Asciilands

Asciilands is a multiplayer survival and building sandbox played in the browser, in which a 3D world is drawn entirely with text characters. All players share one persistent world of forests, coasts, deserts and mountains, split into regions that you cross by walking to their edges. The game is in open beta and in active development.

You start with bare hands: chop trees, mine stone and pick fibre, turn them into planks, sticks and rope, then place a workbench to make a stone axe, pickaxe or sickle. From there the recipes branch out into bows and arrows, fishing rods, leather gear, cooking at a campfire, and smelting and forging metal. Combat has melee strikes with a guard, bows, and glyph spells learned from inscriptions and cast with a wand; wolves and boars fight back. Health, stamina, hunger and a day-night cycle frame the survival side.

Building is done piece by piece: foundations, walls, doors, roofs and stairs, up to four storeys with stone supports. Builds in the wild decay after a day unless they are maintained. Guests can explore, craft, build and trade at markets; with a Discord login, players can also add friends, form parties of up to eight, and found or join towns that claim land with a shared treasury.

An 11-step tutorial and a journal of goals you can pin on screen guide the first steps. No account is needed: a guest character is saved on the server for that browser, and a Discord login carries it across devices. Desktop and laptop browsers only for now.