With Spirit of the Island, 1M Bits Horde presented a cozy tropical life sim that offered players endless freedom to build, farm, and explore. However, their upcoming project, Nested Lands, takes a very different approach. It replaces sunshine and relaxation with survival, struggle, and a fight against despair.
This tonal shift demonstrates how versatile the team at 1M Bits Horde truly is. Composed of developers with backgrounds in indie, AAA, and even web, their goal has always been to create games that players can enjoy for as long as they want, in any way they prefer.
In our interview with 1M Bits Horde, we discuss their inspirations, the challenges of switching from Spirit of the Island to Nested Lands, and their approach to creating worlds that feel both alive and unpredictable. But before diving into the conversation, let’s take a closer look at their games.
Spirit of the Island – A Tropical Life Sim With Endless Possibilities
If you’ve ever dreamed of packing up and starting fresh on a sunny archipelago, Spirit of the Island brings that fantasy to life with charm and depth. This life sim allows you to turn a forgotten island into a thriving paradise, and how you do it is entirely up to you. What starts as a quiet, empty place can be transformed into a lively tourist destination, filled with farms, shops, museums, and happy visitors eager to see what you’ve created.
Farming, raising animals, crafting, and cooking provide the relaxed satisfaction you’d expect, but tourism also plays a significant role, and attracting visitors adds a whole new level of fun. You can even recruit tourists to stay and work for you, making your island feel lively and busy. Every task contributes to your progress, helping you unlock new recipes, level up your ten unique skills, and improve at everything from fishing to socializing.
Images: 1M Bits Horde
Beyond your own island, the world of Spirit of the Island invites you to explore. There are 14 unique islands to discover, each hiding its own plants, animals, and secrets. Ancient caves filled with dangers and treasures call out to the adventurous, and if you’re brave enough, you’ll uncover mysteries that bring you closer to the truth of your past. Whether you’re looking for relaxation or the excitement of discovery, the game strikes a balance that keeps you hooked.
And you don’t have to journey alone. With cross-platform online co-op, you and a friend can build, farm, and explore together on PC, console, or even mobile. The art style is colorful and cozy, the pace is relaxed but rewarding, and the sense of freedom is unmatched. Whether you want a quick and satisfying story run or a long-term project full of creativity, Spirit of the Island lets you play at your own pace. It’s the perfect escape for anyone who loves farming sims but also craves adventure, exploration, and the joy of building something that truly feels alive.
Upcoming: Nested Lands – Surviving a World Beyond Hope
1M Bit Horde’s upcoming survival RPG, Nested Lands, throws you into a plague-ravaged medieval world where despair dominates and survival isn’t guaranteed. Bandits and madmen roam freely, winters are harsh, and disease spreads rapidly. Every decision matters because even a lack of medicine can be more deadly than a weapon. To survive, you’ll need to think quickly, adapt, and utilize every resource to turn a fragile group of survivors into a thriving settlement against nearly impossible odds.
The game promises a mix of RPG combat and detailed settlement management. You begin with nothing, but gradually build a new home amid the ruins of civilization. Set up farms, raise animals, and recruit other survivors to grow your community. Each villager you rescue opens new opportunities but also brings new responsibilities. You’ll need to assign roles, defend your walls, and make crucial decisions that could determine either prosperity or downfall.
Images: 1M Bits Horde
Nested Lands will also challenge you with a tough crafting and skill system. Combat is intense and unforgiving, requiring strategy and growth. Harsh weather, the approaching winter, and random events make you never feel completely safe. The game isn’t just about fighting enemies but about learning to survive in an environment built to break you.
You can face this nightmare alone or invite friends to fight with you using online co-op. Whether you want to lead a thriving settlement, become a feared warlord, or just survive another day, Nested Lands will push your limits. The question is: will you rise above the darkness or be consumed by it?
Interview with 1M Bits Horde
Your upcoming game, Nested Lands, has a very different vibe from your first game, Spirit of the Island. What inspired the tonal shift between these two projects?
In one world: challenge. We wanted to try our hand at something new. Something familiar, mechanically speaking, but with a completely different feeling to it. Because of that, we went uneasy instead of cozy, realistic instead of cartoon, dark instead of light. It doesn’t mean that all of our future projects will be different from the previous one, but it is the case this time.
Can you talk a bit about the core gameplay of Nested Lands and what you want players to experience?
The core of Nested Lands rests in creating a balance between its two main genres: Survival and Management. We’ve often used a phrase that sums this up pretty well: “You must survive to grow your village, and you must grow your village to survive”. The idea at the very core of Nested Lands is that you need a community to survive.
You need different people, all working together, to create a settlement capable of enduring all the threats of this putrid new world, be they the different factions that swarm the land, or the greatest foe of all, the Death Plague itself.
What unexpected challenges did you face when developing Spirit of the Island, and did those lessons carry over into Nested Lands?
Spirit of the Island was, in many ways, a challenge of time. Kikuchi, our head of studio, developed a big part of the game during his free time, with the help of a few different contractors and, eventually, the publishing team at META.
For Nested Lands, however, we have a larger team (although still small), which also requires more planning in the long term. So, to answer the question, production planning and time management of tasks and features which is something we are continuously improving as a company.
How does 1M Bits Horde approach world-building differently depending on the game’s tone?
The game’s tone will inform almost everything we do regarding the world. From the art style to mechanics that are either more or less forgiving, and, of course, the thematic elements of the narrative, such as the plot and the lore of the world.
In Spirit of the Island, we focused more on the positive side of the world and nature itself as a source of life, while in Nested Lands, the focus is less on the world itself, which is basically dead, and more on the human responses of different groups to such a catastrophic event. Some seek only survival, while others take the opportunity to enforce their vision of order, and others still succumb to complete madness.
Are there any external influences like books, games, or movies that inspire the stories or art in your games?
As a whole, we all have several influences that affect our work on Nested Lands in many different forms. That said, our main influences all come from the world of video games, relating to different aspects:
- For combat and exploration, we looked towards both Valheim and State of Decay 2.
- For the village management section, there was no greater inspiration than Medieval Dynasty.
- For the mood of the narrative, we looked towards Darkwood and The Forest.
- And, of course, we also took lessons from our time with Spirit of the Island, although more from a technical standpoint than a design one.
That said, we have also drunk from our own real history regarding our lore, with influences being drawn from Christian and Viking mythologies to create a world that is familiar, but also different.
Are there any experimental mechanics or ideas you’d love to try in future projects that haven’t appeared in your games yet?
Oh, many. Being a small team with big ideas means that one of the hardest aspects of game development is setting realistic design goals, and, sadly, cutting a good chunk of ideas early on. One such idea that we might like to try in some of our future projects is modular base-building, allowing for more freedom in the way players choose to express themselves through their settlements/homes/bases.
Were there any funny or surprising moments during development that made you laugh or shake your head?
At some point, there was a real discussion on making our main NPC “Balder” literally bald, as, before our translators began the manual process, Google Translate was naming him “mais careca” in Portuguese, which means, literally, “more bald”.
If you could spend a week in the world of Spirit of the Island, what would be the first thing you’d do?
Try the food. There is something magical about how perfectly consistent food is in video games, which, sadly, we can’t reproduce in real life. Give me some perfectly round and red apples, and I’ll be happy for a very long time.
If the characters from Spirit of the Island visited Nested Lands, who would survive the longest?
That depends. Bubba can probably survive by himself through fishing, but if anyone attacks him, he’s dead meat. Diana, on the other hand, can probably kill as many bandits as she needs to, but would depend on scavenging to find food.
Honestly, the person who might survive the longest would probably be Hermi. With her magic, she could start her very own cult and then just have her followers do all the work for her.
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