Ashland (in development)

Ashland puts you in a god-view as the commander of a desperate survivor colony. The goal isn't a scripted win: it's an endless sandbox with optional goals, where you grow from a handful of scavengers into an empire that has to defend itself and deal with the factions around it. Lose your HQ and the run is over.

The world is meant to play without you. Undead hordes drift, split and flow like liquid; wild survivors band together, found factions with their own hidden alignment, trade, raid or collapse. Every named person matters, because knowledge lives in people: lose your last specialist and you lose what they knew.

It's a human-guided, AI-built project. I set the design and lock decisions in written plans; specialist AI agents implement them on a work branch, and every change has to pass automated tests and review before it's merged.

Highlights

• Undead that overwhelm by numbers: driven by sound, then sight, then smell, with emergent horde flocking. You can only use them indirectly, with noise, flares, bait and kiting, never by direct command. Every faction can kite them too.
• A hard economy: scavenging and production from the start, per-base resource pools and local power, fuel moved by convoy, and convoys that can be looted or wiped. Emptied resource nodes stay gone.
• Survivors and Scholars: knowledge is carried by people. Rescue juniors, train them at Scholar libraries into specialists, and research your way up.
• Possess any controllable unit in first or third person, anytime, while the colony keeps running. Bites mean 100% infection with no cure, and downed units die if ignored.
• A camera that zooms from the street to orbit, with command and overview at every height.
• Wild humans and AI factions, a council with edicts and tasks, an emergency bunker to evacuate into, and Workshop modding limited to data and Blueprints for player safety.

Media

Progress

Status from the project's design docs as of late October 2026. No percentages yet; these are qualitative.