Solarpunk: Survival Crafting Game on Floating Islands
Cyberwave's Solarpunk is a first-person survival crafting game set among floating islands. Early play is hands-on, and it grows into farms, a power grid and long flights toward unexplored land. The game launched on June 8, 2026.
Top 3 Reasons to Play
- Nothing here fights back. No PvP mode exists and bases cannot be raided; the pressure comes from hunger, thirst and weather. Anyone who wants even less friction can pick a Soft world at the start: hunger and thirst drain at half speed, the inventory survives a death and lightning cannot hurt.
- Co-op that bends to the group. Up to four players can join online, each with a separate inventory and the option to fly an airship of their own. A group can pool into one settlement or scatter across different islands. One player hosts the session, and there are no public servers.
- Islands placed by hand. The world is handcrafted rather than randomly generated, and the pre-release demo already showed what players do with the building tools: multi-story cliffside houses and large mechanical structures turned up in community builds.
Story and Lore
The game ships without a story campaign or a narrative quest line. What it offers instead is a setting: a technologically advanced world broken into floating islands, where renewable power sits beside animals that are kept in coexistence.
Lore beyond the setting lives in companion fiction. The novella The Lost Compass, written by Ben Calvin Hary, follows Riley Skye, who is stranded on a remote world fragment after a severe storm and searches for her missing father and an artifact called the Solis Compass. Community wikis point out that neither Riley nor the compass appears in the playable game; the book is a companion piece, not canon encountered in play.
Gameplay and Mechanics
The first hour goes to gathering raspberries and wood, plus breaking stone with a pickaxe. A hoe, a crafting table and a research table follow, and a craftable Survival Guide acts as the main source of in-game advice. Research Table tiers gate the wider recipe list, and the materials each tier asks for hint at what to collect next. A Build Hammer handles walls and roofs, and stairs can be stacked.
Three wheels track health, hunger and thirst, and health recovers on its own while the other two stay high. A rain collector is one of the first machines to craft, and a fall from an island is one of the few things that can hurt the player.
Power sets the pace of the middle game. The Energy Workbench, obtained through a trade, opens solar panels and cables along with a Network Display, with batteries and wind generation arriving as research advances.
- Solar panels follow daylight and weather, and output swings accordingly.
- Wind turbines add a source that is not tied to sunlight.
- Batteries bank the surplus for dark hours and storms, while cables and wireless links carry it to machines.
- A Network Display shows whether supply covers demand, which makes it the first stop when a machine stalls.
Automation grows out of that grid. Sprinklers water crops without a watering can, and transport drones carry resources from remote drills back to base; an ore island can then run unattended once power and storage are in place.
Crops grow in tilled, watered plots. Animal care sits behind its own research and asks for shelters and troughs before the first product appears. Animals that stay fed, watered and sheltered long enough will breed on their own.
The airship is the main gate between islands. The first one needs a component salvaged from a wreck on the starter island, plus a dock where it is later upgraded and recalled. Range is short at first, and a crash or a fall from an island returns the player to the home base. Exploration is scoped modestly: Steam currently reports two biomes and treats flying as support for the sandbox rather than a permanent focus.
Characters and Factions
Factions play no part in the game, and the playable character has no set name or history. The cast is small and mostly practical.
- Your character. Built in a character editor that Steam's store page calls simple.
- Traderbot. A robot trader met once the first airship is flying. It swaps gathered resources for blueprints the Research Table does not offer, including energy equipment and automation tools such as sprinklers and drones, and certain trades pay out airship range upgrades. Upcoming requirements are displayed in advance for trip planning.
- The Vending Machine. Stands beside Traderbot's shop and stays broken until one refined cobalt repairs it. It accepts tickets earned by posting unwanted items through a Postbox, and sells cosmetics such as extra airship colors and decorative recipes.
- The livestock. Chickens, pigs and sheep each respond to a different lure (wheat, carrot and corn respectively), need their own housing, and yield eggs, truffles or sheep's milk.
Editions
A single standard edition is on offer. No Deluxe or Collector's tier exists, and no season pass or gameplay expansion is listed. Steam sells two optional add-ons, both digital books delivered as PDF files in the game's install folder; neither changes anything in the game, and each requires the base game on the same platform.
- Solarpunk – The Lost Compass (Story Novel).
- Solarpunk – Official Book.