Stray Fawn Studio has recently released the largest update yet to their survival city builder, The Wandering Village, adding a story mode to the game along with the announcement of physical copies for consoles and a 1.0 release date.

Being driven away from your home by an infestation of toxic spores, you and the rest of your village travel in search of a new place to settle down. After years of moving to different locations, you encounter a large dinosaur-like creature called an Onbu. They normally slumber underground. However, due to the toxic spores, he has awoken and is forced to roam the overworld. There isn’t much to eat for him up here, so in exchange for allowing you to build a city on his back and keeping you safe, the colony has to provide him with the sustenance he needs.

This is one of the unique points of The Wandering Village. You have to build various structures that help you communicate with the Onbu, telling it where to go, curing the poison that builds up due to the toxic spores, and feeding it by launching food into his mouth. However, it is still a wild animal, so it will not always listen to you. It might walk in a dangerous direction or just stop to sleep, which can increase your toxic level. This is where you get a choice. Will you be friendly with the Onbu, or exploit it by any means necessary? You can hurt it to force it to follow your commands and even force-feed it by drilling a hole through his back to keep it alive. This took a darker turn than I expected, as the art style is very lighthearted.

Of course, the creature is not the only one you need to think of. Upon arrival, the village elders have given you the mantle to rule over the settlement and make the hard decisions. Your settlers require homes and various jobs, like woodcutter, stone miner, crafter, researcher, or farmer. Conveniently, the back of the Onbu is full of trees, rocks, and mushrooms that you can harvest. The town’s population will increase over time. Giving the villagers housing and building decorations they like will increase their happiness. If it falls below a certain threshold, new people will no longer arrive.

If endlessly surviving on the back of your new friend gets a little boring, you can try out the newly added story mode. This will give you quests from the elders that lead to uncovering what caused the toxic spores, what happened to humanity, and the world itself. Finishing this will unlock a special skin for the Onbu. This mode is available on both Steam and Xbox.

The developers announced that The Wandering Village will be coming to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch when the full release drops later this month on the 17th. Or, if you already own the game and love it, the console editions also get a physical collector’s edition with a bunch of goodies.

Will you become friends with the creature or force it to follow your every command? Let me know in the comments.