EcoGnomix: A Roguelite City Builder That Doesn’t Always Go to Plan

Things never really stop moving in EcoGnomix. You’re either sending gnomes underground or patching up the village they crawled back to. One half of the day is chaos — last-minute tool repairs, restocking bread, figuring out who’s brave enough to scout deeper. The other half is quiet, spent watching scaffolding rise while your crew sleeps off another run.

You don’t control them directly — they have minds of their own — but you nudge them. Assign tasks. Set priorities. Shift buildings around to streamline the next day’s work. They’ll argue, hesitate, wander off for food, but they’ll get it done. And when the sun sets, they grab their gear and head into the caves like they’ve done it a hundred times before.

The expeditions are where everything tightens. Each underground run plays out in real time — no pausing, no takebacks. The gnomes dig, scavenge, build tunnels, and sometimes push deeper than they probably should. You don’t get to micromanage every move. You just plan, equip, and hope. There’s always a moment where it could go either way — a misstep, a wall collapse, one gnome falling behind without enough food. You can pull them out early, but that means fewer resources for the village. Let them stay too long, and you might lose the whole team.

Back on the surface, what they bring home matters. Each haul feeds directly into the build loop: wood for planks, stone for infrastructure, new tech trees unlocked by rare finds. And progress isn’t just functional — it’s visual. Your village evolves from a messy handful of tents into something sturdy, weird, and alive. Little quirks emerge — gnomes who hang out near the brewery too long, or refuse to sleep until the roof looks just right. It starts to feel less like a build order and more like a place.

You’ll mess up a lot. Build too fast, send the wrong loadout, overlook a system, and the next expedition crumbles. But that’s part of the rhythm. Failures leave behind scrap. That scrap becomes new gear. That gear makes the next run easier — until it doesn’t. You’re not building a perfect colony. You’re just helping a scrappy one survive long enough to become something worth keeping.

You’re not guiding them step by step. You’re just keeping the wheels turning while a bunch of noisy gnomes figure out how to survive you — and each other.

EcoGnomix is available on Steam.

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