Nested Lands – Impressions from Alpha

Nested Lands is a ruthless RPG with survival elements from developer 1M Bits Horde and publisher META Publishing. In it, you find yourself starting from a clean slate – washed ashore with nothing but the shirt on your back. With this unwelcome place being ravaged by a deadly plague and stalked by bandits and other unsavory types, surviving is a goal that cannot be achieved alone.

To that end, the game features in-depth village-building mechanics, offering a refreshing mix of a survival RPG with RTS/city builder. Now, you can assign some of your usual tasks such as collecting wood and stone to your villagers, and they will set out to complete their work and help you out in the process.

The game kicked off an open alpha test today, but I had a chance to spend a few hours thanks to the key provided by the developers. Let’s discuss all things Nested Lands!

From the very send your character washes ashore, hurt and confused, it is obvious that it is not a charming type of survival farm. The world of Nested Lands is dark, gritty and unwelcoming. The land is ravaged by sickness, with you stumbling on corpses, blood-soaked patches of land and plagued buildings as you attempt to find a semblance of safety.

If it wasn’t enough, bandits roam the forests and the fields, attacking anyone in their sight and preventing you from leaving the section of the island you’ve landed on. But, your character is not one to give up. Having picked up some of your belongings from the crash site and creating some bandages from cotton, you set to work.

At first, the game tightly holds your hands through a surprisingly friendly NPC that helps you get on your feet. He also points out wood logs, stones and other interactables, and teaches you how to craft an axe. Note that while the game is bountiful with resources at first, you want to immediately craft a pickaxe to go with it, as this fountain of generosity will dry up sooner rather than later, and you’re back to scavenging, gathering, mining and chopping to get your way.

Between the bandits and the plague, the few friendly survivors that remain are keeping to their own instead of forming a community. The very thought seems laughable – until you come along. From a tent with a fire, to a sprawling village that takes care of its own needs by working together and following your leadership.

At the moment, the game has a tutorial and a sense of progression that it has in mind and that it will tightly hold you to, unlocking new buildings and options one-by-one.

First, that tent that lets your character restore energy and fire to both keep you warm and cook. Then, the village center and the first villager’s house – you can only invite new people if they have a place to live in. When you get your very first peasant, your choices aren’t many. You can make them gather wood or stone (by picking up logs and stones that are already around), cut wood or mine stone to produce them from trees and large boulders respectively, or send them out to gather one of the main ingredients that you need in your daily life: plant or reed fiber, berries and more.

But as you progress and unlock more buildings such as farm lots, builder’s house, smithy and carpenter’s lot, your villagers will also have extra roles they can fulfill. Additionally, if you find that you have quite enough wood or stone, or that you don’t plan on building anything new any time soon, you can go to the village’s center and swap the peasant’s profession to something that is more useful right now.

It does help and make it easier on you knowing that your precious vegetables won’t die off under the watchful gaze of a farmer while you explore the further reaches. Or that you can put down a couple of buildings – and the builder will finish them on his own, provided that other villagers keep supplying the needed ingredients such as stone and wood logs.

Note that you need to place food and other reagents into the village’s chests so that NPCs can interact with them. You might want to be transferring the contents of your inventory to the village’s containers occasionally, since if you die, you lose all that was in your backpack.

Nested Lands’ survival elements at the moment are pretty basic. You have energy, thirst, hunger, cold, and my favorite: how clean your character is. Since the world is ravaged by plague, you better take a dip in a lake or a river from time to time to keep yourself clean.

Your villagers have the same needs, hunger being the most prominent, and it is up to you to take care of them. A couple of people can live on just the berries and some vegetables, sure, but if you want a thriving community, you will need to find more secure and diverse options of getting food.

That includes hunting rabbits and deer, provided that you can craft bows and arrows for yourself or your villagers. You can also build a weaver’s hut that will allow you to move from the dirty rags to more appropriate clothes.

While the game is still in the alpha and thus quite rough around the edges, this unique mix of survival and village management has been surprisingly fun to try out. Having others to take care of and seeing your settlement grow from a couple of huts into an actual village, with people working together to make their lives better, is quite fulfilling.

Nested Lands can use a few touches when it comes to optimization and quality of life features. For example, batch crafting and moving (items from and to containers), UI improvements, lighting up your village and perhaps interactables/ingredients at night if you have sufficient skill, but even in alpha it is an intriguing project that is worth keeping an eye on.