
  • Spikes and wire outside, turrets on the corners, a generator to run them
  • Rain and fog cut how far you can see, and they don't care
  • Sleep it out, or stand on the wall and fight — both are valid, one is cheaper

9:56 PMStill day oneRain, fog

Night, heavy rain and fog. A walled compound of stone blocks encloses a lit
                campfire, a bed, workbench, forge and storage crates. Rain streaks fall across a
                fogged treeline. Floating damage numbers show turrets firing at attackers beyond
                the north wall.

The numbers over the wall are your turrets hitting things you can't see yet.

Night seven

And then there's the blood moon.

Every seventh night the sky goes red and the count stops being a handful. They come from every direction at once, they come for the walls rather than the gate, and stone that held for six nights starts coming apart in front of you. You'll know a week in advance. It won't help as much as you think.

7:15 PMDay sevenBlood moon

The same compound under a blood moon, everything washed deep red. A wall section
                on the north side has been destroyed and infected are pouring through the gap into
                the courtyard, where the campfire still burns. The counter reads fifty-two hostiles
                with thirty-five more coming.

Fifty-two through the gap, thirty-five still walking in, and the workbench is on the wrong side of it.

The way off

Three masts. Two minutes. Then you're gone.

Surviving isn't winning. There is an actual end to this, and it is the hardest thing in the game.

01

Find them

Three transmitters, scattered across the island. Nothing tells you where. You find them by going and looking.

02

Get them live

Each one is dead, defended, and needs parts you won't have early. Clearing the ground around it is half the job.

03

Hold for extraction

With all three lit you can call for pickup — then survive two solid minutes while a wave lands on you every twelve seconds, each one bigger than the last.

What's in there

It's a full game, not a demo of one.

A different island every time

The whole world is generated when you press New Game — coast, forest, highlands, roads, ruined towns and everything in them. Or type a word into the seed box and get that one instead: the same coast, the same ruins and the same things hidden in them, for anyone you send it to.

Or the island you asked for

Six presets — archipelago, highlands, overgrown, scorched — and nine dials under them. Land mass, sea level and relief; how much woodland, marsh and ashland; how many places there are to find, how much is in them, and how much of the island is already occupied. Pick the season you start in while you're there.

A thread, if you want one

Eleven moments across the year that tell you which part of the island matters this week — someone on the far shore who found the frequency long after everyone else stopped answering. One at a time, never two. Nothing about it is failable and nothing about it blocks, and it still won't mark your map: it says south-west and leaves the rest to you. Ignore it and it goes quiet.

A year that turns

Four seasons, a week each. You start in summer with the long light; by winter the days are short, the snow lies where it falls and there is far less growing out there to find.

Eighty recipes, twenty buildings

Tools, weapons, ammo, medicine, food, armour and everything you build a base out of, on a tech ladder you climb by making the workshop first.

Ten kinds of infected

Shamblers you can walk away from, feral hounds you can't, and brutes that come through the wall rather than around it.

Skills that change your run

Twelve of them, levelled by doing the thing. Plus relics and set bonuses for players who like building around one idea.

Vehicles

The island is bigger than your legs. Nine ways to cross it faster, once you've earned them.

Other people

Survivors you find hurt, bring round and keep — up to four, each on one standing order: follow you and shoot what gets close, hold a spot, or work the ground and stock the nearest crate. They take hits, and they bleed out if you leave them. Plus a trader passing through who turns a stockpile you're sick of into the one thing you're short of, at a rate that is deliberately bad.

What's coming

The island isn't finished with you yet.

Landed

Something that wants something from you

This sat here as the next thing to build, and it is in the game now. Eleven moments handed over one at a time, never all at once, teaching you the island by needing things from you rather than by listing them — and never taking the run out of your hands.

Next up

They get stronger too

Right now the horde is sized off the calendar — how many come is a question about what day it is, not about you. It should be about you. The week you finally feel equal to the nights is the week that ought to stop being enough.

Undecided

Phones

It needs a keyboard, and every control assumes one. Making it work properly on a touchscreen is a rebuild of how you move and aim, not a button — so it happens only if enough of you turn up on one. That's partly what this playtest is for.

There are no dates on the two that are left, and nothing unfinished has a number next to it — both would be guesses dressed up as promises. The order is real, though. That is the order it gets built in. And when one of them lands it lands here, at this address: no download, no launcher, nothing to update. You just open it again.

Before you start

Four things worth knowing.

Desktop only
It loads on a phone and then you can't move — every control is keyboard or gamepad. Rather than let you find that out the hard way, the game says so on the title screen and asks you to come back on a computer.
Saves
Kept in your own browser, on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded and there's no account to make — which also means clearing your browser data clears your run.
Cost
Free, and there is nothing in it to buy. It's an open playtest: the point right now is finding out where people stop playing, and why.
Privacy
The game itself has no analytics, no trackers and no third-party code in it at all. The one thing it can ever send is an anonymous report about the run — no name, no account, nothing that joins two visits together — and there's a switch for it in Settings. Every field is listed, and the privacy policy covers this website too.

Dusk is in four minutes.

A whole day and night runs in eight. You have a hammer, a pickaxe, and no walls yet.

Start a run

Loads in one file. Works offline once it has.