Un-Banished 0.1.0 · 19 October 2026

First Settlers

A few families arrive in a valley with a cart of supplies, and the winter is coming. That is how every game of Banished starts. It is also how this project started: with an empty folder and a copy of the finished game. Version 0.1.0 is the first time the whole game runs on its new engine, on your computer or in your browser.

A town you already know

Un-Banished is a new engine for Banished, written from scratch in Rust. It contains none of the original's code, art, sound or text. Instead, it reads the game files from your own copy of Banished, the same files that the original reads. So everything looks, sounds and plays as you remember it: the menus, the toolbar and every window are the original's, drawn by the new engine.

It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and in a web browser. Open the Play page, choose the four game files from your copy of Banished, and play. The files stay in your browser, and so do your saves, settings and mods.

A town loaded from a save of the original game.

The whole game, to the last bit

When you start a new game, Banished makes the valley from a random number, the seed. Un-Banished makes exactly the same valley from the same seed: the same hills, the same rivers, the same trees and stones, to the last bit. We checked this by running the original's own map functions in an emulator and comparing every value.

Choose the terrain, the climate and the difficulty, as in the original.

The first minute of a new town.

Then the citizens live their whole lives: they are born, grow up, start families, work, eat, get cold, get sick and grow old. They farm fields and orchards, herd animals, hunt, fish, gather, build roads and bridges, and trade with the merchants who come up the river. The animals are there too, every chicken with its walk. And the seasons turn as they did: the fields go golden, the snow comes, and the town waits for spring.

Market day.

Autumn, winter and spring at speed 10.

Your old towns still live here

Un-Banished uses the original save format and the original save folder. A town that you saved in the original game years ago loads in Un-Banished, with its citizens, its stores and its history. Mods made with the BanishedKit (.pkm files) work too, through the Mods menu.

The Town Hall, with the stock of a town from an old save.

Built from evidence

We did not have the source code of Banished. We had the finished program. So every part of Un-Banished started with evidence: we read the original's machine code with Ghidra, ran its functions in an emulator to get exact results, and then wrote new code that gives the same results. About 1,600 original functions are named in the code next to the new code that replaces them. The whole story is in How it was made.

What is next

There are no ready-made downloads yet: you build Un-Banished from its source code (see the setup guide). A few things still differ from the original; they are listed in the issues.

Also in 0.1.0

• Tutorials, scenarios and achievements, as in the original.
• Sound: the music, the ambient sounds, sound effects from where they happen in the world, and the sounds of the menus.
• Disasters: fire, disease and tornadoes.
• Autosave, on the original's timer.
• A website with a setup guide, the story of how Un-Banished was made, and a Play page.

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All changes: Changelog, version 0.1.0 · Next: Boomtown, 0.2.0