Folklands: three brothers and a friend ship their 1.0 after four years, with five ways to win

The story of how this game was made is worth telling, because it explains the result.

Three brothers and a close friend, who have been making games together forever. First project: a deckbuilder, worked on intermittently for ten years, until one of them finally asked the right question. Does any of us actually like playing deckbuilders? No.

So they listed what they genuinely loved. The Settlers, the early Annos, Caesar, Pharaoh. And they made this.

What the game offers

You settle in uncharted land and look after your folk.

They need housing, food, employment and protection. You harvest, you refine raw materials into processed goods, you stack longer and longer production chains as needs grow.

And there is genuine care in the systems. One player points out that you can replant the trees you cut down, and that this is what revealed to them the depth of the sustainability management here. That is not trivial: most builders treat forest as a stock that depletes.

The danger is not military, it is domestic: fire, sickness, crime. You fight them through production and distribution, not with soldiers. There is an optional conflict mode and optional disasters for anybody wanting pressure, but the default mode is peaceful.

What 1.0 adds today

Two additions change the game's nature, and they ship today after four years of development, a year and a half of it in early access.

Five victory conditions, which you switch on or off before starting a game. Monument construction, prosperity score, regional dominance, and two others. The studio explains the thinking with some humour: when four people close to each other play together, somebody eventually asks who won.

A global market, letting you buy and sell instead of having to build every production chain yourself. It is smarter than it sounds: it makes specialisation useful. If your map is rich in oil and poor in vineyards, you produce surplus oil and buy somebody else's wine.

And since a friend can join a game already in progress, you no longer need to carve up the map at the start. Somebody turns up, finds a patch, realises you took all the oil, and works something else out.

Map generation was reworked too: size, water level and resource abundance vary, and the interesting resources are scattered, sometimes protected. Staying in your corner is no longer viable.

The early access reception, which needs reading

Here is the honest part, because 1.0 arrives carrying a history.

The game has 27 positive reviews out of 37, accumulated since March 2025. That is few, and more importantly the criticisms are precise and worth knowing before buying.

Optimisation comes up most often. Several players describe slowdown that worsens as a game progresses, becoming painful on large settlements. For a game whose whole point is growing a village, that is the worst possible place to have that problem.

Localisation is incomplete. Italian, Japanese and Chinese players report half-translated interfaces, with whole sections reverting to English partway through the tutorial.

And content divides opinion. Some find it vast after thirteen hours, others felt it did not justify its early access price.

What works in the game's favour is that this feedback covers previous builds, and 1.0 is precisely the moment when those jobs were supposed to be finished.

For whom

For anybody who wore out The Settlers II and has spent twenty years looking for something that gives the same sensation: carrying a resource from one place to another and watching it become useful.

At 10.35 euros, with online, LAN and cross-platform multiplayer plus planned Steam Workshop support, it is an honest proposition. But check the demo first, which exists, particularly if you intend to build very large settlements.

How many hours before your village burned down? Disaster stories are warmly welcomed on the InsertCoins Discord.