Keepsake
A drawing of the Ferris wheel
Wax crayon on the back of a wallpaper offcut.
The wheel is drawn taller than the houses.
Six gondolas, and a seventh floating loose.
Zoryane, taped inside a classroom cupboard door
v0.7 alpha · in development
Dustline
Isometric survival on a battered quad, across 100 km² of exclusion zone raised from real Chernobyl elevation data.
Every frame here is the game.
Recorded in-engine with the HUD switched off.
01 · The Zone
Ten kilometres of real ground.
The Vesna Exclusion Zone is fiction. The ground under it is not: the terrain is lifted from real elevation data of the Chernobyl area, then amplified until every horizon hides another valley.
You ride in as Rilya, on a Reclamation Licence: half archivist, half scrap mechanic, wholly alone and mostly fine with it. Ahead are pine ridges and drowned meadows, a river you can wade, three lakes and a millpond, six villages with their own names and their own silence, and the Svitlo-4 power station in the far north. It is one map with no loading screens once you are in, and you can ride it end to end.
- 100 km²
- one open map, ten kilometres by ten
- 6
- villages: three in the Green, three in the Red
- 5
- red pockets that never healed
- 1
- river, shallow from bank to bank
- 9
- fuel pumps, and none of them refill
- 6
- lookout towers that open up the map
02 · The Licence
A licence, a quad and a photograph.
Forty years after Svitlo-4, most of the Zone has gone green. The state still issues a handful of Reclamation Licences a year: catalogue what is left, salvage what you can, and return what was someone’s.
Rilya holds one, on probation, and a quad called Vera that came with it. The only voice she hears is the Senior Inspector’s, from the checkpoint. Everybody else she meets in what they left behind.
The house
One house, forty years of describing it
Baba Hanna has described the same house since before Rilya was born: whitewashed, a willow by the gate, a stork’s nest on the roof. It stands somewhere inside the Zone. Rilya has one photograph of it, and more prints are out there, each one narrowing a circle on the map.
D.
Notes under stones
Vera came with the licence, and so did her last rider’s habits. At cold fire rings across the Zone there are notes and prints left under a stone “for whoever comes after me”, signed D. D. went into the Red alone and did not come back.
The Zone
The Red can be healed
The Black Bloom drinks the glow. Feed it to a Collector, seal what the Collector takes in, bury it where it cannot hurt anyone, and a pocket of the Red pulls back, for good. There are five pockets, and an order to them.
Licence Day
A new game is a six-minute first run and nothing else: no wall of text, only the morning, a road, and six small jobs that teach the ground. It ends at the checkpoint with your licence endorsed, with a skip button for anyone who would rather find their own way.
Ride Vera into Zoryane.
Search a house; whatever a family left goes in the journal.
Fill the tank at the pumps. Fuel is finite.
Read the road sign, and the map begins to fill.
Make camp, build one upgrade, sleep.
Report to the checkpoint and post what you found.
Four acts
The main line runs about forty-five missions, twenty-odd hours before a single side thread, all the way from Licence Day at the road head to the Core.
Act I: Whoever Comes After Me
The Green
A checkpoint, a depot and a radio. D.’s fire rings across three villages, a hunting lesson, letters home, a fire tower, and a first dosimeter reading at the red line.
Act II: The Mould That Drinks the Glow
The first Red · Polynove
Rim stakes, a house with its door shut and the first Collector. The first disc is sealed and the first canister buried.
Act III: Sources
Verbove, Stari Duby, the tractor factory
Three pockets, each with a source underneath that has to be capped, each a harder dive than the one before.
Act IV: The Core
Svitlo-4
The power station at the end of the road, and the last of the Red.
Always somewhere to go
The journal’s first page is the quest log: the main line pinned at the top and never dismissible, side work and contracts below, and a red dot when something new arrives. An amber diamond marks the main job and a cream one the side job you are tracking. It sits on the minimap, as an arrow on the rim when the target is off the disc, on the big map with a dashed circle for “somewhere around here”, and in the world itself. Markers can be Full, Minimal or Off. There are no timers, and nobody stands on screen to hand you work; whoever has a job writes it down.
Side threads
A dozen optional threads open the game up: the mill’s missing brass weight, the Ferris wheel’s seventh gondola and the lights that come on at night, the forester who stayed, a wedding on the dam, a class register, the bus that never ran. Each is built on keepsakes already waiting in the world, and each can be set aside without a penalty or a timer.
Letters home
A keepsake is never sold. Post one at the checkpoint letterbox and it goes back to the family it belongs to, stamped RETURNED in your journal. One to three sleeps later a letter comes back, about forty of them, and some carry something small.
The contracts board
Five jobs posted, three held at once: deliveries, hides, pump readings, tower reports, hot-spot surveys, Black Bloom samples. The board refreshes when you sleep, nothing expires, and a job you drop goes straight back to the pool. Red jobs appear only for pockets the story has reached.
Daily radio requests
The 06:00 bulletin carries one request a day on its crawl: check a pump, count the storks, watch a wolf, walk the dead line. Text only, and once you hold one it stays.
Licence ranks
Work done is standing, and standing is rank: Probationary, Dustliner, Senior Dustliner, Reclaimer. A rank opens deeper contracts and more at the depot, a weekly fuel ration, a daily repair, rifle rounds and a resupply at camp.
Blueprints
Missions hand out workbench rows that scrap alone cannot buy: a bigger jerry can, a second headlight, a scanner that pins hot spots on the map, the lead pannier for carrying canisters, and the Collector’s four Marks.
Trophies on Vera
A licence plate, a dented can, a pennant, a clip for the prints you have found, a string of fair bulbs that lights at night, an embroidered rushnyk on the bars. They hang on the quad where they belong, beside paints and decals to put on her.
Collections
Species seen, places found, towers climbed, waysides read and pumps checked pay out as you fill them. Keepsakes, notes and letters keep no running total: a letter from the checkpoint tells you when you have passed a mark.
Healing the Zone
Not a score: ground. A sealed Collector leaves a permanent clean disc, a buried canister brings a ring of the Red back toward green, and a capped source finishes a pocket. Every healed zone pays for the gear that makes the next one a fair dive.
03 · The Ground & the Machine
Every pass cuts deeper.
The ground is simulated, not painted on. Wheels carve ruts with real depth, shove the spoil up into berms beside them, and part the grass as they go.
Lap the same meadow and each pass digs further. Leave a rut to dry and it sets into a packed two-track that rides firmer; rain softens it all again, and mud costs you speed but never control. Snow takes real tyre ruts, and boots and hooves leave prints of their own.
Her name is Vera.
A battered 1980s utility quad, inherited with the licence, and the other main character of the game. Fuel, wear and weight are the survival problems out here, and she carries most of them.
Nine pumps stand in the Zone, and every litre you draw from one is gone for good. After that it is five-litre cans out of car boots, or the corn still at camp: twelve ears in, a day’s wait, five litres out. Low range doubles the torque for the steep and the soft, and the body, wheels, gearbox and engine all wear until the workbench puts them right.
| Tier | Top speed | Cargo |
|---|---|---|
| I | 35 km/h | 60 kg |
| II | 45 km/h | 85 kg |
| III | 55 km/h | 110 kg |
| IV | 65 km/h | 140 kg |
Top speed is power-limited, never capped: grade, mud and cargo all push back through the same physics. And she cannot flip. That is a rule, not a tuning value.
04 · Water
Ford it. Bridge it. Respect it.
The river runs shallow from bank to bank, the whole way down the valley. Wade it anywhere your nerve holds, or aim for the fords and rock bars where the old roads cross.
Two bridges still stand, one of cracked concrete and one of timber. Rapids churn around the stones, and the banks are Polesian mud, dark at the waterline. Three lakes and Mlynivka’s millpond each keep a pier and a rowboat that will never sail again, and in winter the lakes freeze into shortcuts.
- 3 fords
- 3 rock bars
- 3 rapids
- 2 bridges
- 4 piers
Every spring the river rises until one bridge is the only way across.
For a few days the fords, the rock bars and the timber bridge go under. The radio warns you a day ahead.
05 · Villages
Six villages, left mid-sentence.
Zoryane, Mlynivka and Tykhyi Kut stand in the Green. Stari Duby, Verbove and Polynove stand where the plume came down. All six were emptied in seventy-two hours and simply left.
Walk into the houses, where the doors swing open as you reach them, and search what is left: 440 crates, lockers, duffels and car boots across the Zone, each showing you exactly what is inside before you take a thing. What people left behind is not loot. Keepsakes and notes go into your journal, never your pack, and nothing in the game can destroy them. When you are ready, a keepsake goes home through the letterbox at the checkpoint, and the family writes back.
From the journal
Each keepsake and note is written for one place and waits there until you find it. Three of them, word for word:
Note
A note left on a gate
The dog is called Kuzya. He is chained because he follows the bus.
He has water for four days.
We are coming back on Friday. If you are reading this and it is not Friday, let him off.
Tykhyi Kut, the gate of a house
Keepsake
A packed suitcase, never taken
Cardboard, a strap, initials in white paint.
Two shirts, a towel, a photograph, papers.
It is standing by the door, closed.
Polynove, beside the front door
The map is blank until you ride it
Beyond Zoryane it starts as empty paper and fills in only where you have been. Read a village sign post and the roads out are stroked onto it; climb one of the six lookout towers and three kilometres of valley appear at once.
One radio, strapped to the bars
Find the set once and it rides on Vera’s handlebars for good. The signal climbs as you head for the listening wall, a giant radar array still transmitting in the woods: the Senior Inspector’s checkpoint bulletin with tomorrow’s weather and a request or two, the river and the pumps that ran dry, a numbers station that means nothing, and any tapes you have found.
06 · Survive
Camp anywhere flat and green.
Tent, fire, workbench and crates fold out of Vera’s racks wherever the ground is level and clean. Sleep there to pass the night, because sleeping is the only way the Zone writes your run down.
The workbench
Scrap is the currency; steel, rubber, glass, fabric and copper are the ingredients, and copper survives only on the factory floor. Spend them on two trees: Vera’s drivetrain, tyres, racks, jerry can and corn still, and Rilya’s suit, recovery, hunger, stamina, pack and dosimeter. The deepest rows, from a bigger jerry can to the Collector’s Marks, open only when a mission hands you the blueprint.
Foraging
Mushrooms in autumn, berries and wild honey in summer, apples from late summer on, at the edges of the three green villages. No timer and no minigame: walk up in the right month and pick.
Wildlife
Hares, roe deer, foxes and Przewalski’s horses run from you. Wolves and brown bears raise a warning first, and if you step back they stand down. No predator can outrun you on foot, let alone on the quad.
The rifle
A bolt rifle with a target lock and slow, visible rounds, and a workbench that presses five at a time. A shot is loud: everything nearby hears it, and a wolf may come to look.
Shelters
Bus stops and the forester’s hut let you sleep without unpacking camp, so a long run does not have to end where the flat ground does.
Failing soft
Hunger never kills you: well fed, you recover faster, and empty, you stop healing. If your health does run out you black out and wake beside safe ground, and the materials you were carrying wait where you fell, marked on the map.
The longest, hottest drive in the Zone ends here.
07 · The Red
Where the plume came down.
Five pockets of the Zone never healed: a huge one around the reactor, one at the tractor factory, and one over each of the three villages people were living in when the buses came. The best salvage is in there. So is the radiation, and for the first time there is a way to push it back.
Exposure climbs fast on hot ground and clears ten times slower once you are out, so a deep run stays in your bones for minutes. The trees stand bare, the grass dies to red straw, and the geiger rises from one lonely tick to a solid crackle. Three mutant species hunt on sight there, the blight wolf, the ash bear and the hollow one, but none of them ever leaves its pocket; kill a whole pocket at once and it falls silent for good. And you cannot pitch camp on hot ground.
Twenty-four small hot spots hide in the Green as well, a tell and never a trap. Build the dosimeter at the bench and its needle reads the ground under your feet while its arrow points at the heat.
Healing the Red
Scrape the Black Bloom
A black fungus that feeds on radiation grows on the hottest ground in all five pockets and crusts the red villages’ houses. Scrape a clump and it grows back in eight days. After dark, a faint blue sheen drifts over the hottest ground.
Build a Collector
A liquidator-era absorber, rebuilt at the workbench from six scrap, two steel, one glass and four Black Bloom, once the story hands you the blueprint. Four Marks follow: each one wider, faster to spin up and quicker to fill.
Set it down on hot ground
It spins up for two minutes, then drinks the field around it: clean ground for sixty metres in every direction, and no mutant will cross the rim. A running Collector draws mutants from a quarter of a kilometre away, so stay and guard it. Take it too close to the reactor and it would slag itself.
Fill it, seal it, bury it
A unit fills in eight hours or one good sleep at a camp inside its disc. Seal it and you keep the frame and a hot canister, and the ground it cleaned stays clean for good. Canisters are heavy and they leak while carried, and a lead pannier keeps two of them quiet. They go in the trenches at the Disposal Yard at Polynove, a Black Bloom seed on top.
Healed ground stays healed
The pockets fall in a fixed order, Polynove, Verbove, Stari Duby, the tractor factory and the reactor last, and each one is a fair dive at the next suit level, so the suit track is the ladder into the Red. Bury enough canisters and a ring of red pulls back; cap the source underneath and the pocket is finished. Every healed zone pays for the gear that makes the next one possible.
“Do not sleep in the Red. You will not sleep.”
08 · Light & Seasons
Golden hour is a place here.
A full day runs thirty minutes, and the sky moves through seven keys: the actual palette the renderer blends through, from cold night blue to the long amber evening.
- 00:00night
- 05:31dawn
- 08:24morning
- 12:00day
- 17:17golden hour
- 19:12dusk
- 21:07late dusk
The night runs on one headlight and nerve.
A 45-metre beam, a moon on clear nights, and predators that sense you from further away after dark.
Four seasons, thirty days each.
The year turns while you ride. Clear skies, overcast, rain and snow roll through on their own, and the radio can tell you about tomorrow.
- Spring
- The river floods for a few days and the low crossings close.
- Summer
- Berries and wild honey ripen at the edges of the green villages.
- Autumn
- Mushrooms and apples, and the gold the Zone is known for.
- Winter
- Snow on every roof and road, ruts pressed into it, and lakes frozen into shortcuts.
09 · Field Notes
Postcards from the Zone.
Stills from the game. Open any of them full size.
First light by the old pierin-game capture Morning at the Mlynivka water millin-game capture Fording the river over a rock barin-game capture Golden hour on the timber bridgein-game capture Golden autumn light through the pinesin-game capture The fairground's rusted Ferris wheel at golden hourin-game capture Headlight on, crossing the river at sunsetin-game capture The Svitlo-4 cooling tower at sunsetin-game capture Late dusk among Polynove's burial moundsin-game capture Rain, mud and wake on the lake bankin-game capture Home after dark in Zoryanein-game capture Campfire by the lake at nightin-game capture Snowfall over Zoryane at duskin-game capture Out onto the frozen lake at sunsetin-game capture
Fuel up. Ride the Dustline.
Coming to Early Access on PC and Mac. Follow development, playtests and the road to launch.
Read the transcript
“They said the Zone would kill you. Thirty years on… it hums with life. The river runs shallow. The wheat stands tall. And the old roads remember every wheel that ever crossed them. Fuel up. Ride the Dustline.”