About the Game
Songs of Syx is in Early Access. We recommend reading the EA clause carefully and playing the demo before purchasing.
Songs of Syx is a low fantasy city-builder with vast real-time battles simulating tens of thousands of citizens and soldiers. Start off as an insignificant village and build, scheme, and fight your way towards a mighty city state and empire. The mechanics are deep and true to life, where small events can spiral into the collapse of kingdoms.

Living World
Full of different races, cultures, old and new gods and strange creatures - everything in Songs of Syx is connected. Night turns to day, climate and weather change, and migrations of animals and people flow. Droughts and pestilence, raiders, traders and bandits, and new discoveries will ensure kingdoms and empires come and go with or without your intervention. Everything you do generates new unique stores and worlds each time you play a new game.
City Building on a Huge Scale
Win the hearts of your subjects or whip them into submission. Have their number swell your insignificant village into a metropolis of your design. Watch tens of thousands of individually simulated citizens and slaves interact: each with their own life, religion, fears and desires.
Build each house, street and plaza with utmost care in order to keep the needs of your citizens, your state and your army balanced.
But be careful not to overreach: everything you build requires upkeep and a slight disruption to your production, or a dip in your standing, could quickly spiral out of control. Your people will not hesitate to turn against an incompetent ruler.
Grand Tactical Battles
Recruit, train and equip citizens of your great city. Gather allies and vassals, conscript traveling mercenaries and local peasants to bolster your ranks with up to 50,000 individual units. Use tactics and skill to encircle your enemy in massive real-time battles, or let your reputation demoralize them before the fight.
Each soldier is simulated and will require supplies produced by the industrial might of your great state. The outcome of battle will dictate the rise and fall of empires.
Nobility & Slaves
Break the backs of slaves as they make your beds and swab your floors. Just throw them a bone from time to time to keep them from rising up in revolt. Appoint nobles, or import them from other kingdoms and have them manage different aspects of your kingdom to boost your production and standing, but be careful with whom to trust, and reward them accordingly as some might get the idea to usurp you or join your enemies.
Grand Strategy
As your capital grows, it must be sustained by the villages, towns, lumber camps, castles and ports that constitute your kingdom. But you are not alone. Other kingdoms and despots are either eager to forge an alliance or expand their borders, so tend to your relations. To grow your might, you must engage in diplomacy, trade and war.
Matching Soundtrack
Thanks to the fulfilment of our first Kickstarter stretchgoal the game will have a fully fledged soundtrack made by @jasinkamusic. We already have some tracks done which neatly fit into the playable prototype.

Screenshots
30 images
Version Information
Steam Patch Notes
Official update history
This is a peculiar thing. It started happening long after I had patched V67 for the last time.
I managed to find the offensive files in the game .jar, and remove those, and I thought the problem was solved.
But now it seems to have found something else to complain about.
The particular files it's nagging about is the framework "lwjgl", which is all about rendering things to the screen. This exact copy of it is also in V66, which to my knowledge passes the defender tests. With the files being identical, I can only surmise that this must be something about dates and modification dates.
My own personal theory, which is probably not correct, is that there are variations of SoS floating about on the internet, and some of them contains a virus/malware. The defender then sees all SoS copies of this and that modification date as threats.
I can only say that I have not uploaded anything dangerous. This I can prove with the fact that this started happening long after I had patched V67. (I have patched since to remove the offending malware warning. It was useless files in any case).
So, I'm at the mercy of the whims of windows defender here. Since I have no knowledge of the matter, all I can do is pray. And you can help me out by reporting the file to Microsoft. There should be a button somewhere when you get the warning.
I am 99.99% sure this is a false flag thing. I can't say 100%, because I'm not all knowing in the matter. I'm also not overly worried, since this only affects V67 beta, and I'll look into it seriously for V68.
Also, make sure you let steam verify the installation. Might be that you haven't gotten the latest version, and that this version is fine.
If you have any information about this, of things I can try to do, please let me know.
/Jake
I'm set on releasing 25th of June. This has been the longest update interval yet, my apologies, but hopefully it will be worth it.
**************************************
This update is taking quite a bit of time, and in fear of nightly pitchforks and torches, I'll attempt to explain a bit what I'm working on and what you'll get to play soon.
I finally caved to the pressure of the community that wanted expansion of the battle mechanics of Syx. My reluctance was based in the fact that city building stuff is pretty solid ATM, and adding the few more features I want in would be fast. The world management were still just loose ideas I had, and seeing them to completion would take a lot of effort. And it has!
So, having said that, this update will take some time. I'd say at least another month. But hopefully, it will be worth it.
As we all know, the world map is divided into regions. What's new is that each region now has an urban centre. If you control that, you control the region.
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/35894849/bda5eed813315671a4e7ceeb09de5539143c0e58.png
You'll now conquer regions with world armies. A world army is a marker on the world map, which you attach garrisons from regions / cities. You then move around with your armies, fighting other armies in field battles, or conquering rebel/AI regions.
Your regions make up your kingdom, and you can tax and manage them. And there is depth here, to satisfy all our needs. You'll be forced to focus on different things to achieve a strong kingdom.
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/35894849/3cb28f14853fc74591adfb9052dbf0dd45477b0c.png
On the city-building side, there will be two new rooms.
Army Depot - works like a trade depot. Battlegear, food and clothes will be collected when your city garrison is attached to an army somewhere else. this is your supply line. If you fail to deliver stuff, your army will fail.
Administration - This will employ clerks, that produce administration points, used to control your regions. It will work the same way as with knowledge.
Apart from this there will be some QoL improvements.
- Hauler room added. Can be placed for free on cleared ground and will employ haulers, that will fetch resources to the room.
- Proper Woodcutter room added. Now fully renewable and with fixed output, same as other industries.
- Much easier to reach 0% squareness.
- Logistics mechanics overhauled, added a "empty to" mechanics which lets you empty resources to specific warehouses.
- New Janitor room with maintenance now separated from construction. Only janitors can do maintenance. Janitors need construction materials in the vicinity, or they will become less effective.
- Auto employment for some rooms, which will make the AI fire/hire 1 subject per day based on workload. Workload calculations improved.
- Normal speed triggers when there is a message
- Immigrant value now decreases more slow, allowing you to fulfil the needs of new immigrants.
- Onx pastures for cold and temperate climates.
- Hotkey for getting to the throne/capitol.
- Status concept. New profile screen.
- Level (title). You now increase your level according to your population, which unlocks bonuses and rooms. The throne visually upgrades with these levels.
- Faction visuals. Change faction name and colors while playing.
- Faction banners. Randomized banners for all faction and a banner editor for the player.
- Added on "available services" tooltip. How many are used and how many that needs work.
- Fixed various crashes from streaming. Requires you to uncheck "debug" in the launcher.
- Remade light engine and prettier fires/candles
- Recoloured ore
- Huge AI refactoring. Not that anyone cares, but it allows for faster AI progress.
- Criminals. Come in three flavours: thieves, vandalisers, streakers, and murderers. Each race has a property on their chance to become criminals. The amount of criminals spawned depends of law and happiness.
- New guard post room. Guards will catch criminals in their vicinity, or if they happen to stumble into one on their patrols. Guard posts also deter crime in their vicinity.
- Prison. Employs guards that bring food and empties latrines of the cells. Criminals will go here after being caught, if your policies are set up that way. Prisoners will stay there for a number of years before being let out and become citizens again (average 6 years).
- Game will now save to "new_city" before you place your throne, allowing you to restart at any time by loading it.
- Scaffolds room. Employs executioners. Prisoners will go here to be executed according to your policies.
- Courts. Prisoners will go here before going to either prisons or scaffolds. Improves justice. Can also instantly turn some prisoners back to friendly subjects.
- Added a width/height restriction to rooms.
- Made so that the tunnelling bonus actually works. Dondorians tunnel into mountains twice as fast.
- Rearranged resources categories a bit.
- Law. Law is gained by apprehending criminals, having courts for them as well as Prisons and scaffolds. Law makes your citizens happy and deters the spawning of criminals.
- New algorithm for determining build order when constructing massive walls now enables you to build as thick a walls as you'd like without people getting stuck.
- The above also holds true when building rooms with inner walls.
- Added demography to understand retirement better. Also made it more clear that retired people doesn't work.
- Returned rock ground under mountains that had disappeared.
- Moved key settings to in-game menu.
- Touched up the happiness screen in an effort to make it more understandable.
- New tech tree with unlockable buildings.
- Made room construction render above terrain.
- Decreased snoring sound.
- Deleting room blueprint no longer removes roads beneath.
- New employment mechanics with new priority system and panels. AI will now distribute workforce evenly.
- A bit more UI info about service rooms.
- New trading mechanics for stabler trade and prices.
- When Krull dies, his son will take up his arms and continue raiding you.
- optional resources shown as optional on hover when build.
- Harvest jobs can be placed, but only performed when ripe.
I've put it in the unstable branch for now. There is a lot of new stuff and changes that requires a lot of testing, and while I'll be testing myself, it will speed things a lot if those willing will help.
Here's how to check out the unstable branch:
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/35894849/0a5b8ec9fd16c248227148ad51b7a4aefc817b19.png
Now on to the goodies!
FEATURES
- Version log in launcher!
- Nobles!
- Slaves
- Ability to enslave Krull's men.
- Emigration
- New top panel
- New bottom build panel
- New room - chambers. The finest of sleep services.
- New Room - flats an upgrade from dormitories.
- Dormitory reworked and job-less.
- Dorms and flats modable. You can add your own versions.
- Sleepy subjects will find sleep facilities in the order they like them. Then find a place indoors to sleep.
- Reputation now Happiness. Complete rework.
- 2 new songs + music changes with battles/stops at night.
- All panels have been reworked slightly
- Subjects get clean in baths and by skinny-dipping. They get dirty over time, visiting the lavatory and spending time in industries and mines.
- Added harmony and Dread influence to work the same as awe. Added ability for roads to emit different kinds of influence. Specific monuments for harmony and dread will come
- Added a bunch of new statistics and some happiness tied to them.
- Added extensive modability to races.
- Retirement mechanics added
- Service room access reworked
- Kickstarter names for subjects added
- Building preference added. Races like to stay in different buildings.
- Reworked room placement UI
- Added walls and doorways when placing rooms.
- Added colors for battlegear upgrades
- Minimap boxes for resources and wild edibles.
- Work priorities added
- Secondary work priority added per race
- Races have different skills and different preferences when it comes to work
- Added light & awe coverage to right click explore.
- New font for launcher
Fixes
- Might now correspond at a 1:1 ratio with your population. For claiming regions 1500 might is required for each of them
- Added email in error messages.
- Possibly trade depot bugs fixed.
- Added manual steam-fetch mods button in launcher.
- Export/import setting is set to 50%
- Fixed a bunch of placability issues.
- Woodcutters stopped from chopping invisible trees.
- Rooms can now be built on top of degrading roads.
- When placing monuments, you can delete mistakes by holding shift.
- Collision with domesticated animals removed.
- Available services changed to a "usage" percentage. Can be sorted in menus.
- Flowers no longer grows on fences.
- When you're building a room, Right Clicking or opening another panel will construct the room (if it's constructible). This also applies when Refurnishing a room
- Krull increases his tribute as you yield.
- You are warned where Krull is likely to strike.
- camera pans to where Krull attacks
- Adjusted working schedules, so that there will be more activity in the day.
- Graveyard items fixed
- Might have fixed world map lights
- Subjects will return equippables to stockpiles if there is storage for it before they drop it on the ground. Inc. Battlegear.
- Delta generation fixed.
- Fixed Stockpile UI.
- Light, awe and road access now only updates when a subject is outside of a room.
- Main menu: rearranged buttons a bit, removed others.
- Mouse scrolling now opens the minimap.
- Fixed some rendering bugs with growables.
- Adjusted Animal spawn rates, eating behavior.
- Adjusted light colors somewhat.
- Fixed subjects clothes color.
- Fixed minimap colors for rooms working as intended, no need to load save
- Fixed a visual bug with degraded floors/roads
- Errored jobs show what resource is missing.
- Changed a little trade thing with imports. The game would import resources in order depleting your treasury on the first ones, never getting to the last ones. Now changed to prioritize resources based on incoming/storage capacity.
- Mushrooms now placable in caves.
- Monument no longer removes cave roof when removed.
- Fixed some stat and cost values for room items.
- Added support for non 16:9 screens (no more stretching).
- NOTE: some drivers might report faulty resolutions, casing crashes.
- Hopefully fixed the game from going into low FPS when Vsync is enabled.
- Defeated divisions un-musters
- Accepting Message prompt about Krull's tribute closes the message UI
- Soldiers move from their current division to ones with more experience if experience is gained. Fixed a few training bugs
- Animals no longer run away from hunters
- Animals drop a lot more resources
- Hunting fixed in general
- Animals in water rendering fix.
- Entities saved differently, shaving off a few MB of savegame size
- Sorted the order of resources.
- Flimsy placement of walls/ceilings fixed.
- Graveyard desecration values reworked. (Avoid penalty by deactivating it and let the graves disappear)
- Max room size now can't be exceeded.",
- Dormitory knickknacks different costs",
- Library and knowledge fixed, it was a disaster.",
- Slayed enemies now says that they were slayed by you.",
- Outposts such as fisheries always finds fish, even if once depleted",
- Double click for save/load in menu
BUGS
- Fixed CTD when undoing items in room construction.
- Fixed continue button in menu when saves were deleted.
- Fixed a CTD when restarting from the main menu a couple of times.
- Fixed CTD when trying to delete non existent save
- kitchen had a nasty bug, hopefully fixed.
- Rare corpses stay active fix
- Fleeing Krull messes everything up fixed.
Notes
- Doors are no longer intended to use with rooms. They're going to be changed to gatehouses, but I leave them in for now.
- Some things are coded in the blind. I only have a 16:9 display for instance, so, wide displays may/may not work, please let me know if you have one...",
- I seem to get crashes when choosing certain full screen displays. I hope this is because I bought a cheap display :). Let me know if you get any of that.
There is no tutorial in the unstable version. I will fix it once it stable.
P.S.
Some day V53 is going to be the new demo. If you have a city you're proud of, please send me the save, and I'll add it to the example cities.
I felt the time was right for me to show you that you're getting a return on your investment.
I've been refactoring like crazy, basically ripping out part of the old AI and inserting a new one that allows for extensive moddability for races and more flexible code for me to flesh out.
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/35894849/b4f7b7a71ddc7369a43acf0fc127e7ebb39e1800.png
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/35894849/5471b25e2d3b34ff609c720a51607e729af79479.png
Now, all resources can be made "equippable" and you can define what boosts they give to a subject. You can also define traits with similar properties and chance of occurring. Reputation is now called standing and is also fully modifiable per race. You can also define what trades your race likes, making it more important with trade or race diversity in your city.
Thanks to some feedback, I've also been experimenting with a new UI layout, especially to improve trading and other aspects.
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/35894849/a30d39f9035a8b0d54ccc6b2e004f9d3e1a594be.png{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/35894849/d9e5eb06cb6f7675424a3fd0f56708f89665bdb7.png
I want to get rid of the full screen ones in general and trying to figure out ways to convey a lot of information in a simple way. I really like the standing main panel. Not only is it clean, it also allows me to crop the main game somewhat, which saves a few % in performance.
I've also tried to fix the most pressing bugs in the current release. the rest will have to wait for V54.
Currently the main challenge is not to starve from waves of immigration. I plan on tipping this over. You'll have a toggle to allow immigration and Instead we'll have emigration when your standing is low, and "retirement", meaning that it should be more of a challenge as your city grows and not the other way around.
Then there will of course be the nobles and slaves, which I hope to get to next week. Other from that, lots of QOL, bugfixes and tweaks for a better experience. Hope you'll like it.
I have spent most of the time since launch trying to calm my nerves and fixing some of the bugs that makes sense right now. the problem is that I've already started on the next update (54) and it gets very complicated when fixing the same bug in two different places.
so, I'm postponing a few bugs to be fixed in v54, just so you know.
So, what progress is being made?
New face generator. A bigger face in general with many billions of possible variations.
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/35894849/cdab9e4c73c5c234bb67c23b909dcbd7a3f0f099.png
Here's how it's done:
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/35894849/8d833c3f84778095c3f707504c0b884f33d8a766.png
I'm also more or less rebuilding the reputation mechanics and improving on the AI in general.
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/35894849/360f7622b7e08a4a06ed279f1a4bbe3b39105fa0.png
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/35894849/7c59e042cf77c4db3946f6f98902aa242e7a3045.png
And what's really cool is that is mostly all modifiable. You can add items to equip, traits and new services, and you can change how each race feels about them.
The big thing to come though is the nobility class and slaves, even though this will be a bit barebones in the beginning.
I also have a list of hundreds of bugs and minor suggestions that I hope to address before launch.
I probably shouldn't give you an ETA, but I'm hoping for 6 weeks. Pray for me :)
/Jake
UNSTABLE means the version is in the unstable branch on steam. In your steam client, right click songs of syx -> properties -> betas -> select "unstable"
53.51
- fixed tribute from claimed regions
- fixed forgetting knowledge from affecting all techs.
53.52
- fixed a CTD that occurred when building baths that I introduced in 53.51 :)
53.53
- Fixed baths, now you can build big basins
- Fixed some CTDs (Crash to desktop)
- Set up a new build pipeline, so that the game updates to all platforms instantly. I've tested this on mac, but not linux. Would be very grateful if someone on Linux could test it out.
53.54
- Added a little more info to the launcher info screen to help debug mac users.
53.55
- hopefully fixed the full screen visuals for mac users. I still recommend playing in windowed more, or at lower resolutions. That retina display is a tricky beast)
- adjusted mouse wheel to better fit mac.
53.56
- Fixed crashes related to computers being set to other languages than English.
53.57
- Fixed a CTD on load
53.58
- fixed a CTD when looking at the minimap
- fixed a CTD due to big, big rooms.
- fixed a CTD when trying to add animals through modding.
53.59
- fixed a CTD that wasn't really fixed.
53.60
- finally found a bug where deleting a room under construction would delete parts of neighboring rooms and cause a lot of bugs as a result. Also increased max addable fortifications to 8.
53.61
- removed the confusing tool policy
- fixed a bug where subjects wouldn't fetch tools unless the clothes policy was > 0
53.63
- fixed a krull spawning CTD
53.64
- fixed trade depots. They would become useless in time and workers would stop fetching goods.
- fixed steam integrations from crashing the game at startup
53.67
- made some smaller specific fixes. Tried to get the steam integrations to work.
So, a big thank you to all who have supported me this far. If you weren't aware, Songs of Syx was kickstarted 4 months ago, found here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/songsofsyx/songs-of-syx With those funds, and the ones I'll receive now, another year of development is firmly secured.
Also big thanks to the volunteers in the community and its managers! You are really taking a load off my shoulders! Thanks to Superwutz, who is now part of the development team.
First off, some bug fixes:
- The damned message panel can now be closed. (it could be closed with right click, but now also through clicking the 'x').
- Crashes when pressing the wiki button is gone. Instead no wiki will be opened, because there isn't one yet for all room types.
- Steam screenshots should now work. Unfortunately the in-game screenshots made by clicking buttons /pressing prtsc are not connected to steam yet, but will be in the next major update.
- Mac unplayability: When playing on mac, the steam overlay goes rabid and completely takes over. I have no control over this. The only fix now is to disable it. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9394-yofv-0014 Long term fixes is Steam fixing it, or me dropping Mac support, if it's not acceptable.
- Crashes when clicking play. This seems to be conflicts with other software running on your PC. I've had Bandicam as a culprit for example. try turning those off.
Criticism
A lot of criticism is based on the lack of polish and lack of user-friendliness really and that is fair and expected.
But please keep in mind, I'm a solo developer and just an ordinary homo sapiens, not a AAA studio. I've also tried to make it clear that despite having in development now for 7 years, it is still rough. I don't spend much time on polish and balancing yet, simply because that gets in the way and constitutes extra work as I continue to add new features and mechanics.
That's how it's going to be, but the reason I'm launching on steam now, is that I believe a threshold has been reached, where enough foundation work has been built to allow me to focus more on making it all, well, fun and intuitive to play.
So the game ATM is aimed at people who want this kind of game hard enough to live with hiccups, bugs and other bumps along the way.
In the end I hope to make a great game for the mainstream audience, but it is not there yet and not for the vast majority of people at it's current state. I expect this to change within 3 years. And I don't expect to release 1.0 for another 5 years.
UI
This is an ongoing process. I think the current one is better than the demo, but I've heard it still isn't... perfect. I'll continue to work on it, but I'd love to hear more concise suggestions on how you'd like the UI to be in the future, where to move buttons, how to group functionality and so forth, so please let me know if you're up to that.
Multiplayer
A lot have asked if there will be multiplayer, especially since I have a button for it :). The button will be removed. It won't have multiplayer in any foreseeable future. the closest thing to it will be a mechanic, where you can optionally upload your cities to a server and let other players raid and conquer them. But this is pretty far off.
The Coming Months
Apart from that, you guys seem to enjoy it, which gladdens me. I've already started on the next update. It will focus on your subjects. I'm making races more modifiable and adding slaves and nobles, although they'll be primitive at first. ETA: 6 weeks. After that, I'm going to revisit the production mechanics, and make some new rooms and try to solidify that. Meanwhile I'm hoping the modding community picks up and that they donate a feature or two to the main game :)
You can see what I'm doing here: https://trello.com/b/wF5RYqdF/songs-of-syx
The Future In General
The primary goal for the next 1-2 years is fleshing out the base-building aspect of the game. This includes adding religion, heath care, alcohol and many other features. The foundation for empire management and battles are there, but they'll have to wait a bit until this is done, so that the game can be enjoyed in some aspect for the mainstream audience. Fear not though, battles will be spectacular with ranged units and artillery and you'll spend most of late game conquering and enslaving the world.
All right, thanks for playing and don't forget to communicate your feedback.
AND DON'T FORGET TO LEAVE A REVIEW!
/Jake
Current Release
Build 23998889
Uploaded Jul 12, 2026
System Requirements
How to Install
SongsOfSyx.exe to play
Troubleshooting tips
• Run Redist/_CommonRedist installers if game won't start
• Add folder to Windows Defender exclusions
• Run as administrator
Download
Direct link available
378 MB
23998889
C3CB6040
8d6374a3efb42b5330c40ccbd6aa9ad6232c647a87637b498ca5f1c3ee0733cc
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