Progression — The Path
Alone has no quest log and no tech-tree screen, but it does have an order. You climb the same ladder humanity did: survive with your hands, then farm, then work metal, then engineer. Each rung is gated not by a recipe unlock but by real time and effort — knapping takes strikes, chopping takes minutes, firing takes hours-compressed-to-minutes, forging takes many blows across several heats. You don't skip a rung; you earn it.
The four ages below map to the real arc:
| Age | Real-world analogue | What it's about |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Survival | Palaeolithic / hunter-gatherer | Stay alive today with flint, fire, and what you can catch |
| 2 · Settling & Farming | Neolithic | Stop wandering — grow, store, and preserve a food surplus |
| 3 · The First Metal | Bronze Age / Mesopotamia | Clay, kilns, and the first worked metal; a village, not a camp |
| 4 · Iron & Engineering | Iron Age / Rome | Smelt and forge iron and steel; build to last; the long expedition |
This page is also a living audit. Steps you can do now are unmarked; ⏳ planned marks a rung that's on the Roadmap but not built yet. If the path has a hole — a step that's unrealistic, out of order, or missing a bridge between ages — it should show up here first.
Age 1 · Survival (Palaeolithic)
You wake with nothing. The whole day is water, food, warmth, shelter.
- Gather off the ground. Pick up loose rocks and sticks, and dig gravel — flint nodules sift loose bit by bit as you work. No tools needed; this is your first hour.
- Make a cutting edge. Knap flint with a rock (about ten strikes, and a novice shatters half of it) into a shard, then craft a flint knife, hatchet, pick, and spear. A crude wooden spear (3 sticks) can come even before the flint one — the oldest weapon there is.
- Make cordage. Strip plant fibre from grass and ferns, twist it into string, then rope — it feeds bandages, bows, and bindings.
- Make fire. Drill a friction fire with a hand- or bow-drill (it costs stamina, and skill makes it quicker), or — if the gravel has turned up a nodule of pyrite alongside the flint — craft a flint-and-pyrite strike-a-light: a struck fire that catches quick for almost no effort, though its cooler spark still needs dry tinder (it fails in the rain, where only a forged ferro rod holds up). Keep the fire fed with sticks and logs, and carry an ember to light the next one instead of starting over.
- Drink. Drink from cold, moving water (raw water is a gamble — cold and flowing is far safer than warm and still), or hot-rock boil it clean in a hide waterskin. In snow country you can eat a handful of snow in a pinch — but it chills you, so melt it if you can.
- Hunt and butcher. Most days you live on small game — rabbit, squirrel, and bird, a scrap of meat each, taken in numbers — while a deer is the rarer prize (a skittish grazer you stalk or run down; small animals wind quickly, a big one takes real endurance to tire). The spear's reach is your best weapon up close, and a slingshot (a forked stick, bands, and a pouch) flings a foraged loose rock to drop small game at a distance — the first ranged tool, before any bow. But the surest early food is a trapline: set free snares near cover, bait a deadfall for better odds, or drop a fish trap in the water — passive food that works while you do everything else. Walk the line and clear them. Run game down by persistence, follow a blood trail, and read the wind so quarry (and predators) don't catch your scent. A blade kill salvages the hide, bone, and sinew. Cook the meat over your fire. You can also fish for an easier, renewable catch — dig the soil for worms to bait the hook and pull up more — but a spot can be fished out, so work a lake or shore, not a puddle. The same holds for game: hunt one patch of country too hard and it thins out, so range widely rather than stripping one valley bare.
- Get out of the weather. Bed down on the ground at first, then build a roof and real walls — shelter and dryness are what keep the cold (and a blizzard) off. Wear leather from your hides for insulation — but keep it dry, since wet clothing barely warms you. And watch the sky: while you're out in the open you get a warning before a storm rolls in — time enough to get under cover, your fire covered, and your drying meat in.
You've survived. But you're still spending every day just staying alive — nothing accumulates.
Age 2 · Settling & Farming (Neolithic)
The turn from wandering to staying: grow more food than you eat today, and make it keep.
- Work clay. Dig clay by water, shape an unfired clay pot, and fire it hard in your campfire — open-hearth (pit) firing, the way the first potters hardened ware long before kilns existed — for a real water and cooking vessel. You can bake bricks from clay the same way. It's slow, one piece at a time — a proper kiln (Age 3) fires a whole batch at once. Woven baskets from plant fibre carry the light, bulky things.
- Plant a crop. Till the ground with a flint hoe (a knapped blade lashed to a handle — the way the Neolithic farmed, long before any metal), then sow and harvest. The point isn't calories-per-click, it's variety: a monotonous diet shrinks your usable hunger, and going without fruit or vegetables long enough brings on scurvy. Farming is the first thing that pays you back for settling down.
- Preserve the surplus. This is the whole point of a harvest you can't eat at once: dry meat into jerky on a rack (you hang it raw — drying is the preservation), salt it (boil seawater down to salt first), smoke it over a fire, or keep it cold in a root cellar or ice house.
- Guard the stores. Fresh meat reeks and draws predators — preserve or cache it so a wolf or bear doesn't take it (and stay downwind of them).
- Tend the field — a whole season's work. A crop takes ~one season to mature (28-day seasons now), and it can fail four ways: drought (keep it watered/irrigated, or it wilts — fast in summer heat), weeds (they sprout around the plot and choke it, and a neglected field sows its own), winter frost (which kills an exposed crop in days), and background blight. And the soil itself wears out: every harvest drains fertility, and farming the same crop on the same plot (monoculture) exhausts it fastest — so you rotate crops and let plots lie fallow to let the ground recover, as real farmers did. So a farm is several plots you cycle through and tend — water, weed, rotate, harvest before winter — not a one-time build. You pass the growing weeks by living your days (resting fast-forwards them).
- ⏳ Livestock as wealth — barter for animals (priced in grain), earned over many harvests, never found wild; and purpose-built stores (sealed barrels, hung caches, smokehouses) that beat the scent.
You have a surplus and a place. Now you can afford to spend days on something that isn't food.
Age 3 · The First Metal (Bronze Age / Mesopotamia)
A camp becomes a village: fired brick, high heat, and the first metal you can pour and hammer.
- Build a kiln. You can already pit-fire pottery and brick a piece at a time on the campfire; a kiln built of those fired bricks is the throughput jump — it fires a whole batch (a full stack) in one long, fuel-hungry burn, the first purpose-built heat structure above the open fire, and the reason a village turns out pottery and brick by the load rather than one at a time.
- Make charcoal. You need it hotter than wood-fire for metal: char wood down to charcoal (a burnt-out campfire leaves some; a furnace makes more). ⏳ A charcoal clamp will make it in bulk.
- Work copper — the first metal. Mine copper ore (a flint pick handles it), smelt it, and cast copper tools — the softest, most forgiving metal, worked without a full forge. Copper is your bridge off stone on the tool ladder (flint → copper → iron → steel), and it's a real gate, not a shortcut you can skip: a flint pick can't work iron ore, so you must forge a copper pick before you can mine iron. (Copper here stands in for the whole Bronze Age — there's no separate bronze/tin tier by design.)
- ⏳ The ash economy — hardwood ash → lye → potash, feeding soap and the glass flux.
- ⏳ Glass that gates itself behind forge heat, flux, and lime — arriving late as the trophy it historically was — plus glass bottles and seawater distillation for fresh water.
- ⏳ Irrigation & the wheel — finite, flowing water to channel, and the wheelbarrow above the travois you already drag.
You can pour and shape metal, fire brick, and store a season's food. What's left is to make it all harder, sharper, and permanent.
Age 4 · Iron & Engineering (Iron Age / Rome)
The top of the ladder: smelt iron, forge steel, and build works that outlast you.
- Mine and smelt iron. Iron ore needs a copper pick to work (a flint pick just shatters on it) — so Age 3 gates this. Then charge a bloomery with the ore and charcoal and let it run a long, hot, fuel-hungry burn into a bloom — then hammer that spongy bloom into an ingot, which is real work in its own right (about half a minute at the grid, consolidating the lump and driving out slag), not a free step. Iron needs more heat, more fuel, and more sweat than copper ever did — that's why it comes later.
- Forge and temper. A grid-crafted iron or steel piece comes out a brittle unforged blank. Heat it at a forge and hammer it on an anvil — many blows across several heats — and it rolls a quality from crude to masterwork. Re-tempering rerolls it (and repairs it), but lowers the ceiling each time. A whetstone keeps the edge honed between forgings.
- Make steel — the top tier. Blast an iron ingot into a steel ingot; steel tools mine at diamond level and steel armour sits above iron. Steel is the endgame metal (diamond is abolished as gear).
- Build to last. Ram earth into load-bearing rammed earth, shore your digs against collapse, and keep fire clear of your timbers.
- ⏳ Roman-scale engineering — concrete and aqueducts, roads (emergent from a horse + cart's demands), mills, up to rails as the logistics endgame; structures, relics, and villager barter for the old world's leavings.
- ⏳ The expedition. Run modes with self-set victory conditions (survive the winter, survive a year), and the Dragon as a multi-season campaign — the Nether as a heat-and-no-water death zone, obsidian as real logistics.
Realism notes & known gaps
The path is deliberately the real one, but a few rungs are simplified or still missing. These are the things to keep honest as the pack fills in:
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Copper stands in for the whole Bronze Age — by design. Real Mesopotamia ran on bronze (copper + tin), but Alone deliberately folds that into a single copper tier rather than modelling tin, prospecting, and alloying. Copper represents both, so the metal ladder is simply flint → copper → iron → steel. (This is a chosen simplification, not a missing rung.)
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Steel is a slight anachronism. Mass steel is really post-Roman; here it stands in as the game's top metal in place of diamond. Acceptable as a game-tier, but worth naming.
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The bridges between ages have real, verified gates. The metal ladder can't be short-circuited, and the enforcement has been audited:
- No stone-tier shortcut. Vanilla wood, stone, and gold tool recipes are removed (overridden to an unobtainable ingredient), so you can't craft a stone pickaxe to skip ahead — flint tools are the early tier.
- Iron needs copper. Iron ore and deepslate iron ore sit in the flint tools' incorrect list, so a flint pick can't work them; the vanilla copper pick (the next tier up) is the first that can. You must reach the copper age to mine iron.
- Iron needs the bloomery. The vanilla furnace/blast-furnace recipes for iron are neutralised too, so the only smelting route to an iron ingot is ore → bloomery → bloom → hammer it out. No furnace shortcut.
Each age still requires the last in spirit too: farming needs Age 1's fire and water; metal needs a food surplus to afford the days at the forge. Two sources of ready iron sit outside the forge on purpose: structure loot (the planned "old-world leavings"), and a village iron golem — which, being made of iron, realistically drops it when killed. Everything drops what it should; the golem is kept from being a cheap bypass not by removing its iron but by making it a genuinely dangerous fight you can't safely cheese. A golem now smashes through weak cover — dirt, wood, stone tier — to reach a target it can't otherwise get at (so a one-block hole or a thrown-up wall no longer keeps you safe), and it can strike a target perched on a tall pillar or ledge above it (so climbing just out of reach and hitting down no longer works). Its iron is earned in a real fight.
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Time and effort are the real tech tree. Every rung must cost what it did in life — the danger is a shortcut sneaking in (a fast craft, a free resource, a mob that drops good gear). When auditing, the question is always: could you really do this, this fast, with what you have?
See the Roadmap for the full list of what's planned, and Features for how each shipped mechanic actually behaves.