Under Canopies

Under Canopies: build a forest home without the fighting

Gather materials, build your cabin and grow dinner. Under Canopies keeps the hunger and thirst of survival games, but leaves out combat, hunting and death.

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If gathering supplies and building a home are the parts of survival games you keep coming back for, Under Canopies puts them at the centre. You explore a forest in first person, collect materials and build a cabin piece by piece. Furniture and handmade decorations turn that shelter into somewhere you have chosen to live.

Your garden feeds the next trip

You plant seeds, water crops and use the harvest in cooking. Food has a practical place in the routine: hunger and thirst still need attention. Developer Novemtails says there is no hunting, combat or death, so looking after yourself does not turn into another fight outside the front door.

Exploration also gives you something to bring home besides supplies. You photograph wildlife, record discoveries and earn animals' trust. The camera gives you a reason to look closely at creatures you are not there to kill.

A wooden cabin seen from first person, with a building blueprint and construction controls visible.

Watering tomato plants in a raised garden bed; the hunger and thirst indicators remain visible.

A bear among autumn trees, framed through the in-game camera viewfinder.

Official Steam screenshots: cabin building, watering tomatoes and photographing wildlife. Images © Novemtails / Assemble Entertainment. Image source.

What you get in Early Access

The current version includes gathering, crafting, cooking, building and decorating, photography and animal interactions. Its story does not yet have a conclusion. Novemtails also lists balance, stability, optimisation and clearer progression among the work still to do.

The 0.6.19 update reports performance improvements and fixes to controller navigation. Those are the developer's patch notes, rather than a hands-on performance verdict from us.

Under Canopies entered Steam Early Access on 23 October 2026 for Windows. It is a single-player game, developed by Novemtails and published by Assemble Entertainment. A confirmed 1.0 release date is not available.

This is a game to consider if you want resource gathering, a growing garden and a home to work on, and are comfortable starting before the story is finished. If a completed narrative matters to you, that is a reason to wait.