Screenshots
Watch trailer on Steam ↗Roots of Harmony
Guillaume Beaumel · Published by Guillaume Beaumel
Content notice: In-game events offer options that could be seen as cynical, cruel, unfair or subversive. They do not represent the views of the author.
Positive — 100% positive (27 reviews)
Last updated 30 Sept 2026
Text-based 4X focused on turf war, victory conditions and resource management. Roots of Harmony is a strategy game where you have to lead your colony through puzzling challenges, while managing your doctrines and disciples. 100% gameplay, ASCII graphics only!
£4.90
£7.00Lowest price we've ever recorded
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Price history
Adventure, Indie, RPG, Strategy · 2024 · More under £5 games
Navigate complex challenges and manage doctrines in Roots of Harmony, an adventure RPG where every decision shapes your colony's fate.
About this game
Roots of Harmony (RoH) is a unique text-based 4X where you lead a colony through ideology and conquests. Every decision you make — like what you build, whom you recruit or what you believe — can have an effect, not only on your disciples, but also on the procedural island itself.
Roots of Harmony feels like a board game, where you move your units on a grid map, explore special locations, and fight tactical battles. The game is turn-based and heavily emphasises replayability, with random victory conditions that guide and influence the way you play.
In Roots of Harmony, the game's difficulty can vary from one island to another. The choices you make determine the challenges you'll face. For example, provoking a tribe with numerous allies, adopting a hedonistic lifestyle when your neighbours are all ascetics, or making moonshine in holy sites will surely increase the overall difficulty of the game!
Humorous and philosophical, Roots of Harmony does not hold your hand and is challenging on purpose. However, the game mechanics are presented to you gradually over time, and the learning curve remains gentle.
In Roots of Harmony, you start your new colony with one of twelve doctrines. Will you be altruist, or despotic? Rational or mystic? Will you favour collectivism or individualism? Those choices will determine what units you'll be able to recruit, the perks you'll unlock, the events that will shape your fortune, and most importantly, the resources you will focus on:
Resources are the core of the game. They serve a dual purpose: they reflect your moral decisions, and they determine your ability to construct buildings and start production chains, like for instance... the Pillory!
A 4X wouldn't be a 4X without a good amount of exploration, and Roots of Harmony is full of it! Altars to summon powerful units, mines and plantations to earn resources, creepy places that will grant more traits to your disciples, trading posts, shipyards, dungeons, and more! Every map is different and full of different encounters meticulously designed by a proper (?) human brain.
But the island is not yours, you have enemies! When you settle on the island for the first time, with just a handful of people, you are in the dark. However, you'll soon realise that every land is owned by a tribe, and that those tribes have made alliances and have their own procedural units, ready to cause you problems! They will not hesitate to launch waves of invaders that will test your strategic choices if you don't treat them with respect...
Planning accordingly and moving your disciples to the right locations at the right moment is therefore crucial for your survival.
When it comes to combat, Roots of Harmony features what they call an auto-battler system. In other words, apart from positioning your disciples, and also picking what blessings to cast, battles play themselves out, and you cannot interact with your units once the combat has started. The composition of your squads is what really matters. But don't underestimate the few choices you still have, because they can change everything!
Roots of Harmony is a passion project made by a solo dev. It's written from scratch with its own engine. It has been through four major updates that have overhauled the game's core features and redesigned the UI. Don't let the text and the fancy ASCII illustrations fool you; this game is deep, highly replayable, and it will entertain you for hours!
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64 bits
- Processor: 1 GHz single core, x64
- Memory: 256 MB RAM
- Graphics: Integrated graphics
- Storage: 100 MB available space
- Additional Notes: Minimum resolution: 1024 x 576 (non-wide resolution ratios, such as 4:3, do not work)
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 11 64 bits
- Processor: 1 GHz single core, x64
- Memory: 256 MB RAM
- Graphics: Integrated graphics
- Storage: 100 MB available space
- Additional Notes: Recommended resolution: 1920 x 1080
Supported Languages
Latest news
AnnouncementsOfficial
Version 4.1
NEW FEATURESGame modifiers. In New Game+, you can now activate new modifiers that will increase the game difficulty. Be careful, some of them are super hard! 😉CHANGESIn NG+, invaders now randomly target one of your lands instead of always picking the closest one.Adjacent unexplored lands now appear in grey in order to easily identify the edge of the map.Added 40+ new follow-up events.Added the Pawnshop, a Tier 2 building that takes 1 Inspiration for 2 Greed. There was a lack of greed in early game.FIXESSome Independents had a #number as suffix in their name when it was not needed.Rare out-of-bounds crash when loading a NG+ game.Defeat was instant instead of having a 5-turn countdown.Read full article on Community Announcements (Joubarbe)Patch NotesOfficial
Version 4.0 - The Map update
4.0 is here!Hello harmonious people! Today is a big day, as I'm very excited to present you the Map update! If you have missed the previous announcement where I talk about the main changes, you can read it here.The game has gone through so many changes that it would not make much sense to detail every little one here. Roots of Harmony has been reforged, so enjoy, share, join the Discord, and don't hesitate to leave a review! 😉Version 4.0 is a major version, and as such, savegames from 3.1.4 are non compatible. You can choose to play version 3.1.4 through the Beta program in the Steam option.NEW FEATURESThe list of locations has been replaced with a grid map. The map has 4 layouts (aka templates) that you can choose from during world generation.Battles now happen on a 6 lines battlefield with new UI and new mechanics.CHANGESTribes now have territories and are no longer randomly distributed.Tribes can take over each other's territories.Landmarks no longer exist and have been all replaced with POIs.POI interaction now requires the presence of disciples on land.The Independents now act as POI guards. They must be vanquished if you want to interact with the POIs.Passive usage of disciples such as work and preach have been removed.Battles are limited to 6 VS 6. That means that the fight for a single land can take multiple turns.The choices you have before watching a battle are now very simple: disciple position, and blessings. Combat style, behaviour and target now depend on the unit itself, and the position line you choose.You can now give resources to other tribes in order to gain reputation. They will also produce 1 extra disciple every time you do so.Last level milestones have been changed. Now you have two options: King of the Hills (control specific lands) or Boss of the Island (eradicate one specific faction).Many menus have been modified to make them easier to use and more intuitive.Dodge has been renamed Evasion and now applies to both Melee and Ranged attacks.Ac...Read full article on Community Announcements (Joubarbe)Patch NotesOfficial
Announcing 4.0: The Map Update!
Hello, Harmonious people! Long time no see, right? Well, guess what? Roots of Harmony isn't dead, and I'm actually working on a pretty big update! "The biggest update ever!" blah blah, you know the rest. But this one has been quite a lot of work, as it involves refactoring some of the game's major core features, so it's definitely exciting!So what's the big update about? Well, there are two major features amongst many other minor ones: a map, and a new combat system.The new grid mapWhen I launched RoH, the locations were presented as a list because I thought it would be clearer and sufficient for what I wanted to do: make invaders come to you one step at a time. Therefore, you would see them on the list and perfectly understand the situation. However, the flexibility of that system was pretty much zero: limited strategic depth and difficulty implementing new features. I remember a few players suggesting that I make a map, and there's even a negative comment about the lack of a "real" map. Well, a real map in ASCII would be very difficult to implement and isn't really necessary for RoH, which is a 4X game focused on territorial warfare. So, to represent this territorial war in the best way possible, I thought about a grid map!As you can see in this screenshot, there are map filters, highlights, tooltips, and colours; enough to give you all the information you need on one screen. That's already worth it, but when we talk about maps, we also talk about layouts, aka map templates. There are currently four of them, each quite different and offering different strategic challenges.The Cluster layout.To implement this new map, I had to overhaul many features, and I took the opportunity to make the game clearer. For instance, there are no landmarks anymore: every piece of land is owned by a tribe and can have a Point of Interest. These POIs actually include the landmarks from previous versions, such as mines, plantations, monoliths, and altars. POIs can be guarded by Indepen...Read full article on Community Announcements (Joubarbe)Patch NotesOfficial
Version 3.1.4
Fixed: Inventory items were not restored after retrying a battle. Also improved the error library. Whenever there's a critical error, the log will automatically open.Read full article on Community Announcements (Joubarbe)Patch NotesOfficial
Version 3.1.3
Fixed: Demons could duplicate themselves when you retry combat. This bug made me think about the balance of the "master betrayal" feature, which I now find quite frustrating. As a result, Demons have no chance of betraying you anymore.Improved engine performance and various fixes. Could potentially lead to some bugs, so please report them in the forum if you find any. :)Read full article on Community Announcements (Joubarbe)
