Chop Trees, Gather Lumber, Make Soup.

Sure, King Under The Mountain might set itself in a fantasy world, but I doubt very much the flavor of soup will be your priority of concern in this simulation-based, settlement-building, strategy management game.

That sounds like a mouthful and for good reason; now you might be able to choose from either of the dwarves, orcs or human races to align towards but once that’s out of the way, it’s time to let the game’s interlocked simulated systems take over your settlement-building plans.

Giving high-level orders across cycles of day and night, players are told that the weather will have a deep influence on the colonies of critters that fester underground, the beasts that grow above, and the mood of the settlers themselves that work against these.

The latter might have their own physical, mental and social demands, while procedural generation at least ensures that they are never bored of looking at the same art assets twice.

Difficulty options let you pre-determine if you’d like an idyllic journey or one where your building attempts are constantly foiled by poltergeists, and the choices you make in either regard are bound to have consequences in the form of say, having your wealth looted in the absence of proper defenses, your settlers revolting because you forgot to hoard grain, for the harsh winter and so forth.

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Speaking of choices, one may indeed pick their line of trade – be it mining, farming, brewing beer – production lines of which are to emulate real-life processes, enabling you to establish yourself on the market with enough renown.

From thereon it’s up to you to play the introvert or better yet, send some of your troops off to crawl dungeons, engage in tactical battles with the proffered realm of civilizations, and even invade copies of other players’ settlements. No high-level orders here, mind you, you’ll be partaking in battle first-hand.

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Rocket Jump Tech. hopes that this will maintain re-playability and encourage a thriving community of user-generated content, to which end mod support is included. Of course, a lot of this remains in its conceptual stages with only a basic prototype serving as proof of concept.

Even so an elaborate roadmap has been laid out by the team exploring how the first release will be a feature-incomplete alpha, succeeded by Steam Early Access and an ongoing community-driven production process that will likely continue to unfurl in the year of 2020.

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Regardless of what your thoughts are though, King Under The Mountain has been fully crowd funded in less that 5 days with a couple of ambitious stretch goals in sight for the rest of the Kickstarter period.