e-River Cabin Journal

e-River Cabin Journal is a diary-driven survival strategy game set in the Alaskan wilderness. You choose a location, build and equip a log cabin, then plan how to make a sustainable life there through a full year or more. Survival means managing starvation, animal attacks, serious injuries and your own inexperience as the seasons change.

Daily life in Alaska

You choose tasks such as gold panning, fishing, hunting, felling trees, cooking and foraging. Each takes a realistic amount of real time to complete, and its outcome is recorded as a narrative in your cabin task journal. A diary entry for each new day describes events since the previous day. The game is designed to unfold across real hours, days, months and seasons, though Fast Forward lets you instantly complete up to 12 tasks per day.

Fate Cards add risks of positive or negative incidents as you pursue set objectives and become more capable. Planning, waiting for tasks to finish, reading what happened and deciding what to do next are central to the experience.

Survival activities

The game includes:

• Gold panning
• Hunting with a shotgun and rifle
• Ice fishing, lure fishing and fly fishing
• Fish trapping and small-game trapping
• Crafting and building
• First aid
• Repairing and servicing vehicles

Systems and trading

You can trade items and help NPCs and other players through a code system that does not require both players to be online. The map, weather, main animal groups and gold locations are persistent for all players, using algorithms. Forest fires, floods and avalanches can also occur.

A Fear system can benefit you from chatting with NPCs or having a hot drink. A Karma system changes how people treat you based on how you treat others and how you act.

Cabin additions

You can add a Hobby Room to specialize in a particular activity:

• Smoke House: make jerky and smoked fish.
• Geology Room: polish jade and garnet to increase their value.
• Gun Room: make your own ammunition.
• Rod Room: make lures and flies, and smoke fish.
• Potting Shed: get seeds to plant and herbs to eat; with a garden, it also provides a beehive for honey.
• Hot Tub: connect it to the cabin stove to help with hypothermia and heat exhaustion and prevent infection.
• Tanning Room: preserve and sell fur from game and wolves you shoot.
• Beer Still: brew beer.

You can also add equipment and facilities to improve your self-sufficiency, including a radio mast, solar panels, a food cellar and canning setup, a garden and duck pond, a wind turbine, and chinking.

Where you build

Your cabin’s location can affect what you encounter. Depending on where you build, you may receive post from home, find a railroad where you can flag down a passing train for a gift or a chat with the driver, or be beneath a Bush Doctor’s flight path so you can signal for healthcare.