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Watch trailer on Steam ↗Plains of Pain
Cobra Byte Digital · Published by Cobra Byte Digital · Official site ↗
Content notice: Contains violence and in-game blood.
Very Positive — 83% positive (1,035 reviews) · 4 achievements
Last updated 27 Sept 2026
Enter a living post-apocalyptic sandbox where the world doesn't wait for you. Build, craft, trade, earn the trust of factions, and forge your own path through a brutal procedural wasteland.
£7.53
£16.75Lowest price we've ever recorded
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Price history
Action, Adventure, Indie, RPG, Simulation, Massively Multiplayer, Early Access · 2023 · More £5 - £15 games
Embark on a journey through a harsh post-apocalyptic world in Plains of Pain. Craft your survival strategy by building, trading, and earning trust among factions as you navigate this early access indie RPG.
About this game
The sun is your deadliest enemy.
In Plains of Pain, you fight extreme heat, thirst, toxic air, and ruthless enemies in a vast post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Build bases and settlements, trade with NPCs, craft gear and anti-gravity hover vehicles, and use them to move faster across the desert.
Outposts are constantly fought over by factions. Survive solo or with friends and decide where you stand.
THE STORY BEHIND PLAINS OF PAIN
Humanity stood at the peak of technological achievement when it all went wrong. For reasons no one could explain, the sun began unleashing colossal solar flares—so powerful they vaporized Mercury and Venus within days. Earth was next. The heat rose, fast and merciless. Panic spread like wildfire.
The world’s leaders didn’t save anyone. They saved themselves. In a secret evacuation project, the powerful and the wealthy abandoned Earth, leaving the rest behind to face the inferno. Civilization cracked, then crumbled. What was once a thriving world fragmented into chaos and dust.
The land is now a scorched wasteland. Blistering heat and relentless drought have drained the planet dry. Most of the remaining survivors lost their minds long ago—wandering the deadlands in search of scraps of food or drops of water.
Two factions now fight to bring some semblance of order to the madness. Each claims to be humanity's last hope—but they have very different visions of what the future should look like. If you don't have reputation with them, you're nothing. Just another ghost in the heat.
And this is where your story begins.
You're no one. No past, no protection—just the will to live. Survive however you can. Earn trust from the factions... or walk your own path. Stay neutral, or pick a side. There are no easy choices. Trade, build, explore. Dig into the ruins of the world and decide for yourself who’s right, who’s wrong—and who’s already lost.
GAMEPLAY MODES
Survive your way—solo or with others. Plains of Pain offers full singleplayer, co-op with friends, and online play on official or community servers. Prefer local play? Host or join a game over LAN. Whether you're a lone survivor or part of a crew, the wasteland is waiting.
BUILDING
Build your home, your base—or an entire settlement. Use modular pieces for total creative freedom. Set up stations to purify water, craft materials, and survive. Grow into an outpost with barracks, sniper towers, and a Grand Shack that supports wastelanders—if you can supply food and water. Find blueprints in the wasteland, trade for them, or loot them off the dead.
VEHICLES
Traverse the wasteland in advanced hovering vehicles built with future tech. Craft them from blueprints found or bought, fuel them up, and hit the dust. Each vehicle comes with storage, a fuel tank, and unique fuel types. Upgrade speed, acceleration, armor, durability, and more. If you want to explore the far reaches of the world—you're gonna need a ride.
SURVIVING
The wasteland doesn’t forgive. Learn to manage thirst, hunger, heat stress, radiation, biohazards, and fatigue—or die trying. Face off against deadly enemies, loot their bodies, and decide what’s worth carrying. Deal with Overheat events, meteor showers, and brutal bandits. Choose your allies, find traders, upgrade your gear. There’s no single way to survive—only what works. For now.
FACTION WARS
The wasteland’s outposts hold rare and vital resources—and the factions want them all. Their forces fight to claim and defend each one. As a lone survivor, you can tip the scales. With enough reputation, you can capture outposts for a faction of your choice, shifting power across the land. No outpost stays safe for long.
QUESTS
Begin with intro quests that teach you the basics—but the real journey starts when you explore. The wasteland is filled with NPCs offering hidden tasks, challenges, and rewards. Some quests are key to increasing your skill caps, letting you grow stronger. Bigger, story-driven missions are coming later—but even now, there’s no shortage of quests. You just have to find them.
SKILLS
Customize your survivor with a bunch of unique skills that shape how you play. Earn experience points (XPs) by eliminating enemies, building, trading, looting, or completing quests. Each level grants a Skill Point to spend—boost your health, regeneration, melee damage, or fine-tune your stealth, critical hits, trader prices, firearm accuracy, and more. Every choice makes a difference in the wasteland.
CRAFTING
Craft to survive. Build melee weapons, firearms, ammo, armor, and gear like backpacks or shoulder plates. Cook food, assemble vehicle parts, or make containers for precious liquids. In the wasteland, crafting isn’t a choice—it’s your lifeline.
TRADING
Traders are scattered across the wasteland—in camps, settlements, and hidden corners. Each one belongs to a faction, and trading with them boosts your reputation. Most deal in Rusty Nuts, the common currency, offering everything from random goods to specialized gear. Some even offer cargo delivery jobs for a solid profit—turning you into a wasteland courier. Buy what you need, sell what you don’t. In a world this harsh, trading can keep you alive.
SETTLEMENTS
Build and supply settlements to shape life in the wasteland. Bring food and water to attract wastelanders and grow the population. As your settlement expands, it activates production buildings that generate useful items—and defending units to fight off waves of mad lowlifes and ruthless bandits. The bigger the population, the tougher the attacks. But with strong defenses and smart support, your settlement becomes a lifeline—and even draws in traders to keep it thriving.
HORDES
The wasteland is never quiet. It breathes, it moves—and it hunts. Massive hordes of Lowlifes roam the scorched lands, drawn to movement, noise, and any sign of life. Camps, outposts, and settlements are like beacons to them. These heat-crazed madmen don’t think—they swarm. If you're caught unprepared, they’ll overwhelm you in seconds. Survive long enough, and you’ll learn: it’s not a question of if the horde comes. Only when.
REPUTATION
Every choice counts in the wasteland. Barter, complete quests, or eliminate faction targets to earn reputation with the factions. Higher reputation unlocks access to special outposts, better trading options, and unique production opportunities. You can fight in faction wars anytime—but only with enough reputation will a faction trust you to claim outposts in their name.
AIR CARGO DELIVERY
Wherever The Network’s signal reaches, you can call in cargo—vehicles, fuel barrels, even faction battle drones. Your order is delivered by flying transport straight to your location. But be smart about where you call it in—enemy factions can spot the drop and shoot it down before it reaches you. In the wasteland, every delivery is a risk.
PROCEDURALLY GENERATED WORLD
No two journeys are the same. Each world is shaped by a unique seed, creating endless variations in terrain, enemy spawns, trader inventory, and loot. Biomes offer distinct challenges—extreme heat, radiation, oxygen loss, or rare enemies and resources. Some offer better shade, others hide deadly threats. Choose your world size—up to 26x26 km—and dive into a wasteland that’s always changing.
EXTREME EVENTS
This world doesn’t just kill—you have to outthink it. Global events like Overheat and Meteor Showers can wipe you out in seconds. When the Overheat hits, your only chance is shade. When the sky rains fire, find cover fast and learn where it’s coming from. These events are brutal, unpredictable, and always deadly. Surviving them means paying attention—or paying the price.
ROADMAP
We don’t follow a rigid roadmap—our development is flexible, shaped by player feedback, our own ideas, and the evolving vision of Plains of Pain. But make no mistake: we know where we’re heading. More vehicles, weapons, and blueprints. Expanded settlement systems. New enemies, biomes, and extreme events. Storyline quests, deeper NPCs, and more locations to explore. Whether you prefer PvE or PvP, there’s a lot on the way—and we’re just getting started.
EARLY ACCESS & COMMUNITY
Plains of Pain is in Early Access—and your voice matters. We're building this world with the community, listening to your feedback, suggestions, and experiences. At the same time, we have a strong vision of where the game is headed: a brutal, immersive survival experience set in a world that doesn’t hold your hand. Join us on the journey. Help shape the wasteland, one update at a time.
THE DEVS
We’re Cobra Byte Digital—just three people with a big vision and a love for brutal survival games. Plains of Pain is our passion project, and no matter what, we’re committed to reaching full release. After that, we’re not stopping. As long as we have ideas—and as long as the community sticks with us—we’ll keep the wasteland alive and evolving.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows 7
- Processor: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- Memory: 10 GB RAM
- Graphics: GTX 670 2GB / AMD R9 280 better
- DirectX: Version 11
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 7 GB available space
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: GTX 980 / AMD R9 Fury
- DirectX: Version 12
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 7 GB available space
Supported Languages
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
Hotfix v0.8.20.28.5
Hotfix v0.8.20.28.5A quick hotfix is now live.We discovered a UI related issue that could negatively affect FPS in certain situations, and we have now fixed it.Thank you to everyone who keeps reporting problems and helping us react quickly with fixes.We hope you enjoy the whole weekend in the wasteland, make some progress, get into trouble, discover something new, and have a great time in Plains of Pain.If you enjoy how quickly we keep improving the game, dropping a Steam review helps more survivors discover Plains of Pain ❤️Your Plains of Pain Dev TeamRead full article on Community Announcements (Frost)Patch NotesOfficial
QoL Update v0.8.20.28 Inventory Locking
QoL Update v0.8.20.28We are not stopping.Just a few days after the Major Update, we are already bringing another quick patch based on the community feedback we have been gathering since release.This update focuses on several fixes, small improvements, and a couple of new quality of life features to make everyday gameplay smoother.Main Highlight Inventory LockingYou can now click the Lock icon on the right side of each inventory container to lock it.Locked inventories will be ignored when transferring all items or filtered items between containers.Looted items will also not be automatically placed into locked inventories.This gives you much better control over backpacks, belts, Deathproof Pockets, and other inventory containers.In upcoming updates, we also plan to expand this system with the ability to lock individual items inside inventories.Smarter Melee Survival BehaviorLowlifes and other melee units will now retreat from players or enemies who are actively firing loud firearms at them.This should make melee encounters feel more reactive and give these units a stronger sense of self preservation when facing heavy gunfire. Production System Update and a Small Settlements 2.0 SpoilerWe are still actively gathering feedback about the new production system introduced with the recent Major Update.First of all, thank you to everyone who is testing it properly and sharing useful feedback with us. We are already preparing adjustments and tweaks that will arrive in the next update after this one.We also want to clarify one important thing.The current production setup is not the final form of the system.Some players understandably see the new worker requirements, resource consumption, and more hands on settlement management and assume this is how production is supposed to stay permanently.It is not.This update was an important foundation for the upcoming Settlements 2.0 layer, where several new systems will reduce unnecessary micromanagement and make larger settlements much...Read full article on Community Announcements (Frost)Patch NotesOfficial
Major Update v0.8.20 Production and Relic Traders
Major Update v0.8.20 Production Reworked, Relic Traders and New FoundationsThere is a point in development where an update stops being just a collection of new features and starts changing what future updates can become.For us, v0.8.20 is one of those updates.We have worked extremely hard over the past weeks to make this release rich in new content, but also to rebuild some of the systems underneath Plains of Pain so we can take much bigger steps soon.Some days were spent creating things you immediately see. New traders, items, weapons, characters, locations.Other days disappeared into worker logic, production queues, UI, world generation, loot tables, settlement resources, and all those invisible gears that make the wasteland actually work.Both matter.Because the world we want to build cannot just look alive.It needs to work like one.And this update brings us another big step closer.Plains of Pain: From Nothing to Power | Gameplay TrailerAbout This TrailerThis trailer follows one possible journey through Plains of Pain, from starting with almost nothing to building, trading, producing, travelling and eventually taking on some of the most dangerous threats in the wasteland.The gameplay was captured directly in-game during live sandbox sessions.There were no carefully staged encounters waiting for the camera. We entered the world, started recording and followed whatever happened around us, a little like a wildlife cameraman stepping into the wilderness and hoping something interesting happens before something interesting eats him.What you see is the sandbox doing what it does best: creating situations, encounters and small stories on its own.Original narration by Paul GreenGameplay captured in live sandbox sessionsEvery survivor finds a different path.This one was ours.Important: New World RequiredTo access the new v0.8.20 content and features, you must create a new game world after updating.Existing worlds will not include the newly generated content.Main Highlight ...Read full article on Community Announcements (Frost)Patch NotesOfficial
Dev Blog - Next Major Update in Development
The Wasteland Does Not WaitNext Major Update in DevelopmentSurvivors,today we are not releasing a new update.Today we want to share a small but important message about what we are working on behind the scenes.We are now intensively preparing the next big major update for Plains of Pain, currently planned around the end of August. As always, quality and stability come first, but the direction is clear.The wasteland keeps growing.And so do the systems behind it.New Gameplay Battlemix TrailerAlongside this announcement, we also prepared a new Gameplay Battlemix Trailer.It is a mix of some of the best action moments you can experience in Plains of Pain.Firefights with bandits, heavy battles with giant drone machines, rocket barrages, wasteland chaos, danger, dust, bullets, and the kind of strange situations that can turn one normal trip into a story.The goal is simple.To show the feeling of the game.A post apo sandbox world where something can always happen.The world does not wait for you.Find your place in it.What We Are PreparingNext week, we will share a bigger dev blog with more details about the upcoming major update.For now, here is a short preview of the direction we are working on:Reworked production building layerMore control over farming and related systemsNew resource gathering additionsNew trading related contentStronger foundations for future Settlements 2.0 systemsMore teasers from development progressWe do not want to reveal everything today.This is just the first signal from the road ahead.Thank YouThank you for being with us on this journey.The community is growing day by day, and the positivity we are seeing in Steam reviews, Discord discussions, videos, screenshots, and messages gives us huge energy to keep pushing forward.We keep listening, collecting feedback, implementing what makes sense, and shaping Plains of Pain step by step together with you.If you enjoy the direction of Plains of Pain and want to help more survivors discover this world, leavi...Read full article on Community Announcements (Frost)Patch NotesOfficial
Update v0.8.13 QoL Update Is Live
Update v0.8.13QoL UpdateAnother week, another patch from the wasteland.We keep working, listening, testing, tweaking, and delivering updates step by step. Since the last update, we have been gathering feedback from the community and preparing changes that should make the game smoother, clearer, and more flexible.As always, this patch is not only about fixes. We also bring something new, because Plains of Pain should keep growing with every update.This time, we are adding new Custom Difficulty options, better map readability, the long awaited color picker, truck improvements, performance work, and several fixes based on your reports.Custom Difficulty Settings AdditionsWe are preparing the ground for a true Hardcore playstyle.These new options will help players create tougher singleplayer worlds or run epic Hardcore servers with more control over survival, production, and loot balance. Production Buildings SpeedWe added an experimental setting for Production Buildings Speed.This allows you to adjust how fast production buildings generate resources, both in settlements and in player built bases.It is an experimental function, so we will continue watching how it behaves and adjust it based on feedback.Lower Loot Chance and Loot Amount ValuesLoot Chance and Loot Amount can now be set much lower than before, down to 0.01.This gives players and server owners more control when creating very harsh survival worlds where every item matters. Map UpdateMap readability has been improved.Non visited revealed locations now start with a gray icon on the map. After the player visits the location, the icon changes to white.This is especially useful when players reveal multiple new locations at once, for example by buying several maps to discover trader locations.Before this update, new revealed locations could blend together with already visited ones, unless players manually changed icon colors. Now it is much easier to see what you have already explored and what is still waiting for ...Read full article on Community Announcements (Frost)
