Before the first dawn there was only the Weave, and upon it the elder hands drew land from water and breathed life from clay. The old gods have long since gone quiet. The thread is yours now.
The current world will be lost (save it first if you care about it).
Skip the slow build-up — drop straight into a war already in motion. Army sizes scale to your population cap.
The rules this world runs on. Change them at will — you're the god here.
Everything of note that has happened in this world, newest first.
Every world your peoples have charted. Starbound settlements build star-vessels from steel and timber, and their colonists cross the void — arriving when you next visit their destination. Travel freely: each world keeps living exactly as you left it.
Elderthread — game design, code, world lore, and visual identity (the name, the peoples, the weave-seal, the theme) are original.
Primary sprite art — peoples, soldiers, beasts, buildings, trees — and the tool-tray icons were generated with PixelLab exclusively for this game and are original to it. The fallback sprite set is derived from Kenney's 1-Bit Pack, public domain under CC0 (kenney.nl). The title seal, rune cursor, menu & control iconography, and all interface theming are original, drawn by hand for this game.
All music and sound effects are synthesized in-engine with the Web Audio API — original, no samples or third-party audio.
Original, MIT-licensed. Vanilla JavaScript and an HTML <canvas> — no engine, no third-party runtime.
Your peoples mine ore, fell timber and work it into over a hundred goods. Pick a settlement to see its storehouse, or browse the full ledger of what can be made.
Before the first dawn there was only the Weave, and upon it the elder hands drew land from water and breathed life from clay. The old gods have long since gone quiet — the thread is yours now. There is no goal here. Shape the world, fill it with peoples, protect it or unmake it.
🏔 World — draw terrain onto the Weave: grass, forest, swamp, mountains, snow, ice, water, even lava. 🐑 Life — raise the four peoples and a whole ecosystem of animals. Peoples found camps that climb six ages — Camp, Hamlet, Village, Town, City, Capital — each era raising new works: huts and cottages, town and city halls, markets, temples, watchtowers, keeps, monuments, and at last a citadel. They farm, sail to new shores, crown kings, forge alliances and wage wars — all on their own. Each people has a gift: the Kith are Adaptable (+20% food), the Grull go Berserk (+45% damage when bloodied), the Sylvani are Windward (they loose arrows from afar), the Karn are Deeproot (they walk straight through mountains). Veterans (3+ kills) wear a small blade badge. ⚡ Powers — meteors, lightning, fire, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, rain, healing. ☠ Doom — zombies, plague, demons, dragons, krakens, UFOs, acid rain, and the nuke.
📦 Economy — the land is seeded with ore veins and clay pits. Settlements send miners and woodcutters out to work them, pile raw resources into their storehouses, and — once they raise a sawmill, mine and forge — refine and craft over a hundred goods, from planks and steel ingots to bread, chainmail, stained glass and gold regalia. Food speeds their growth, weapons and armor arm their soldiers, and luxuries raise a settlement's prosperity. Click a village, then View economy — or open the 📦 Economy menu — to see every storehouse and the full crafting ledger. Armies muster by age into soldiers, archers and knights, wage siege with catapults and defend with firing turrets; towns grow watchtowers, cities raise turrets, and the greatest become capitals crowned by a citadel.
💬 Talk (Other tab) — every villager has a mind of their own, with an intelligence score from Dim to Brilliant. Click one to chat: suggest tasks (settle, guard, explore, farm), nudge friendships, stir rivalries. The clever may refuse you; the dim may misunderstand gloriously. Kings accept whispers of statecraft — war, peace, and alliances — and dim kings make wonderful puppets. Friends stick together and avenge each other; rivals brawl on sight.
⚔ War & Wave — towns raise walls from the Town age on: attackers must breach the masonry (catapults crumble it sixfold faster) before the town itself can fall, and the victors pillage a third of the fallen storehouse. Folk can swim the coastal shallows — slowly, heads bobbing — but the deep sea turns everyone back until a coastal town builds ships; only then do armies cross as invasion fleets. Trade caravans and merchant ships carry surplus goods between friendly settlements, raising prosperity at both ends — and tempting the pirates whose black sails prowl the lanes and put raiders ashore. Veterans of six kills become named heroes: stronger, monster-hunting, and armed in legend at a high city's forge. The seasons turn year by year — harvests swell in summer, starve in winter, and autumn storms scatter fleets mid-crossing.
🏙 Towns & society — settlements climb eight ages from Camp to the star-faring cities of the far Weave, and along the way they need what they build: no City without a school, no Capital without a hospital, no Industry without a factory, no starships without a power plant. Two great cities of one crown grow together into a megacity. Every soul takes a trade (farmer, smith, healer, mason, teacher…), masters it over a lifetime, and carries one of eight temperaments — the cheerful and gloomy, diligent and lazy, hotheads and the kindly. They wed into named Houses, and blood tells: children inherit their parents' traits and temper, with the odd spark all their own. Keep them fed, safe and prospering or their happiness falls — and a miserable people will revolt.
⚖ Laws — toggle how the world works (wars, rebellions, animal aggression, fire spread, seasons, trade, pirates…). 📜 History — the full chronicle of everything that happened.
Controls: Left-click / drag — use tool · ✋ Pan (or H) — drag to move the world · Right-drag, Shift-drag or two-finger drag — also pan · Wheel / pinch / ＋− buttons — zoom · WASD/arrows — pan · Z or ↩ — undo terrain strokes · 123 — speed · Space — pause · Minimap — click to jump. Brushes come in six sizes, round ● or square ■.
Tips: spawn 3–4 settlers of a race close together to found a village. Civilians flee monsters — veterans with 3+ kills stand and fight. Heal cures plague and zombie bites. One zombie in a crowded village is a story; five is an ending.
Art: Kenney's 1-Bit Pack (CC0, kenney.nl) + a few original sprites. UI icons by Lorc, Delapouite & contributors (game-icons.net, CC BY 3.0). Code: original, MIT.