Crawler

Free to play in your browser (click Run game above), with Windows and Linux downloads below.

In most factory games, bigger is always better. In Crawler, bigger is louder, and louder gets you eaten.

Your base is a small platform on the back of a giant mechanical Crawler that stomps across a dead, cracked world generated as you walk. Park over iron and copper veins and your edge-mounted drills start mining. Belts carry ore to smelters, then to assemblers making gears and circuits, then into crates.

But every running machine makes noise, and beneath the ground, the Hunter is listening. As its awareness rises you get warnings: a faint rumble, cracks racing across the ground, screen shake, and finally a huge shadow under your platform and a countdown. Go silent, walk away, or throw it a decoy. If you don't, the ground heaves open and it tears a chunk out of your factory. Lose the cockpit and it's over.

Features

• Your factory is the danger: every machine has a noise value, and a creature underground hunts by sound.
• Stop or go: drills only work while the Crawler is parked, and a parked Crawler is easier to find.
• A factory puzzle, not sprawl: limited tiles, and weight that slows you down and makes your footsteps louder.
• Quiet tech: muffler plating, soft legs, sound baffles and decoy noisemakers.
• Leave the Crawler on foot to scavenge ruins for scrap, but it won't wait for you. Keep your pilot fed and watered with water extractors and greenhouses.
• Three regions, three Hunters: Ash Flats (the Burrower), Rust Canyons (the Listener) and Drowned City (the Leviathan).
• Save and continue, with autosave.

How to play

• Browser: press Run game, then click to start (the click lets your browser play sound). Fullscreen button at the bottom right. Keyboard and mouse needed.
• Windows: unzip and double-click Crawler.bat. If Windows says "Windows protected your PC", click More info then Run anyway. The game isn't code-signed; the zip contains the official LÖVE engine plus the game file.
• Linux: make the AppImage executable (chmod +x crawler-linux.AppImage) and run it.

Controls

WASD steer / walk · Space stop / go · E exit or enter cockpit, search ruins · Left click place / toggle · Right click remove · R rotate · 1-9, 0 build bar · F assembler recipe · U upgrades · H help · Esc pause

Crawler is v0.5.0 and in active development by a solo developer, made with LÖVE. Tell me in the comments what killed you!