Operations
Lt. Mara Voss
"Negative. Seal the route and they'll dig a new one under our feet."
Frontier Defense Corps // Hadra-7
Hold the Ember Line.
The Kethra Swarm has woken beneath the Ember Line, and every one of them is heading for the last fusion reactor on Hadra-7. Build the maze, hold the core and keep the colony's heat alive.
Free on Steam · coming soon
See it in action
Tower defenseFree to playSingle-playerWindows PC
Open-field mazing
You draw the battlefield.
There are no fixed lanes. Every barricade and tower you place reroutes the swarm, so the map becomes whatever maze you can afford.
Funnel skitters into an incinerator's cone, stretch carapaces past a line of mortars, and keep a wall in reserve for the moment a breacher starts ramming. Sell and rebuild mid-wave if you have the nerve: the swarm always takes the shortest path you leave it.
Field manual
What you're working with
01
Six weapon towers
Autocannons, siege mortars, arc pylons, missile racks, incinerators and rail lancers, plus ferrocrete barricades. Upgrade to Mk III, then pick one of two tier-4 specializations.
02
Eight castes and a Titan
Skitters flood, leapers vault walls, burrowers tunnel under them and shrikes ignore the maze entirely. Then a building-sized Hive Titan walks in.
03
Commander support
Call down an Orbital Strike or an EMP Burst when the line bends. The cooldowns are long, so pick your moment.
04
A voiced campaign
Three missions of about twenty waves each, with briefings and live comms from the crew holding the colony together.
05
Endless mode
Win a mission to unlock its map in Endless, where the waves keep escalating until something gives. Usually you.
06
Free, start to finish
No ads, no microtransactions, no store. Mouse and keyboard or gamepad, with rebindable controls and scalable graphics.
Media
Screenshots
Captured in-engine from the current build. Select an image to view it larger.
The arsenal
Industrial tools, repurposed
The Frontier Defense Corps is a militia of miners, welders and haulers. Their weapons used to be mining equipment. Nobody here signed up to be a soldier.
Structure · the maze
Barricade
Cheap ferrocrete poured from refinery slag. It doesn't shoot; it decides where everything else gets to shoot. Paint walls with a drag, connect them into lines, and sell them mid-wave to reroute the swarm.
Kinetic · ground + air
Sentry Autocannon
Rapid-fire turret. Reliable against light targets on the ground and in the air.
Explosive · splash
Siege Mortar
Lobs high-explosive shells. Devastating against packed and armored ground targets.
Chain · slow
Arc Pylon
Converted ore-smelting coil. Chain lightning jumps between targets and slows them.
Missiles · air first
Skyhammer Missiles
Homing penetrator salvos that hunt flyers first, then anything on the ground.
Thermal · cone
Incinerator
Short-range flame cone that sets every ground target in it burning.
Rail · piercing
Lancer Rail
Long-range charged beam that pierces ground and air targets in a line.
Specimen list // Dr. Varga
The Kethra Swarm
Deep drilling cracked open a dormant hive under the Ember Line. The Kethra aren't conquerors. They feed on heat, and a fusion reactor is the hottest thing that has ever touched their world.
Baseline
Drone
The swarm's basic worker-soldier. Chitin plates, no real armor.
Fast swarm
Skitter
Small, fast and fragile on its own. Never on its own.
Armored
Carapace
Slow armored brute. Small arms barely scratch it. Use explosives.
Wall-hopper
Leaper
Vaults a single barricade instead of walking the maze. Double walls stop it.
Tunneler
Burrower
Dives under walls and towers, and can only be hit while it's surfaced.
Flyer
Shrike
Winged flyer. Ignores your maze and dives straight for the core.
Carrier
Broodmother
Bloated egg-sac carrier. Bursts into a pack of skitters when it dies.
Siege
Breacher
Ram-headed and heavily armored. Smashes whatever blocks its path.
Boss
Hive Titan
A walking hive heat-sink. Crushes structures, breeds skitters and shrugs off slows.
On the comms net
The people keeping the lights on
Chief engineer
"Dutch" Okafor
"Arc Pylon's live. Used to melt ore. Now it melts bugs. Progress."
Xenobiology
Dr. Ilse Varga
"Fascinating. The plating's denser than basalt. Bullets won't do it. Something that goes boom will."
System requirements
Before you deploy
| Operating system | Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit |
|---|---|
| Graphics | DirectX 12 GPU (DirectX 11 supported). Four quality presets plus render scaling. |
| Storage | 3 GB available space |
| Input | Mouse and keyboard, or a gamepad. Controls can be rebound. |
| Languages | English (interface, voice and subtitles) |
| Minimum / recommended | To be announced. We're benchmarking a range of PCs with the game's built-in benchmark and will publish tested specs here and on Steam. |
Ember Line command
The core is still warm. For now.
Garrison Zero is free on Steam. The store page is on its way.
Free on Steam · coming soon
Press kit