Taiao

Taiao (Māori: the natural world) is a single-player browser RPG in the vein of the old tile-based MMOs I grew up with (RPG MO, early RuneScape), but drawn HD-2D style: a WebGL world with a tilted chase camera, depth fog, and pixel art billboarded in 3D. There's nothing to install and no account to make. Your save lives in your browser.

The terrain streams in forever as you walk, across named worlds of 15,000² tiles. Everyone plays the same seed, so a place you find is a place a friend can go visit. The world runs on its own weather: fronts drift across on isobars, rivers swell after long rain, snow settles and melts again, and the sun casts shadows that match your latitude and season, up to a proper midnight sun near the poles. Native New Zealand birds fly, perch, and sing using real field recordings, mixed spatially into a dawn chorus.

Trainable skills	61
Items	2,942
Recipes	2,482 across 45 crafts
Creatures	423, including 33 bosses
Biomes	37
Crops · resource node types	160 · 143
Tiers of fish / trees / ores / herbs / runes…	32 each, one unlock per level

New characters wake up on Tūhura Isle, a hand-built tutorial island with fifteen keepers, and leave it by a crossing I'd rather not spoil. Out in the wider world you can press X to split into five bodies that work in parallel, hold V and speak spells out loud, talk to villagers in your own words and get real answers, and sell into a workshop economy where goods carry their maker's name.

Free software, on purpose

The entire game is free software: code under GPL-3.0, art and audio under CC BY-SA, all at github.com/dataversion5372/Taiao. Clone the repo and it runs from a folder on your machine, offline, indefinitely. No publisher can delist it, no server shutdown can brick it, and if you don't like something you can change it. The optional community server is GPL and self-hostable too. If this game ends up mattering to you, the repo is the game.

Requirements

• Desktop browser only: recent Firefox, Chrome/Edge, or Safari with hardware acceleration on. WebGL required. Mouse and keyboard; there are no touch or gamepad controls.

• The whole game is about 60 MB, and you're playing well before that finishes. The world starts after roughly 15 MB and the rest of the art streams in behind you. Birdsong, music, and the NPC chat model (~150 MB) download in the background later and cache. If they never arrive, the game still works, just with quieter skies and simpler villagers.

• There's an Accessibility section in the ? tab with a UI text-size slider and a reduced-motion mode (static Bifrost crossing, no shakes or eased zooms). Your system's prefers-reduced-motion setting is picked up by default.

• Saves are in your browser's storage. Clearing site data for itch.io deletes them. Playing from a clone of the repo keeps your save in a browser profile you control.

• It's made for long sessions and slow evenings. Combat exists, but this is a gathering, crafting, and wandering game first.

Controls

Click to walk · click things to use them · right-click everything · Enter talk · X split · Tab switch selves · V speak a spell · M map · J journal · B bestiary · ? full guide in the sidebar.

Credits & licensing:

Art from Kenney.nl and Clint Bellanger (CC0) plus custom PixelLab and hand-drawn sheets (CC BY-SA). Sound effects CC0. Bird recordings by xeno-canto recordists (CC BY-NC-SA, shipped as an optional layer, individually credited). Full credits in the repo.

Community: GitHub Discussions ·
Support: what koha funds.