Second Dawn

About the Game

Hearth is grey, airless and cold. You are the advance party, and the advance party is one: a suit, a printer, the mission's whole blueprint library, and a ship that brought you down and will never fly again. The colony comes when the planet is ready. Making it ready is your job.

Make it breathe

Every machine you print pushes the planet a little further. Heat melts the ice, pressure thickens the air, oxygen fills it and life takes hold, through eight stages from Dead to Breathable. The sky takes on colour. The First Rain falls. The frozen sea in the valley turns to open water, and green climbs slopes that were bare rock.

• Eight stages of terraforming, each one changing the sky, the ground, the weather and the sound of the world
  
• More than forty machines to print, from heaters, vents and scrubbers to drills and ice harvesters, with the core machines upgradeable through three tiers
  
• Power from everything the planet offers: the sun, isotopes, the wind, volcanic vents and the swell of the sea you melted, with accumulators to see you through the night

Build a home from nothing

Nothing is dropped from orbit. No resupply, no crates, no cache. Every frame, cell and litre comes out of the ground under your boots. Knowledge is never the gate; material is.

• Modular habitats on a snap grid: rooms, glass corridors, windows, decks, stairwells, upper storeys and the furniture to live in them
  
• A rover that follows you, and drones that guard, repair and haul on your orders

A world that comes alive

Life arrives as the planet warms. Striders graze where there was only dust, three-legged titans walk the horizon, and drifters ride the high winds. Not everything that comes is friendly. Cross the seas you melted by hovercraft and see what has grown on the far shore.

Terraforming is the excavation

Hearth was never empty. A line of stones on the plain is too regular to be natural. A door waits under the shore ice. When the rain washes a cliff clean, forty metres of writing come to light. Someone built here, always in threes, everything aligned on one bearing toward a caldera on the horizon, and then they closed their doors from the inside.

Their story is told by what they left behind, never by a voice. Scan it, file it, and piece together what happened to them.

Your warmth wakes something

The first heat you bring stirs what was sealed beneath the ruins. Hives break the crust, their patrols hunt the dark, and at night a swarm comes for your base in waves: crawlers, lancers, burrowers, fliers and siege beasts. Print a laser pistol in your first hour. Build a line of laser, tesla, missile, mortar and heat turrets, and hold it through the night.

Choose how hard the swarm pushes when you start a world: only if provoked, standard, or relentless.

Take the fight to the hives

Holding the line is only half of it. Print a hover tank, a walker and a gunship, drive them into the swarm and bring each hive down, one after another, until the way to the caldera is open.

• Vehicles: a hovercraft scout, a hover tank, a gunship, a walker, and a cruiser that is a flying base in its own right

Alone, or with up to three friends

Play the whole game solo or in online co-op for up to four players. Invite friends through Steam. Everyone keeps their own suit and gear, and the planet you bring to life together is yours together.

Also on Hearth

• First-person survival: oxygen, water, food and the cold are your first adversaries, and the first night is not kind to a settler without shelter
  
• Day and night, storms with lightning, dust squalls and meteor showers
  
• World settings: how hard the swarm pushes, how hostile the wildlife is, the suit's difficulty and the length of the day
  
• Sleep through the night in a bunk; Steam Cloud saves and Steam Achievements