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Watch trailer on Steam ↗Mercantisle
Forbidden Oak Games Limited · Published by Forbidden Oak Games Limited
Mostly Positive — 76% positive (21 reviews)
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
Living world village simulator with an in-depth economic model. Your villagers lead their own lives, learning skills and setting up businesses, then trading in a free-market simulation. Try out real world economic ideas as you grow from a single house to multiple villages in a vast trade network
£11.79
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Price history
Indie, Strategy · 2026 · More £5 - £15 games
In Mercantisle, guide your burgeoning community through complex economic decisions as they learn skills and establish businesses. Watch your single house evolve into a thriving network of villages, all while exploring the dynamics of free-market trade.
About this game
About this Game
Mercantisle is living world village simulator, where the NPCs (both in your village and in their neighbouring NPC-run villages) lead their own lives. Your villagers all try to make a living for themselves, and neighbouring villages grow and trade over time. You live among them, adapting to their needs and the opportunities which they make available.
Set on a chain of islands where you and your fellow villagers have fled from the oppressive monarchy, you play as one citizen amongst many. You start by harvesting basic resources from the land, setting up a shop, and selling your wares to your neighbours for profit. Grow your brand, employ your neighbours, and become a profiteer with the power to better (or ruin) everyone’s lives with the price of your services and dominating the market.
Key Features
In-depth Market Simulation.
Independent NPCS
Gather, craft, buy, and sell to build your village.
Experiment with both real and fantastical economics.
Explore weird and wonderful archipelagos.
Help (or hinder) your fellow islanders.
First amongst equals. Your fellow NPC villagers and NPC-run neighbouring villages will develop on their own, but could use your help from time to time if you want to build a utopia in these strange lands
Pick a career. Choose from a wide selection of professions! Will you be a blacksmith? Farmer? Or even an arms dealer?
Experience an in-depth market simulator. An economy driven by NPC trading, supply, and demand. Manipulate your environment (and your fellow villagers) to shape the financial ecosystem.
Make use of fantastical materials and businesses. Bottle up the air to sell as a luxury product. Make juice from a quadrupedal carrot. Made a necklace from the flower of an eyeball tree. An inventive business owner has plenty of opportunities!
Experiment with economics. Use these strange islands to try out fantastical versions of real-life economics. Set taxes, markups, universal basic income and more. Try out Alchemical Intelligence, a magical machine that takes away the need to work. What will such an invention do to your economy, and how will you manage it?
Cooperate or compete with your fellow villagers. You're one citizen amongst many. NPCs lead their own lives, make their own decisions and build their own buildings.
Graphs! Watch that line go up!
Weird islands abound. Strange creatures roam these lands – antelope made of carrot, giant blueberry snails, bees made of banana and more. Colossus plants tower over the landscape, and magical mysteries can be found on every island. What will you do with these resources?
Not all islands are built equal. Many different islands exist, each with their own unique challenges and opportunities. What will magic, danger, and temperature do to the economy?
A living world. Other settlements exist in this world that will develop on their own. If you trade with them and bring them what they need they can grow on their own, and can often be a source of useful goods for your own village.
Beware. Hunger, boredom, injuries, and loneliness lurk in these isles. Help your fellow citizens, or monopolise food, medicine, and entertainment. There are always ways to profit from their misery!
Become a local hero. Look out for your fellow islanders. Spend some time and money on festivals to keep people happy, charity to help the poor, and investments to keep the economy ticking along. Helping a struggling villager set up a bakery can lead to great things for them, and great things for your village. Help them grow from struggling to afford food to becoming the heart of your village's exports of baked goods.
The Evil path. If you're feeling villainous, you could always sell more with a bit of creativity. Encouraging dangerous insects onto the island would do wonders for weapon sales. Strip mining a rival village dry would leave them with no choice but to buy stone from you. Or use your patented Air Bottler to charge your neighbours for the privilege of breathing!
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel i5 2500 or AMD FX-6300
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: At least 4GB VRAM
- Storage: 1 GB available space
Recommended
- OS: Windows 10 or 11
- Processor: Intel i5-7500 or Ryzen 5 1400
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: GTX 1070 (8GB) or Radeon RX 580 (8GB)
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Supported Languages
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
Bugfixes
-Fix bug to custom game start options -Fix alert graphics bug -Fix to map screen being dismissable when a custom start location hasn't been chosenRead full article on Community Announcements (Bobby Two Hands)AnnouncementsOfficial
Version 1.0: Full Release
Version 1.0 is here, along with the new biome, the Badlands.The badlands are an inhospitable region. The only animals there are dangerous when attacked, and plants don’t grow. Any village trying to grow there will need food imported in large quantities, as well as resources like iron and cotton. Despite this, villages here are critical to getting your nation to reach its true potential. Beneath these sun-scorched sands lies liquid magic. When liquid magic is pumped out it can be used to power your industries. Buildings will work faster when their owner has a Magic Powerplant. If they’ve got enough raw materials, the building will repeat its production up to three more times, so you can make four times as many items in a day as you could before. This industrial revolution lets you finally produce enough clothes and high quality food for your entire population. While this can allow prices to fall and everyone to enjoy abundance, it can also lead to just the rich getting richer and dominating the trade routes to an even greater degree than before. Alongside this change, a huge amount of work as been put into the soundscape. New ambiance sounds and redesign of creature noises will bring these regions to life. Birdsong in the wetlands, cicadas in the jungle and the cold bitter wind of the arctic give each biome their own distinct feel and presence.Read full article on Community Announcements (Bobby Two Hands)AnnouncementsOfficial
Game Name Change!
Hey everyone, we have some big news! We are changing the name of the game from We Need No Kings to Mercantisle! Alongside this we are also giving the Steam art a new coat of paint, and have made a shiny new logo. We felt that it better represented the game to people who otherwise have no information about it (also to match our growing number of in-game puns). Hope this doesn't cause too much confusion, and Happy Islanding! -Sailor SamRead full article on Community Announcements (TheEntireArtDepartment)Patch NotesOfficial
The Weirdness Update!
Our first large content update is here. Weirdness allows you to slowly build up a population of weird members of your society. Normal people get unhappy when weird people do their thing, which can harm your village’s growth rate, but weirdness comes with its own advantages. They have access to new clothing and entertainment, which if you can provide them makes people happier in general, and certain weird buildings have uniquely powerful effects. Healing both the body and the mind become possible, in limited quantities, allowing your village to endure hardships others couldn’t. Those cured become weird, but that might be your entire goal, adding another weird villager to your little sub-community. The game also begins on more complex animals, with the dodocado. It has a life-cycle, with an egg, slow maturation and eventual death by old age. It can be hunted to extinction, or all its eggs poached, but if it is harvested responsibly it can provide useful food and clothing options. Other than this, the start of some NPC-village improvements are now in, with the villages following set decoration patterns, which they tailor to their available resources. They will plant flowerbeds around roads and statues, and choose the plants and decorations based on what the village has on hand, to make each village match its economic conditions. Detailed changes: Gameplay -New Magic plant: Weird Healer. Makes people weird (which has advantages and disadvantages) if they use it to heal (max one heal per day) -New Magic plant: Tree of woe. Makes people weird (which has advantages and disadvantages) if they use it to cure dissatisfaction (max one heal per day) -New Skill: "Sung Stories" allows singers to satisfy social need too, requires base level singing -New Building: Haunted Harp. Lets you play music to satisfy 'strange compulsion' of weird people and give mood buff. Requires Sung Stories -New Building: Icecream parlor. Requires a fruit taken from a freezeflower -New Building: Apothec...Read full article on Community Announcements (Bobby Two Hands)Patch NotesOfficial
Bugfix: Mouse position
Fix for an issue which was being reported on certain monitor setups (including ones with a secondary monitor to the left of the main one) which prevented building placementRead full article on Community Announcements (Bobby Two Hands)
