Gather and build
Chop trees, mine iron, bank what you earn and spend it before it burns a hole. Ring the castle with towers, choose what each one becomes, and push them up through five levels. The clock does not stop while you decide.
The loop
Hold what you built
Monsters come for the castle. Step outside its walls and they break off to hunt you instead — you have health out there, and going down costs you the rest of the night. Survive to dawn and it all starts again, harder.
What is in it
Ten towers
Ten fruit towers, each with its own role and special ability.
Choose what to build at every spot and upgrade it through five levels.
Champion monsters
From night three in Endless, monsters spawn carrying random
powers. Some stack several at once into a boss with its own banner.
Upgrade centre
A sprawling hexagon tree you can open anywhere, with a branch
growing from every material you bring back.
Crafting
Break down what you do not need into chunks, then salvage and
craft your way toward the gear you actually want.
Item corruption
Gamble your strongest items at the Workbench for power that
comes with a cost. Endless mode only.
Combat and survival
Six classes with their own experience and talent trees, a belt
that grows to eight slots, and twenty consumables to fill it with.
Who makes it
Wood or Die is built by Sverkerman, working alone out of Stockholm in the evenings around a day job in IT.
The habit started in 2010 with the Warcraft III World Editor and did not let go for twelve years — somewhere past ten thousand hours, and four published maps that were downloaded more than a hundred thousand times between them. That is where the taste for large systems that have to keep running came from.
In 2022 he was taken into NetEase's CliCli incubation programme, one of twenty picked from over a hundred applicants, and one of the games he built there, Hook Arena, was shown at GDC in San Francisco.
Roblox came next. Jetpackers Obby reached around twenty thousand players across 1,600 hours of development, with more than twenty contributors — artists, animators, composers, testers — to coordinate as project lead, and a custom item and inventory system he wrote front to back.
Wood or Die is the first one he is building on his own.
This update, by the numbers
- Started
- 11 May 2026
- Shipped
- 28 August 2026
- Hours
- 200+
- Commits
- 518
- Pull requests
- 94
- Changes
- 326
109 days from the first branch to release. Every one of the 326 changes is written up in the patch notes.