Under Canopies sets cosy forest survival for 23 October

Under Canopies finally has a date. Assemble Entertainment and indie studio Novemtails will put the no-combat forest sim into Steam Early Access for PC on 23 October 2026, confirmed with a release-date trailer and a store page that now reads 23 Oct, 2026.

The pitch is a survival game with the survival taken out. You are dropped into a bright, storybook forest with a journal and a camera, and your job is to build a life there rather than fight for one. No raiders, no hunting and no violence: the store page is blunt about it, promising that exploration is about discovering resources, watching wildlife and writing each find down.

What you actually do in the forest

The loop is homesteading. You build a cabin from scratch and then fuss over it, crafting furniture, decorations and handmade items to fill the rooms. Farming supplies the kitchen: plant crops, harvest them, collect what the forest gives you and cook from more than thirty recipes. Animals are neighbours rather than resources, and the announcement is specific about the difference — feed them, care for them and earn their trust, whether you are keeping chickens, sheep and bees or simply watching what turns up at the edge of the clearing.

Photography is the hook that separates this from the pile of gentle farming sims. A wildlife album sits at the centre of exploration, nudging you to slow down, find new species and fill the pages, with your journal recording everything you discover along the way.

What has changed since the first reveal

This is not the game that was first shown. Novemtails says the months since the original announcement went into progression and a rebuilt tutorial, an expanded building system, a farming layer that did not exist before, better animal behaviour, new resources to find and more things to craft and cook. A demo has been live for a while, so Early Access is arriving after a public test rather than instead of one.

Our opinion

No-combat survival has quietly become its own genre, and its marketing has become oddly competitive about the absence of violence. Under Canopies is making a bigger bet than most: instead of bolting a threat on top of the farming loop, it replaces the threat with a camera. That only works if curiosity is a strong enough engine on its own, and the wildlife album is the cleverest thing in the pitch because it turns wandering into a checklist without ever putting a monster in the trees.

The risk is the Early Access calendar. 23 October drops the game into a crowded autumn, and cosy sims live or die on how much of a life there is to build after the first weekend. If the forest keeps producing new species, new recipes and new reasons to wander, the missing combat will read as confidence. If the album is the whole game, players will notice the silence.