Four difficulty modes
Casual (Very Easy) was added on 7 November 2026. You can change difficulty any time from ESC, Options. Easy removes item loss on death and shrinks skeleton raids from 13 to 7.
Difficulty is not a menu you pick once. It is a dial you can turn at any point, and two of the four settings change mechanics rather than numbers.
Every figure below is checked against Pequi studios announcements or Steam's own endpoints on 2026-11-09.
Four settings, and the difference between them is not a damage multiplier. Casual, Easy, Normal and Hard change specific mechanics, several of which only exist at the easy end, and you can switch between them at any point mid-run.
Casual, Easy, Normal, Hard
| Mode | Added | Combat | Death penalty | Built for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Casual (Very Easy) | 7 Nov 2026 | Minimal threat | Not stated publicly | Walking the story without fighting |
| Easy | Launch | Skeleton raids of 7 | No item drop | Learning the game |
| Normal | Launch | Designed baseline | Items drop where you died | The intended experience |
| Hard | Launch | Deer survive a spear hit | Items drop where you died | Players who want resistance |
Casual arrived on 7 November, five days after launch, and the announcement describes it as being for players who want to explore the islands and follow the whole story "without facing too many challenges". The developer's own framing, and the setting to pick for narrative over survival.
Three real mechanical differences
The patch notes give three concrete mechanical differences, which is more than most games publish.
Skeleton raids scale down on Easy. The 6 November patch reduced the number of skeletons in an Easy-mode skeleton attack from 13 to 7. A near-halving of the encounter, specific to Easy rather than a global rebalance.
Death costs nothing on Easy. Also from 6 November: on Easy, dying no longer makes you drop your items at the location of your death. On the other settings, it still does. The single largest difference between the modes in practice, because it decides whether a failed expedition is a setback or a total loss.
Reticle and fishing bar scale with difficulty. Added 4 November. The hunting aiming reticle is larger on Easy, and the fishing progress bar drains more slowly. Both minigames are genuinely harder on higher settings, which means the difficulty setting affects systems that have nothing to do with combat.
Hard changes specific fights. The same 4 November patch fixed a bug where deer could not be killed with a single spear hit on Hard. That fix implies the intended Hard behaviour: animals take more punishment, and a clean hit that ends a hunt on Normal does not end it there.
ESC, then Options
Open the pause menu with ESC, go to Options, and pick a different setting. The 7 November announcement states this outright, and frames it as an invitation to experiment.
Worth saying plainly: most survival games lock difficulty at world creation, so a movable dial makes the setting a preference rather than a commitment. If Normal turns out to be more than you want, you do not need to restart.
Picking one
If you have played survival games before and you want the game as designed, Normal. The developer calls it the experience they believe offers the most balanced gameplay, in the launch announcement, which is as close to an official recommendation as this game gets.
New to the genre? Easy. The combination of no item loss on death and the smaller skeleton raid removes the two things that most often end a new player's run, and the easier minigames mean the hunting and fishing systems teach themselves instead of punishing you.
Here for the story and the building? Casual. It was added for exactly that and it is the setting the 24-island story is most accessible on. The main story achievement sits at 2.6%, so anything that gets you through it is a reasonable use of the option.
Hard is for a second run or for players who found Normal too forgiving. No achievement is tied to difficulty, so nothing mechanical rewards it beyond the experience itself.
No achievement is gated
None of the 54 achievements are difficulty-gated. No "complete the game on Hard" entry appears in the list, so the setting does not affect what you can earn. Achievement hunting makes Casual a legitimate route to The New Beginning at 2.6%, and nothing about that is a shortcut around a requirement.
Difficulty and the rest of the systems
The setting is not isolated to combat, and three of the other pages on this site change meaning depending on where the dial sits.
Death and recovery. On Easy, dying costs items nothing. On Normal and Hard it costs a walk back to wherever you fell, which on a remote island also costs the food for the crossing. The death page covers the recovery trip; the short version is that Easy is the setting where a mistake is a lesson rather than an expedition.
Cooking and travel. Difficulty does not change what a meal is worth, so a 240-value meal is a 240-value meal on Casual and on Hard. What changes is how much a mistake costs on the way to making one.
Achievements. None of the 54 are gated by difficulty, so nothing here affects what you can earn. The New Beginning at 2.6% is available on Casual, and taking it there is a legitimate route rather than a shortcut.
| System | Affected by difficulty | How |
|---|---|---|
| Combat encounters | Yes | Skeleton raid size, deer hit rule on Hard |
| Death penalty | Yes | Item drop on Easy only |
| Hunting minigame | Yes | Reticle size, since 4 November |
| Fishing minigame | Yes | Bar drain speed, since 4 November |
| Achievements | No | Nothing gated |
| Cooking values | No | Thresholds are fixed |
| Building and Comfort | No | Documented as a separate system |
No published multipliers
The game does not display a difficulty multiplier anywhere, and the developer has not published a table of enemy health or damage per mode. Anything claiming "Hard enemies have 2.5x health" for this game is inventing it. What is documented is what the patch notes describe: raid size, item drop on death, reticle size, fishing bar speed, and the deer hit rule on Hard.