Built by Day, Bitten by Night is a cozy voxel city-builder with a small problem: when the sun goes down, the zombies arrive. And the pirates. And the yetis, robots, and UFOs.
Lay out a sleepy hamlet of farms, fountains and mansions through the warm afternoon. Train soldiers, raise walls, stack mage towers and dragons. Then watch the sky turn red as moonrise brings waves of enemies to your gates — and your archers fire the first arrow of the night. How long can your keep stand?
This is the strategy / tower defense / city-builder hybrid for players who want both halves of the genre in one game: the meditative joy of arranging a perfect little kingdom by daylight, and the white-knuckle adrenaline of holding the line when the horde rolls in. It's the kind of game that's oddly satisfying to play — the click of a coin, the snap of a wall, the crack of a mage tower bolt — and dangerously addictive to put down. Just one more day. Just one more night.
Build By Day
Grow a voxel kingdom from a single stone keep into a sprawling realm. Houses, mansions, farms, chicken coops, pig pens, mage towers, cannons, catapults, tanks, barracks, dragons, rocket towers. Tax your villagers gently, keep them happy with fountains, statues, hedges and lamp posts, and watch your population tick from 5 souls into the dozens. Plant crops, harvest apples that fall from your trees, crack open glowing crystals that emerge in the corner mountains every few days, and grab treasure chests scattered across the corners of the island. Stack ground blocks under towers for range bonuses. Demolish anything for a 50% refund.
Crown the King
Save up 10,000 gold and crown your own King — a one-of-a-kind voxel NPC who walks the kingdom on his own. He's an auto-collector, not a fighter: he wanders day after day, vacuuming up your floating coins so you don't have to. The more coins he eats the fatter and slower he gets (capped at 50% chonkier) — until morning, when he marches out of the keep fresh again. He doesn't pick fights, but if someone hits him he swings a hammer that hits like a freight train. At dusk he heads home, climbs to the top of the keep, and — when the keep is under attack or a UFO drifts overhead — raises his hammer to summon Mjolnir-style lightning that crashes down on the threat. Long live the King.
Defend By Night
Dusk arrives. The music turns dramatic. The horde marches.
Regular zombies, skeleton armies pouring out of graveyards, pirate raiders disembarking from longships, plus huge boss fights against the Zombie Boss, the Giant Yeti, the Big Bad Robot, and the Zombie UFO — each with its own HP bar, off-screen direction arrow, and dramatic ragdoll dismember animation when dawn finally catches them. Walls, gates, towers and mage towers do the static work. Cannons and catapults hit hard with splash damage. Tanks, dragons and catapults are full RTS units — left-click to select, right-click to send them anywhere on the map. Train soldiers from barracks. Survive till sunrise for a survival bonus that scales with your day count.
Big Horde Nights
Every fifth night is a Boss Night — twice as long, dramatic music, a massive boss that crash-lands when slain. Every tenth night is a Horde Night: 30–40 weaker enemies flood the map at once for a They-Are-Billions moment. And every hundredth night the screen turns black and red and the words flash up — "THEY ARE BILLIONS! They're coming from all sides!" — as hundreds of enemies pour onto the map at once. The FPS-friendly weak-spawn pool keeps everything butter-smooth even at peak chaos. Will your walls hold?
A Living Island
The world isn't a backdrop, it's a place. A real-time day/night cycle rolls through dawn, gold-hour day, dusk, and starlit night. Winter rolls in every 7–10 days, turning grass white and waking the Yeti — farms freeze, apples stop dropping, snowmen siege the gates. Storms sweep in with lightning and rain. Pirate ships sail the offshore horizon and drop loot chests when they leave. Seagulls flap over the early-game map. The ocean ripples behind every passing ship; fish jump on lazy afternoons.
Two Ways To Play
Survival — full enemy escalation, boss nights every 5 days, pirate nights every 4, horde nights every 10, massive nights every 100, harder waves as your treasury grows.
Peaceful — no enemies, ever. Just you, the calm soundtrack, and an island to make beautiful. Music stays on the soft day tracks all night long.
Three world sizes — Small, Medium and Large — pick your scale.
Epic, Cinematic Soundtrack
Four hand-crafted music tracks (two day, two night) cross-fade smoothly at dusk and dawn — never restarting, never jarring. Crank it up: in Peaceful Mode the day music keeps playing through the night so the cozy vibes never break. Master volume sliders for music and effects live in the pause menu and persist across sessions.
Your Kingdom, Saved Forever
Auto-save every 10 seconds plus a dawn checkpoint every day — exit any time and pick up exactly where you left.
Resume / Start New buttons appear on the menu the moment a save is detected.
Save & Exit writes your progress to disk before the window closes.
Restart wipes everything for a fresh run with the mode picker.
Run stats panel inside the pause menu shows live counts: population, kings, kills, gold, mansions, defenders, walls, happiness — your whole reign at a glance.
Hand-built Voxel World
Every tree, building, animal, soldier, zombie — and your fat happy King — is a sculpted voxel model. Real-time shadows track the sun. Particles celebrate every coin floated, every boss exploded, every leaf falling at the start of winter. Antialiased silhouettes, soft shadows, season-aware lighting.
Inspired by the greats
Built by Day, Bitten by Night is a love letter to a decade of cozy and brutal builders we grew up on — Kingdoms and Castles, They Are Billions, Diplomacy is Not an Option, Going Medieval, Northgard, Kingdom Two Crowns, Tiny Glade, Townscaper, and Banished. Cozy when you want it. Brutal when you don't. Strangely satisfying either way.
How long will you survive?
Try Early Access and share your feedback!
