A LOW-POLY COLONY-BUILDER
OUTPOST
ALPHA!“The king sent us to bolster the frontier outpost, but when we got here…”
ALPHA v0.3.6· macOS & Windows▼
A SURVIVAL COLONY SIM
Stranded at the frontier
Your colonists were sent to reinforce a frontier outpost — and found it abandoned. Now they're stranded, and survival is the only way forward. Outpost is a colony sim about carrying them through four turning seasons: forage and farm in the warmth, dig in and stockpile before the freeze, and build something strong enough to outlast the wild — and whatever else is out there.
Four seasons to outlast
Spring thaw to killing winter. Each season changes what grows, what threatens, and how hard it is to keep everyone fed and warm.
Raise a real colony
Forage, fish, farm, chop, and mine. Lay down stockpiles, walls, floors, and crafting chains, and turn a bare clearing into a settlement that runs itself.
Set the work, not the steps
You don't pilot anyone. Mark out the jobs and your colonists handle the pathing, the priorities, and their own hunger, warmth, and rest.
THE ROAD AHEAD
As the colony grows, so does the danger. Wolves are the first of it, wild animals prowling in from the map's edges for your colonists to fight off, with raiders and a deeper threat still ahead. Outpost is in active alpha, it gets richer and more dangerous with every release.
SEE IT IN ACTION
Watch the alpha
ALPHA · v0.3.6
Download the Alpha
Free, early, and rough around the edges. Grab the latest build for your platform and help shape the colony.
macOS
Apple Silicon · macOS 11+
Signed & notarized for macOS — download, open, and play.
Windows
64-bit · Windows 10/11
Unsigned build — on first launch click "More info" → "Run anyway" past the SmartScreen prompt.
FRESH FROM THE FRONTIER
Latest Updates
What's changed in the colony, straight from the game's changelog.
- v0.3.6NEWEST
- Fixed a winter deadlock that could end a run. When a fire burned out and the last of the wood was gone, colonists huddled around the cold ashes and refused every order — including the woodcutting that would have saved them. They'd stand there and freeze with axes in hand and marked trees in sight. Now, the moment there's no warmth left to be had, they break off and get back to work: cutting the wood that relights the fire is the only way out, and they'll take it. They still get colder while they do it, so it's a race — but it's a race you can win.
- v0.3.5
- A weapon rack now answers for itself. Rest the cursor on one — or on a weapon leaning in it — and a card tells you how many of its six slots are filled, warns you if anything shelved there is worn or broken and still waiting on a smith (or already on its way to one), and gives you an Armory button that opens the full list.
- A finished carpentry bench or forge now tells you what it's for. Rest the cursor on one and a card names it, says what it makes — wooden weapons and stone tools at the bench, metal weapons and steel tools at the forge — shows how many orders are already queued on it, and gives you a Craft button that opens its order list right there. No more building a workbench and wondering what to do with it.
- Timber walls are properly built now instead of plain slabs. A wall run sits on a base course, is capped by a top plate that runs unbroken along its whole length, and the stretch between them is set back and laid up in horizontal timber courses — planks of varying length butted together, their joints staggered from one course to the next like real timberwork. Every corner, junction and open end stands as a full-width post with vertical grain against those courses, so a wall reads as framed and anchored rather than extruded, and you can see at a glance where one ends.
- When winter arrives, each colonist card at the top of the screen grows a warmth bar under their rest bar, so you can see who is freezing without opening anyone up. It drains as they get cold and turns amber, then red, well before they are in trouble — and it disappears again come spring, when the cold no longer matters.
- Wolves no longer turn up like clockwork at first light. When one is coming it now picks its own hour — the warning might reach you mid-morning, over lunch, or with the light already going — so no part of the day is safe on principle any more. And once a wolf has your scent, saving and reloading won't talk it out of the visit.
- Colonists fetch the right tool before they start work. Until now one would stand over a boulder chipping at it by hand — taking more than twice as long — while perfectly good pickaxes sat back at the stockpile, because a tool only caught their eye if it happened to be a few paces away. Now anyone who needs an axe or a pickaxe walks over and collects one first, from anywhere in the colony they can reach, and only falls back to bare hands when there genuinely isn't a tool to spare. And when a repair is the last one a piece of gear will take, the log says so, so a beloved axe never quietly gives out on you.
- Gear too far gone to mend has somewhere to go now. Mark any storage zone as Scrap and colonists will carry spent axes, picks and blades over to the heap instead of leaving them lying where they fell or letting them sit in a weapon rack slot a working blade could use. The heap looks the part: a low weathered bin with its lid off and the broken gear piled up inside, filling from the bottom as more arrives, so you can read how full it is from across the colony — and resting the cursor on one names it and counts what it holds. A Scrap zone is a heap and nothing else, so your food and timber can't end up sharing tiles with broken axes. Nothing is thrown away — it finally just has a home.
- Wooden floors are laid as real boards now instead of a flat brown pad. Each room's boards run its length, butted end to end in staggered lengths with a dark line between them, so a finished floor reads as timber you laid rather than a stain on the ground — and it sits properly under the new timber walls.
- Anything resting on a wooden floor now sits on the boards instead of sinking into them. A dropped axe used to vanish into the planks with only a shard of the head poking through; campfires stood waist-deep in the floor, and weapon racks, workbenches and forges, storage crates, refund piles, thatch beds and even colonists' boots all sank a little into the floor they were standing on. Placement previews now land where they promised, too. The warmth (T) and light (L) planning overlays used to disappear entirely the moment you laid a floor — in exactly the finished room you most want to check a fire reaches every corner — and now rest on top of the boards where you can see them, along with the glow a hearth throws across its own room and the highlight under a drag-selection.
- Doors are properly built now instead of a flat slab dropped in a gap. Each one is a planked panel — timber boards with dark shadow gaps between them, banded by two iron hinge straps and hung with an iron ring handle on the edge that opens — set in a heavy frame whose posts and head beam stand proud of the wall. And they actually work: a door now sits shut until someone comes to use it, swings open as they arrive, and eases closed again behind them. It opens the way the blueprint said it would, whichever way you turned the door when you placed it, and a colonist working beside a doorway no longer sets it flapping. The frame is solid, too — colonists walk through the opening in the middle instead of clipping straight through the posts at the edges, so a doorway is finally a way in rather than a decoration you could stroll past.
- Thatch roofs now hang out over the walls they sit on. The straw runs past the wall and ends in a fat, ragged lip — uneven along its edge, trimmed back underneath, throwing a shadow down the timber. The straw itself is laid up the slope in loose, shaggy bundles, their frayed ends flopping over one another like the thatch on a straw bed rather than hard stepped rows, with a thick capping bundle riding the ridge. Each gable end is boarded like the wall beneath it, with a sawn barge board down the rake and a king post under the peak. A walled, floored house finally reads as a building with a roof on it rather than a box with a lid.
- Reinforcements sent by the Crown now walk in where you can see them. A newcomer used to arrive completely invisible — the log announced them, they marched across the map and carried their sack of grain to your stores, but nothing was drawn at all until you quit and reopened the game.
- You can pave roads now, and the ground underfoot finally matters. Gravel and flagstone paths join the Build menu beside the timber floor — gravel laid from raw stone, flagstone from crafted stone blocks — and colonists genuinely move faster on paved ground: flagstone is quickest, then timber boards, then gravel, with bare earth the slowest of all. A road between your stores, fields and fire speeds up everything the colony does, and colonists will even swing onto a nearby path when it beats the beeline. Come winter your roads shed the snow, too: paved ground of any kind stays clear while the drifts pile up around it, so the road you laid in summer stays the visible artery through the whitescape all season.
- Each paving looks the part. Gravel goes down as a bed of loose poured stone that runs seamlessly from tile to tile and ignores the tile grid at its edges — corners worn off, a diagonal run reading as one smooth ribbon of spilled stone instead of a staircase of squares, with stray stones scattered in the grass along the roadside so it fades into the ground instead of stopping dead on a line. Flagstone is laid as dressed slabs with mortar lines and a raised kerb of edging stones all the way around. The cheap road looks poured, the expensive one looks laid by hand, and neither is mistaken for your floorboards.
- Lay a road however you like: drag a rectangle for a plaza, hold Shift and drag to paint a winding trail freehand right under the cursor, or press R with a paving tool and click two points — the road plans itself along the walkable route between them, four tiles wide by default so it meets a doorway or gate flush, squeezing past cliffs and skirting right around a lake rather than giving you a line through the impossible (and if there's no way through at all, it tells you so and places nothing). A road planned through an open gate paves the gateway itself — and the gate still shuts tight over it. The mouse wheel sets the width, one to six tiles, and a cost card follows along showing the width, the tile count and the stone it'll take.
- Colonists now wear in the routes they use — and you can see it happen. Ground that gets walked day after day gradually packs down — first trodden, then worn, then hardpacked — and everyone moves a little quicker along a well-beaten trail. The tread shows on the land itself: the grass thins underfoot and then gets beaten flat entirely, the earth darkens into a bare-dirt path with soft edges, and your colony's true routes emerge on the map without you drawing a thing. It never quite matches a real road, so paving a favourite route is still worth the stone, and a trail nobody walks any more slowly greens back over until the ground looks untouched again. And when you're ready to make a trail official, the game hands it to you: pick up any paving tool and the colony's trodden routes light up on the ground, shaded by how beaten they are (press G to hide or show them), with a “Pave the worn route” button that stamps your chosen paving along the whole highlighted trail in one click — priced first, like any other road — and your colonists head out to lay it. The colony shows you where the road wants to go; you just say yes.
- v0.3.4
- Fixed a stutter that could freeze a settled colony for seconds at a time. An idle colonist picking a spot to stroll to would occasionally pick one it couldn't actually walk to — a patch inside a walled yard with the gate shut, an islet across the water — and lock the game up searching for a way there. Colonists now shrug off an unwalkable spot and pick somewhere else.
- Stockpile crates now show what's inside them, so you can spot your larder from your lumber yard at a glance across the colony. An open crate is heaped with what it holds — a catch of fish, cinched grain sacks, a basket of berries, mushrooms, stacked logs, milled planks, straw bundles, rubble, dressed blocks or ore — mounded higher the fuller it gets, and crates with nothing in them stay shut. Storage fills up a crate at a time, so a half-stocked yard reads as full crates and empty ones rather than everything half-empty. The crates themselves are properly built now too, instead of plain brown boxes: slatted sides with dark gaps between the boards, corner posts and an iron strap around the middle. They still sit exactly where they always did, so nothing about placing storage has changed.
- The colonist card is a proper page now, not a narrow scrolling strip. It opens wide with three columns — how they're holding up on the left, the orders you've given them in the middle, their work priorities on the right — so you can read a colonist without scrolling past everything else. Duty, stance, shift and which weapon they should carry are rows of icons you click once to set, and hovering any of them tells you what it does. Their portrait sits in the corner, drawn with their own hair, skin and tunic, so you can tell at a glance who you're looking at.
- Fixed orders placed at a workbench or forge that were quietly ignored — the order sat in the station's list but never showed up in the work panel and no colonist ever came to make it. Orders you place before the materials are on hand now wait properly and get built the moment the timber, stone or ore arrives, and a batch of several keeps going after the first one is finished. Any stuck orders in your colony start working again on their own.
- v0.3.3
- Colonists set to flee a wolf now retreat to your home flag — the same spot the Rally button gathers everyone to — instead of scattering to whichever campfire happens to be nearest. A frightened colonist always falls back to one known place you can rush the rest of the colony in to defend.
- Fixed a slowdown that could drag a large, long-explored colony to a crawl. When a colonist kept trying to reach something it couldn't actually get to — a tool walled off across the map, a workbench with no path to it — it would stall the whole colony over and over hunting for a route. Colonists now give up on an unreachable errand instantly and get on with their work.
- Tools left sitting on a workbench or forge you demolish are no longer lost — they drop to the ground where a colonist can pick them back up.
- v0.3.2
- The carpentry bench and forge now tell you what you're getting, not just what it costs: every recipe lists how much wear it takes before it needs the smith, how fast a tool works, and how hard a weapon hits — so you can finally see why a steel axe is worth the ore over a stone one before you queue it.
- Colonists no longer hack at rocks and trees with the wrong tool in hand. A colonist standing over a marked boulder with an axe now walks over, swaps it for a pickaxe, and gets on with it — where before it would settle in and grind away bare-handed-slow while perfectly good pickaxes sat in a pile nearby. If the colony has no right tool to hand, or can't reach the one it has, it still gets stuck in with what it's got rather than standing around waiting.
- Weapons and tools you craft or repair now land on the ground beside the workbench or forge instead of stacking up on the station itself — so you can hover any of them to check its condition, and colonists pick them up from where they lie. A bench or forge only ever holds a weapon while it's actually being repaired.
- A colonist working a forge or carpentry bench now stands at the open working face and turns to face the station, instead of standing on the anvil or sideways inside the bench — so it reads as them actually crafting rather than clipping through it.
- Your colony now flies a home flag — a royal-blue banner emblazoned with a gold lion, planted at your stockpile. It marks the heart of your settlement: it's where the camera returns to when you press Home, and where frightened colonists rally when a wolf attacks. Hover the flag and choose Move flag to pick a new spot — it re-plants instantly, so you can shift your colony's heart as you expand without your settlers running the wrong way in a panic. The flag's hover also has a Rally to flag button: press it and everyone drops what they're doing and gathers at the flag for a short spell — even waking sleepers — so you can rush your fighters to a colonist under attack, then they return to work on their own.
- v0.3.1
- Placing a stockpile now shows only its crate blueprint — the leftover flat square that could still appear under the crate is gone, so a planned stockpile looks just like the built one.
- The little floating icons over the colony — a colonist eating, resting, gathering a harvest, sweating when hungry — now show their proper emoji instead of turning up as blank white squares scattered across the ground.
- At nightfall the whole colony gathers to sleep together again: a colonist that was carrying a load back to storage when night fell used to just lie down wherever it happened to be, out in the field — now it sets the errand aside and walks in to bed down by the fire with everyone else, picking the trip back up in the morning.
- Zooming the camera all the way out is much smoother now: faraway terrain is drawn in a lighter form near the horizon haze (up close everything is as detailed as ever), so taking in a big sweep of the map no longer drags the game down. Moving around is smoother too — the landscape is now prepared in the background while you pan and zoom, so terrain streams in and sharpens up without the little hitches it used to cost.