Small-map 4X colony survival
Hold the
line
The world was already alive when you landed. How long can what you build endure?
On Steam in November 2026. The free demo is out now on Steam: the first six campaign maps, and your saves carry into the full game. It also runs in the browser with nothing to install.
Send feedback from the demo's menu and you could win one of 5 Steam keys. Draw rules.
The game
Xenobiome Command is a strategy game about keeping a colony alive on a fungal alien world. You land in the fog with one colonist and nobody coming to help, and every map is a new colony to grow from nothing.
The purple fungus on the ground is alive, and it breeds alien packs. They walk out of it toward your Landing Zone and take any area they reach. If they take the Landing Zone, the colony is lost. Burn a patch of fungus and it stops breeding.
The authority that funds you keeps score. Finish quests and your standing rises. Lose colonists or miss deadlines and it falls, and at zero you're recalled.
A 4X the size of one valley.
- EXPLORE the fog to see what's out there.
- EXPAND area by area until the map is yours.
- EXPLOIT the land, refine it, keep the colony fed.
- EXTERMINATE the alien packs and the nests that breed them.
Survey
Explore the fog to see what's out there, and claim the ground under it before something else does.
Claim
Harvest what the land gives, refine it, and keep the colony fed, housed, and healthy.
Hold
Watch the enemy. A sleeping pack sends raids at your land every few days, and a pack you wake attacks at once.
Features
- Build and fight
- Build sleeping pods, orchards, labs, forges, and shrines, and grow from one colonist to a working colony. Hire wardens, the colony's fighters, and march them out to meet the enemy. A fight lasts days, and you can pull back at any time.
- Replayability
- Pick a commander and a colonist trait before you land. 18 commanders and 7 traits change how a colony develops. Draft technologies from four research tracks, so your toolkit changes from colony to colony.
- A living world
- 146 incidents and colony events force choices with costs. Sickness, a cold season, and events with no good answer get in the way of every plan.
- Progression
- Artifacts, festivals, and stars carry progress from one colony to the next. Every map records the hardest difficulty you've cleared, and commanders earn titles as you play them.
- Learn the game
- An interactive tutorial walks you through your first colony, and the in-game codex explains every system.
- At your pace
- A map takes 10 to 30 minutes and saves when you quit. Pick a pace from relaxed to sandbox, and pause whenever you want. Choose from 4 difficulty levels. Cancelled builds refund in full, and you can undo your actions. Steam demo saves carry into the full game.
- Any input
- Play with mouse and keyboard, gamepad, or touch, and rebind the controls.
- Plays offline
- The full game installs from Steam and runs offline, on a plane or a train or a dead patch of countryside. No sign-up, and no tracking across other apps. The demo also runs at play.xenobiome.net, so you can try it before you install anything.
Maps
Play 2 campaigns across 27 handcrafted story maps. The first runs from planetfall to last stand. The second follows a faction that lives off what it kills. Narration plays between maps, and every campaign map hides one secret. Scenario mode replays 24 biomes with seeded layouts, 16 rolled map traits, and 4 asymmetric factions. Today's Drop is a new seeded scenario every day.
Trailer
Or watch two minutes of gameplay instead.
Gameplay
Surveying and claiming ground, the Outpost sheet, research and a tech draft, an incident resolved, a multi-day battle, and six of the seventeen campaign maps.
Roadmap
The second campaign shipped at launch, so the roadmap starts after it: a hardened new game plus for both campaigns and mobile versions are in development; here is what follows.
