Of Life and Land is a promising settlement-building game with rich simulation out on Steam

Released into Early Access today is Of Life and Land (prev called Circle of Kerzoven), a settlement-building game from developer Marco Burri made in Godot. The release comes with Native Linux support. Note: key provided for me.

Having spent a little time with it, I can already see the charm here. It has a wonderful setting and style, and anyone who likes a city building challenge will probably enjoy it. The hook is really the heavy simulation going on, with every creature being independent. Even from the very beginning, you'll have all sorts of animals running around stealing your starting resources which is somewhat amusing.

For the impatient, it can be sped up quite a lot too with a 300x speed, a feature I quite appreciated when waiting for some necessary building resources to be gathered in the blink of an eye — nice. I wouldn't use that speed often though, unless you want your people to die off rapidly. 

There's a lot of little individual things you need to learn about and keep an eye on here. Each villager has stats for food, water, rest, heat, overall health points and energy. So you need to ensure all their individual needs are met, while continuing to expand your village and keep everyone alive together. Quite something seeing everyone run around once you've built up a decently sized village to start unlocking more advanced buildings to expand further again.

An interesting job system too. Each person can work multiple jobs, and they have a workload percentage, so you have to balance how many jobs they have and what jobs people do, to keep up with all your growing needs. Plus, on top of that, various buildings have multiple output types for you to pick your priorities on. There's just so much of everything.

You also have events to deal with too with more people joining your village, or not, if you send them packing. Sometimes they have specific building requests too and I've no doubt the developer will expand the quest system through Early Access.

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Features:

• Unique deep simulation of the nature in a building strategy game with complex interdependence of humans in nature.
• Manage simultaneously the acquisition, refining and distribution of resources on multiple maps in different climatic conditions.
• Manage the needs of the citizens. They are “alive” and have a specific home, workplace, and unique needs.
• Animals are looking for food, get thirsty, sleepy and form social groups to find their place in nature.
• Plants grow and are affected by the actions of the humans, animals, and their environment.
• The seasons and climatic conditions affect the gameplay, as certain plants only grow in certain conditions and temperature affects humans, animals, plants, and the environment.
• Interact and trade with other factions where all items were crafted with same rules as for the player.
• Create own maps and scenarios in the editor and extend through mod support.
• Charming and calm low poly art style.

A fantastic start and with Early Access expected to last a few years, it has a lot of room left to grow still.

Check it out on Steam.