Press kit

Last updated 19 August 2026.

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Fact sheet#

One line#

A persistent colony sim crossed with a procedural dungeon-crawl delve.

Short description#

Build a town on the surface. Send a squad down through the dark beneath it, fight what lives there, and haul the spoils home to build further. The threat grows against the same colony, run after run — there is no reset, and no starting over.

Longer description#

Cobnuts is a heavy-metal-fantasy colony simulation with a dungeon beneath it, and the two halves run on one economy. The colony is what makes the next descent survivable; the descent is what pays for the next expansion. Neither is a side mode.

What holds it together is that nothing resets. The colony is continuous from the first tick — a disastrous delve is the colony taking a hit and carrying on, the way a raid does in a colony sim, not a run ending and sending you back to the start. Threat sharpens against that same persistent town over time, which is something a player feels in the second hour rather than the fiftieth.

Underneath, it is a deterministic simulation written as an engine-independent Rust library, with Godot used only as the shell that draws it. That is why rival settlements can run the same simulation the player does — farming, researching, trading and starving on their own terms — rather than being scripted opponents.

The game is data-driven throughout: every building, item, creature and biome is a text file, and mods can run Lua against a versioned, read-only API. The modding documentation is generated from the live API surface and guarded by a drift test, so it describes the build it ships with.

What is distinctive#

• Two engines, one economy. Colony and combat feed each other in a single

loop, rather than a base-building layer bolted to an unrelated combat layer.

• Escalating threat against a persistent colony. The pressure mounts against

the town you have actually built, and it never resets.

• Rival colonies as peer simulations. They run the same simulation the

player does — an architectural consequence of a deterministic headless sim, not a facade.

• A squad descends, not a hero. The delve is a group operation staffed out

of your colony, and the people who go down are the people you were relying on upstairs.

What it is not#

Not a roguelike. There is no run and no reset-on-failure. The dungeon-crawl lineage is the right one — procedural, dangerous, descend-for-loot — but the run-reset is deliberately absent, and calling it a roguelike sets exactly the wrong expectation.

Assets#

The game is in pre-alpha and its art is placeholder, so there is no screenshot pack worth publishing yet — anything shipped today would misrepresent what the game will look like. When there is art that represents the game honestly, it will be linked here and announced in the devlog.

In the meantime, the wiki is generated directly from the game's own data files, so it is an accurate picture of what the simulation currently contains: 1,169 entities and their relationships, matching the build it documents.

Name#

Cobnuts, capitalised, one word, no article. A cobnut is a cultivated hazelnut; the name is unrelated to the food industry that grows them.

You may see the codename Groundwork in technical material such as file paths, identifiers and API documentation. That is the internal engineering name and it persists in identifiers for compatibility reasons. The product is Cobnuts.

Terms#

You may use anything on this page — text, the fact sheet, and any assets published here — in articles, videos and streams, commercial or not, without asking permission and without a revenue-sharing arrangement. Attribution is appreciated but not required.