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IndieUnder CanopiesNovemtailsAssemble EntertainmentCozySurvival CraftingEarly Access

Under Canopies: Cozy Survival With No Combat on Steam

Under Canopies is a cozy survival game with no combat: build a cabin, cook 30+ recipes and befriend wildlife. Now in Steam Early Access from a solo dev.

Official Under Canopies Steam header: a painted blue forest valley with pine covered hills, a small yellow tent glowing beside a campfire in a clearing, a large moose with broad antlers resting on a rocky outcrop at right, and the yellow Under Canopies wordmark with Early Access Out Now lettering at top center (Novemtails, Assemble Entertainment)

Under Canopies (Steam). Hover for a Voidge draft sketch inspired by a fragment of the header key art.

Honestly, I did not expect a survival game to lower my blood pressure. Under Canopies is a cozy survival game with no combat: you build a cabin piece by piece, grow and cook your own food, and earn the trust of the animals living around you instead of hunting them. It hit Steam Early Access on October 23, 2026, from a solo developer in Mexico who spent almost four years on it. App ID 2939510.

Early players are into it too. As of about 11:00 BRT on October 27, the store shows 97% of 36 user reviews as positive, rated Positive. The launch price is US$14.99, with an introductory 25% discount to US$11.24 until November 6.

Open the clip on X if the embed does not load. Cut from the official Under Canopies short trailer.

Survival without the stress

Here is the hook, and it is a pretty solid one. You still have hunger, thirst, energy and temperature to manage, so the survival loop is real. But in the developer's own launch post there is no combat, no hunting, no killing animals, and you cannot die. The store puts it nicely: you do not fight nature, you join it, and the only enemy is inefficiency.

That changes the whole mood. Survival crafting usually means you sprint home at dusk because something with teeth is out there. In Under Canopies, dusk is just when the sky turns pink and you think about what to cook. It is first person, fully 3D and cartoony, with chunky painted forests that look great in motion. If you liked the gentle no fighting vibe of our Huglings writeup, this one is the solo, first person cousin.

Build a cabin, piece by piece

Heck, the building is the part of the trailer I kept rewinding. You start from scratch and raise your own refuge with foundations, walls, windows, doorframes and roofs that snap together, then fill it with furniture, decorations and handmade bits. The first patches already smoothed out snapping and improved door fit across all six building material sets, so the dev is clearly tuning this system hard.

Official Under Canopies screenshot: a sunny forest homestead with a wooden raised garden bed holding young green sprouts and little wooden plant markers in the foreground, a red wooden bench and a red roofed wooden stand behind it, a wooden chicken coop with a wire mesh run and a white hen on a log at right, a tall metal water tower on stilts in the middle, a big redwood trunk, pine trees and a white rail fence under a bright cloudy sky (Steam)

Under Canopies (Steam). Hover for a Voidge draft sketch inspired by a fragment of the homestead screenshot.

Cook, grow and keep the chickens happy

Farming is the next layer. You gather plants, tend a garden, water your crops and combine ingredients into over thirty recipes. The animals are part of daily life, from chickens and sheep to bees and wild creatures, and each one has its own trust progression. Feed them, care for them, and they slowly warm up to you, with rewards like new recipes along the way.

That trust system is what clicked for me, and I'm into it. Befriending the fox or guiding the deer to water before offering it a stew sounds tiny, but it gives you a reason to wander that is not loot. You bet I would rather earn a fox's trust than skin it for a backpack upgrade.

Wildlife photography instead of hunting

Then there is the camera, which kinda becomes your weapon replacement. You photograph the wildlife you meet and fill an album, and the journal tracks what you discovered. It is a soft collectathon, the same itch our Cat Me If You Can post scratches, just out in the woods with bears and deer.

Official Under Canopies screenshot: the in game camera viewfinder framed in white over a darkened screen, showing a brown bear walking through a grove of white birch trees with bright golden yellow leaves, a pale blue hill behind and a field of tall orange grass in front, with a zoom slider at right and Take Photo and Close button prompts at lower left (Steam)

Under Canopies (Steam). Hover for a Voidge draft sketch inspired by a fragment of the wildlife photography screenshot.

What our clip shows

Three takes from the official Under Canopies short trailer on Steam. First, a walk through the pines, an axe swing into a tree trunk and the camera coming up to frame the lakeshore. Second, a pickaxe cracking a big pink boulder into chunks, then a look at the hand drawn map. Third, rain over the lake, a floor piece snapping into place and the finished wooden cabin. No menus, no logo cards.

What is in Early Access right now?

According to the Steam page, you can explore the Sanctuary, gather resources, craft and cook, build and decorate shelters, use the camera, find letters and get to know the animals. The tutorial and early progression run across several hours, but the story has no ending yet. On X, the developer told one player the current build takes about three hours to finish, so take a look with that in mind.

The plan is roughly three months in Early Access. The roadmap lists a Photography Lab with a companion and a canoe, food preservation and more cooking, and an underground biome with the narrative finale, which the store ties to a new cave and a Great Axolotl whose trust you have to earn. The store also says the price will go up after Early Access. Patches are landing fast: three rounds of patch notes in the first four days, including a manual save button in the pause menu.

On Steam it is Windows only. The minimum is Windows 8.1 or 10 (64 bit), an Intel Core i5 2400 or AMD FX 6300, 8 GB RAM, a GTX 670 or R9 270 and 3 GB of storage. It lists full controller support, Steam Cloud and 10 languages, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese included.

Who makes Under Canopies?

Steam lists Novemtails as developer and Assemble Entertainment as publisher. In the launch post, Novemtails introduces himself as Roberto, a solo developer from Mexico who has been learning game development for about 12 years, and says this is the first commercial game he has made and released on his own, built while sharing the workspace with his nine cats. Assemble came on board as publisher in June, and on X he says the deal let him bring a team on board for launch. Before that, the game passed 50,000 wishlists. On X, @novemtails has about 631 followers and thanks people who share the game.

Is Under Canopies worth it?

For sure, if you want survival crafting minus the anxiety. Fair warnings: it is Early Access, the content is short for now, it is Windows only, and the first patches show there are still bugs to squash. But the core loop of build, cook, befriend and photograph already hits, and that intro price makes it an easy yes for me. Take a look on Steam before November 6.

Image credits & rights

Images on this page are hotlinks from the official Steam store assets for Under Canopies, used with respect for their copyright.

Squad takes

What the others think

  • Pixxer
    Pixxer

    Honestly, the palette is the whole pitch. Teal pines, tangerine birch groves and those pink dusk skies make every screenshot read like a postcard, and the chunky painted shapes keep a busy homestead easy on the eyes.

  • Nyxe
    Nyxe

    Reckon the introductory price is the proper window, since the dev has said plainly it goes up after Early Access. Three months to 1.0 is a tidy plan, provided the patches keep landing this quickly.

  • Junno
    Junno

    Deadass, a survival game where you literally cannot die sounds cooked on paper. Then you remember the genre spent ten years making you fight wolves at 2 AM, and no hunting, no killing actually goes hard.