// Unreal Engine 5.8 · built with Claude over MCP
Wildreach
A living-world survival-builder in Unreal Engine 5. The boss is your imagination.
// the pitch
A world you want to live in, not beat.
Wildreach is a pure-sandbox survival-builder in the spirit of Valheim and Red Dead Redemption: a world you want to live in, not beat. Herds graze, drink, and bolt when spooked. Predators find carcasses you leave behind. Nothing hands you a quest — you explore, you discover, and what you discover unlocks what you can build, farm, and cook.
The fiction: you are inside an enormous biodome — ringworld scale, deliberately unexplained. It is why an elephant grazes beside a wolf beside a deer, and why studying a ruined structure can teach your hands to build one.
// already in the build
Systems, not promises
A world that lives without you
31 species roam, herd, graze, and flee. Spook the herd and it bunches and bolts; leave a carcass to rot and it draws predators. Every animal is huntable — and every animal is rideable, with saddle sockets, gait matching, and mounted archery.
Build like the Sims, gated like Valheim
A 153-piece, 13-category build catalog with a live 3D turntable preview of every piece. Grid snapping, Valheim-style snap points, free placement with fine rotate and scale, and one-key deconstruct. Higher tiers unlock by studying architecture you find in the world.
Farming with real agronomy
Till anywhere on the terrain, plant, water, harvest, and replant from your own seeds. 42 crops with growth tiers, watering that doubles growth, overcrowding penalties, and companion planting — the Three Sisters actually work.
Hunting that respects the animal
An over-shoulder bow with a predictive, gravity-matched trajectory arc, per-bone hitboxes, floating damage numbers, and skinning for meat, hide, and bone. Or skip the bow, sneak inside the hearing radius, and just watch.
Discovery is the map
An RDR2-style knowledge map: species you hear or see get permanent markers, and points of interest unlock systems — find the barn and farming itself becomes yours. Exploration is the soft gate; there is no quest log.
Survival without the punishment
Hunger, thirst, and stamina are soft debuffs, never a death timer. Cook at stations, drink from rivers, sleep off the night. Day/night cycle with a real moon, campfires and torches, and save/load that remembers your structures, kills, and dropped loot.
// in engine
Screenshots
Pre-alpha, straight from the editor — foliage, lighting, and polish are all still moving targets, and that's the point of building in public.
// how it's made
Built by driving the editor, not typing the code
Wildreach is an experiment in a new way to make games — and it is being run in public, every day, on camera.
UE 5.8's embedded MCP server
Unreal Engine 5.8 ships an experimental Model Context Protocol server inside the editor. Wildreach is built by pointing Claude at it: the AI places actors, wires Blueprints, builds UMG menus, and rigs PCG parameters — live, in the running editor, while the game keeps rendering.
100% Blueprint, zero C++
Every system — building, farming, herd AI, mounts, save/load — is a Blueprint authored over MCP. The project doubles as a stress test of how far the editor's own protocol can carry a real game.
The human owns the taste
The division of labor is documented, not vibes: Claude handles the plumbing — data tables, menu wiring, asset migration — while terrain sculpting, river carving, and art direction stay human. When the AI can't do rivers, the devlog says so.
Every lesson written down
A month of orchestration playbooks, MCP recipes, failure post-mortems, and division-of-labor notes lives alongside the project — the groundwork for teaching this workflow, not just using it.
// build in public
One month, on the record
- Jun 22
First commit: a walkable world and a working base-building system on day one.
- Jun 23
First deer in the world, plus the day/night cycle and save/load.
- Jun 24–25
Mounts, bow hunting, and herd AI that roams, bunches, and bolts when spooked.
- Jun 26
The name reveal: the WILDREACH main menu, the HUD, and the first build menu.
- Jun 27
Design v1 locked — pure sandbox, no bosses. Fantasy UI overhaul and a modular character with a persistent gender toggle.
- Jun 28
The full farming loop lands: till, plant, water, harvest, replant from your own seeds.
- Jul 1–2
Two full biomes built overnight — around 180,000 procedural instances — plus the discovery map and discovery-gated farming.
- Jul 4–5
Axe felling straight into the inventory, drag-and-drop item grid, hotbar, and ghost-placed tilling.
- Jul 6
Two-week feature showcase and the first public play-tester call.
- Jul 8–20
Meadow Park resculpted by hand, a snow-capped mountain backdrop, the oak-forest retheme, and PCG density sliders wired up by Claude.
// the road to early access
What's next
Persistent saves across levels, cooking depth, horseback archery polish, build snapping that feels as good as it looks, and a third biome beyond the Wilds and the Meadows. Story, multiplayer, and a combat layer are deliberately deferred — the sandbox comes first. Follow the devlog to watch every step land.