Survival RTS Cataclismo added a sandbox mode, because sometimes we just want to make our silly little castles in peace

A horde of horrors crash against the ramparts of a player-built fortress in Cataclismo. — (Image credit: Digital Sun)

In our Cataclismo preview earlier this month, we enthused about the survival RTS's toolset for meticulous base-building, which lets our inner Lego kids delight in the delicate, piece-by-piece placement of masonry, merlons, and murder holes. In fact, the building is so satisfying that the lack of a sandbox mode was one of our few sticking points. Good news: Cataclismo lacks no longer.

Earlier today Cataclismo got its first patch since its early access release, adding a much-requested sandbox mode. In it, you'll have unlimited resources to work with, letting you build without restriction whether you're exploring the strategic space or just honing your sense of castle aesthetics. It's an important skill: No self-respecting castellan just slaps merlons down wherever they'll fit. Imagine! A misplaced merlon! I can hear the courtiers chortling already.

While it's nice to have Cataclismo's building toolkit to freely play around with, it's an addition that'll provide some carry-over utility for the not-sandbox modes. Cataclismo lets you save blueprints, meaning if you make a substructure or defensive feature that's proved particularly useful, you can save it as a template to quickly deploy later without needing to place its individual pieces all over again. With Sandbox mode, you can design and save new blueprints without having to contend with the resource restraints and besieging mist horrors of the other game modes.

And, of course, you can let in a rampaging siege to see how well the defenses of your meticulously-sculpted fortress fare. Or you can just put a bunch of troops on your immaculate, impeccable architecture and, you know, just kinda look at them. I'd probably be doing a lot of that. That's real videogames, to me.

To celebrate the addition of sandbox mode, Cataclismo developer Digital Sun is holding a Lord of the Forts building contest in its Discord. The devs will apparently be judging on unit placement, strategic considerations, and most importantly, "aesthetics & almightiness." See? I told you about the merlon positioning.

Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.