III: Settlemoon

Recommended by: metamour Theo

Settlemoon is a 2023 idle game from Lepioid, who also went on to make the Aetherverse game Dreams of Aether in 2025.

Theo knew exactly what he was doing when he handed me this: Settlemoon is absolutely me-targeting in an almost hilarious way, right down to most of its in-game text being in a cipher. The game is so deliberately obtuse that its 1.1 patch was called "The 'The Game Actually Explains Things' Update". I am certain that I managed to finish this game without fully understanding several mechanics, and that I likely never will, because looking up how the game works feels antithetical to its artistic vision.

So, yeah, it's exactly my kind of bullshit.

Settlemoon is about an in-game MMO of the same name, complete with a diagetic fake login screen. Basically everything past that is pretty much vibes: most character names are in the in-game cipher, as well as most of the cutscenes, post-boss dialogue, etc, so gleaning specific details of the story is intentionally extremely difficult. This mechanical obfuscation extends into basically every aspect of the game: enemy damage works on...some formula, equipment probably gets better as it gets tougher to acquire (but this is never actually explained), even "what a building does" is intentionally opaque. Some buildings have the quest icon and a +2, so those let you take two more quests, neat, but the post office has...an envelope. Well, you can do envelope things, that's cool. A lot of buildings have the same icon: for example, several different trees exist, and moths can land on them that drop critical items. Do different trees have different chances of different moths? No idea! And I likely never will. And I love that as an experience.

Mechanically, Settlemoon is...an MMO simulator, basically? When the game starts, you're prompted to place a moon into the sky; this default moon lasts for 12 hours, and if it extinguishes, the game stops running until you reinteract with it to drop another moon. Players of the in-universe MMO visit your town, go on quests to find loot and fight bosses, which you can use the drops from to either build new buildings for your town or to hand to a shop to turn it into equipment or items, which can then be bought and equipped by the in-universe player characters so they can fight harder things, kill bosses faster, etc. It's a very neat framing device, and it makes for an absolute delight of an idle game, as you can always just set up some quests to repeat for as long as someone wants to take them, dump 99 of a potion into your potion store, and close the game and come back to tons of dead enemies and the PCs having bought a giant pile of potions. You always have the option for the twelve-hour moon, but the aforementioned moths drop different moons that last for six hours and run 50% faster than the basic one if you want to check in more often. (Each of these also has one enemy exclusive to that moon, which you'll need to fight at least once to get it added to your list of things PCs can farm, since they also all have a drop exclusive to them.)

The game just...sprawls from there, really? The basic loop never changes: players buy gear from the drops from things they've fought and use that to fight enemies to get drops to..., yeah, just, well, a basic MMO, y'know? But, oh, you fought this boss and now some new numbers appear, and there's another mechanic to consider. This boss drop lets you build a building that does...something. There's a mysterious cocoon in the middle of the town that you can't readily interact with, but you did just unlock a new building, maybe this will...no, it doesn't. I'm sure it's all fine.

Settlemoon is just...delightful and unobtrusive and cozy. I started it on January 1st, knowing only "it's an idle game with an ending", and when those are NGU, that can be a months-to-years affair. (I also trusted that Theo would not give me a game that took more than a year to complete, of course :p). But I had no real idea of the scope of this game or lack thereof. Having finished it, with an utterly meaningless Steam playtime of 283 hours (read: "it was running on my desktop playing itself or doing nothing for ????? amount of that time because I'd forgotten to drop another moon"), I still don't. There's a second quest that's different somehow which I may visit in the future, but for now, I'm just delighted to have experienced this.

It's left me thinking a lot about how much I engage with games via needing or wanting absolute mechanical certainty, and how my autistic tendency for optimization can leave me unable or unwilling to entertain other options. This is, after all, why I'm mostly unable to play MMOs myself, with my most recent attempt having been at picking up my wife's enthusiasm for Warframe and having needed to drop it after Val-who-appeared-in-the-intro-post-of-these-writeups gently called me out for letting it eat all of my time. It is, after all, strictly more efficient to level up weapons in ESA than a lot of other ways, so if it's mathematically best to pick Dante and level three weapons at once, I must do that, even if that means that I've suddenly done multiple dozens of the exact same run and ground my enjoyment of the game to dust.

I meaningfully cannot do this with Settlemoon, in part because there's not exactly a huge community for this game and therefore no real data mining has been done, but the more interesting thing by far to me is that it provides the rare case in which I do not want to. I know that [claw icon] is a damage type. I know that this boss is weak to [claw icon] and resistance to [snowflake icon]. I think I had a good grasp roughly of how to get characters to deal more [claw icon] and less [snowflake icon] so they can kill that boss more easily (and I do have the "one-shot every boss" achievement). But...am I missing information about this? How do the different elements interact? Are fire and ice opposed, and if I get some of one I'm sacrificing the other? If I turn on all of the "get an element" towers, do I get them all more slowly, and leaving only a couple on makes them faster?

I have literally no idea what the answer to any of these questions is, and I...don't care? I just wanted to live in the world for a while, watching my little creatures do little creature fake fantasy MMO things, getting the guild together to go raid Cerise as their first boss fight as a group, imagining the transient relationships between them, the conversations, the lived-in-ness of the Settlemoon world. This game managed to, somewhat inexplicably, conquer a brain behavior that typically feels like a geas, just so I could inhabit it as intended. And I loved it for that. Doll Scale 5/5.