A fire that never stops dying.
It's called Stick Picker Simulator. You pick up sticks. You feed a fire. That's the joke.
Then the fire starts draining faster than the twigs by your feet can fill it, the night comes in cold, and you realize the only wood worth hauling is the dense hardwood out past the dark — and the longer you're out there, the closer your fire gets to going out.
It's a cozy-looking game about a very uncozy problem: the fire is everything. It's your health bar, your light, your warmth, your save point, and the only thing keeping a frozen town alive. Nothing you ever unlock makes it drain slower. You just get better at feeding it.
The whole game in one sentence
Carry warmth out into the cold and back — before the clock kills you.
Every system is that one tension in a new key:
Sweep, don't click. Glide through the twig ring and vacuum up fuel in long, satisfying runs. Go light and fast, or load up and lumber.
Push outward. The inner rings get picked clean as the days get colder. By day six, camping by the fire isn't enough — the good wood is deep, and the trip out is a held breath.
Tend the coals. Dense hardwood settles into a glowing coal bed that slows the burn — while it lasts. Slow-burn is a thing you keep re-earning, not a thing you buy.
Light the dark. Plant torches and flares, carry a lantern, brave frozen ruins and procedural dungeons where the cold itself is the enemy and light is your only answer. No swords. Just you, the dark, and how far you dare to walk.
Build a run. Grow a town. Push deeper.
Grow your fire from a Campfire to a roaring Beacon — each tier a bigger warmth ring, a bigger light, and a hungrier clock.
Wake a frozen town one building at a time. Survive nights to raise morale, light windows on the horizon, and unlock vendors, perks, and a second shop deep in the cold.
Draft dawn favors — a pick-one-of-three card each morning that shapes the run, and is lost when the fire dies. The roguelite character you assemble every life.
Find relics in the dark — rare, run-defining wildcards you can only find, never buy. The lantern that floods the void with light. The wraps that laugh at the cold. The relic you'll miss when the next run doesn't draw it.
Catalogue blueprints from the deepest caches and craft dependable gear back at the Workshop.
Earn Frost — a cross-run currency, minted only by going deep — and spend it on a meta tree that widens what's possible without ever making home safer. Attune to one of three Disciplines (Coldstrider, Pyrekeeper, Warden) and play the build you grew.
Built to be watched
The whole screen tells you how scared to be. A warm pool of firelight against an endless blue-black void — the fire glow, the over-the-shoulder glance, the gutter as it starves. You can read the danger from a thumbnail, which means everyone watching can too.
The promise we don't break
Nothing reduces the fire's drain. Ever. No upgrade, no amount of grinding makes your home fire safer. Everything you earn lets you go harder and farther — never lets you relax. The clock is sacred. That's the entire game.
Features
A tense survival loop with a cozy low-poly look and a deadpan sense of humor
A single world of concentric rings, frozen ruins, and procedural dungeons to explore
A frozen town that wakes building-by-building as you survive
Roguelite dawn favors, found-only relics with run-scoped upgrade tiers, craftable blueprints
A cross-run Frost meta tree + three attunable Disciplines for the long game
Earl, a weary frontier merchant who has opinions about your life choices
Single-player. Keyboard. Steam Deck friendly.
Save anytime — automatic and manual, resume exactly where you left off.
Adjustable difficulty — Cozy, Standard, or Hardcore; change anytime in Options.
