A real Earth
The Alps are the Alps and the Tyrrhenian is the Tyrrhenian. Every ridge, bay and river is the real one, shrunk down until you can walk it.
Real-time strategy MMO · Etruscan Italy · 6th century BC
TERRA500 BC
A real Earth, shrunk five hundred times. See the whole planet turn from orbit, then come down — without a single loading screen — to your own village on the Tiber, where somebody still has to chop the firewood.
There is no tech tree here to save you. There is a river to ford, a harvest going bad, and a neighbour holding the iron you don't have.
macOS · Linux · Windows|play alone or host a world|free while in alpha
☾
04:12
Autumn · day 214
🌧
Rain · 11 °C
wind 14 km/h from NW
- 1:500
- true-to-life scale
- 80 km
- all the way round
- 12
- kinds of landscape
- 24 min
- a full day and night
- 360
- days in a year
- 0
- loading screens
One world, no seams
From orbit to a haystack
The planet isn't cut into maps. Pull back and the whole Earth turns beneath you; lean in and you're standing between your own houses. Nothing loads, nothing stops, and anywhere you can see is somewhere you can go.
This matters more than it sounds. When the distance between two villages is the real distance between two real hills, strategy stops being a number in a table and becomes geography: who sits upstream, who holds the ford, who has the forest at their back and who has the sea in front.
Come closerOrbit · the whole Earth
The planet turns below you. Anywhere you can see down there is somewhere you can go, in one continuous fall.
The world makes the rules
Six things that won't wait for you
None of it is set dressing. The land, the weather and the seasons run the same way for every player, at the same moment, whether anyone is watching or not.
Rivers that matter
A river waters your crops, gives you clay and fish, and decides where a cart can cross. Choose the wrong ford and the load goes downstream without you.
Seasons that arrive on their own
A round world under a real sun: night falls where the light doesn't reach, summer days stretch long in the north, and winter comes for your fields on time.
Weather everyone shares
The same storm crosses the same valley for every player at once. Rain feeds the crops, frost halts them, and a bad sea keeps the boats tied up.
Ore where it belongs
Clay along the rivers, iron on the bare ridges, stone where the slope turns sharp, gold almost nowhere. Nothing was placed by hand — the land decides.
The world remembers
The tree you fell stays felled, the field you break stays broken, the road you wear in stays there — for you, and for whoever passes through next year.
Pillars
No man is an island
The whole game sits on four ideas. Everything else — trades, caravans, sieges — falls out of them.
I
Distance is the enemy
Moving goods costs time, carts and an escort. What a thing is worth depends on where it is: grain in the silo and grain on the road are not the same grain.
II
You cannot be everything
One player can't master every trade. Be a metallurgist, a great farmer or a master shipwright — never all three. Trade isn't a bonus, it's how you eat.
III
A living, merciless world
Day and night, seasons and weather set the pace of your work, your spoilage and your campaigns. Food left unpreserved rots in a matter of days.
IV
Sieges start far from the walls
Cut a road, burn a bridge, put a toll on a crossing. You choke an enemy long before you ever have to face them in the open.
Choose a trade
Decide what you'll never be
Mastery is limited and permanent. Specialising isn't a perk — it's a dependency. Whatever you don't make, you buy. Or you take.
Farmer
grain · oil · wine
Irrigation cut from the river, groves that take months of real care. You feed everyone else — and the morale of their soldiers.
Miner
iron · clay · stone
Ore sits in a few fixed places and nowhere else. Hold a vein and you hold everyone's tools — and the points of their spears.
Shipwright
rafts · barges · bridges
Rafts on the rivers, bridges over the fords, a toll on anyone who uses them. You move what others make, and you name the price.
Nothing keeps by itself. Meat has to be salted, grain dried in clay silos, wine and oil sealed in jars and buried in the cool. Every way of keeping food is a trade of its own — and every trade is somebody else.
Devlog
Where we are
Terra 500 BC is being built in the open. The world itself is up and walkable; the long economy is what we're building now.
- Done·The whole planet, from orbit down to the grass
- Done·Day, night and the turn of the seasons
- Done·Rivers, lakes and coastline
- Done·Forests that turn, thin out and fall to the axe
- Done·Weather you can watch coming across the valley
- Done·Iron, clay and stone in the ground
- Done·Villagers with trades: woodcutters, miners, diggers
- Now·Settlements: storehouses, fields and building sites
- Next·Long supply chains, spoilage, tolls and player trade
In the alpha you can
- Found
- pick a spot on the real map and raise your first storehouse
- Clear
- send woodcutters into the forest and watch it thin out
- Dig
- open a vein of iron, clay or stone where the land allows it
- Sow
- break ground for fields and wait on the weather
- Host
- open your world and let other players settle the next valley
BbuildGstorehouseEsccancel
Found your capital
The right spot is out there. You just have to find it.
Download the alpha and open the globe. Play alone against the land, or host a world and invite whoever has the iron you need.
Free while it's in alpha.