Medieval city builder Foundation now in Early Access, already has game-changing mods

Freeform medieval city builder Foundation entered Early Access earlier this month, and modders are already hard at work creating brand new game modes.

It's a completely grid-less city builder in which you paint zones on the land and watch your citizens fill in the gaps naturally. That can lead to satisfyingly curvy streets and squares popping up at junctions—the idea is that you'll get "organically sprawling cities that grow like actual medieval cities".

You also build your own monuments, including abbeys, churches and castles, by slotting together modules in an in-game tool, and then watch them come to life in your city. As ruler of the city you have to stay on good terms with its various factions, and doing so will unlock more buildings. You'll also complete "procedurally-generated quests and narrative-driven events".

Mod support is another big selling point, and you can already grab a handful of mods at Mod.io, a new site from the folks behind ModDB. There are only nine at the moment, but some of them change the game completely: there's an Easy Mode that makes building cheap and quick, as well as a Fast Start mod that will help you breeze through the opening stages. Browse them all here.

The early Steam reviews are mostly positive, and good portion of the negative ones are more "wait and see" than anything else. Bear in mind that the Early Access version only contains around 40% of all the planned content, so it might seem fairly basic at this stage. Developer Polymorph Games says it will remain in Early Access for around a year.

If you want to play, it's $30/£27 on Steam.

Check out the Early Access trailer, below.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.