Once Human

An open-world survival shooter set after a substance called Stardust rewrote the world. Reality is unstable, the monsters are surreal rather than zombie-shaped (a creature made of stacked furniture, a thing that is mostly teeth and hands), and you are a Meta-Human who can survive the contamination.

It plays like a third-person looter-shooter fused with a base builder. You gather, build a territory, craft weapons and gear, fight through hand-built dungeons, and capture Deviants: strange little creatures that live in your base and do jobs for you.

• Free to play, with cosmetic monetisation and a battle pass. You cannot buy power outright.
• Your territory is a placed, movable base with real building, power and automation.
• Deviants are the personality of the game: part pet, part appliance, part horror.
• Combat is gun-based with weapon mods and a build system, closer to a looter-shooter than to a survival melee game.

1. 1

   Follow the main quest chain

   It is the tutorial, the unlock path and the gear curve all at once. Do not wander off it early.

2. 2

   Place your territory somewhere useful

   Near water, resources and a road. Territories can be moved later but it costs you time.

3. 3

   Build the core crafting benches

   Furnace, workbench, cooking station, and power. Power is a real system with generators, wires and consumption.

4. 4

   Capture your first Deviants

   They fill base jobs (cooking, cleaning, defence, production) and some fight alongside you. Do this early, they are free labour.

5. 5

   Learn the weapon and gear system

   Blueprints and mods matter more than raw rarity. Read the mod effects rather than chasing colours.

6. 6

   Join a group

   The shared world means other players are around. Warbands and world bosses are the social content and they are far easier together.

• Territory building is full-featured: multi-storey structures, snapping pieces, power grids and automated production lines.
• Deviants are captured, housed and assigned. Some produce resources, some defend, some follow you into fights.
• Weapon blueprints and calibration are the real progression. Upgrading a favourite gun beats swapping constantly.
• Cradle and formula systems (the gacha-adjacent blueprint acquisition) are where the monetisation sits. It is generous, but it is there.
• World bosses and dungeons are the group content, on timers the server shares.

Each scenario is a themed season with its own map rules, objectives and duration. When it ends, the server winds down and you choose a new scenario to join, carrying over account progress and a capped bundle of resources.

• Different scenarios have different rules: some are PvE, some have PvP zones, some change the survival maths substantially.
• Blueprints and cosmetics you unlock are permanent across seasons. Bases and most materials are not.
• The reset is a feature: it keeps the world populated and gives everyone a shared starting line.
• If you dislike the churn, this is the wrong game on this shelf and Palworld or Enshrouded is a better fit.

The world was overwritten by Stardust, a substance that warps matter, memory and biology. Most people died or changed. You are a Meta-Human, able to move through contamination, employed by an organisation with its own reasons for wanting the zones mapped.

• The monster design is the lore: every creature is a human situation twisted into an object, and the game does not explain the joke.
• Deviants are fragments of the same phenomenon, which is why keeping them as household appliances is quietly horrifying.
• Story quests and recordings scattered through the map carry the main plot.
• The tone sits between cosmic horror and absurdity, and it manages both better than it has any right to.

• Servers are shared worlds. Other players are visible, tradeable and occasionally competitive for resources.
• Warbands are the group structure, and they make world bosses and endgame content viable.
• Co-op with a fixed group across a whole scenario is the best version of the game.
• Choose your server type deliberately: PvE and PvP scenarios are very different experiences.

• Do the main quest first, always. It gates too much to skip.
• Pick one gun archetype and invest. Spreading calibration across five weapons leaves you weak everywhere.
• Keep Deviants employed. An idle Deviant is a wasted worker.
• Check the seasonal carry-over rules before you hoard materials at the end of a scenario.
• Group up for world bosses. Soloing them is possible and slow.
• It is free. Try it for an evening before deciding whether the seasonal churn suits you.

• The official site and season announcements for the current scenario and its rules.
• The community wiki for Deviant lists, weapon mod tables and territory blueprints.
• Ask in our Discord. Free plus co-op plus a fixed season length makes this an easy group commitment.