SurvivorCore

A batteries-included, creator-extensible survival game engine for Roblox.

🌐 Website · 📖 Docs · 📹 Demo · ⬇ Releases

Status: v0.8.0 — pre-release. The core survival loop is in and working; the engine is being grown toward v1.0 and APIs may still shift. Production-tested in The Counter Earth.

What it is

SurvivorCore gives you the mechanics of a survival game — without dictating your content. You bring the items, world and art; the engine wires up the behavior, the UI, and the no-code authoring tools. If you know Roblox Studio, you can build a survival game.

• Survival stats & HUD — health, energy, hunger, thirst, fatigue, blood, poison; ticking, draining, and biting back, on a clean restyleable HUD.
• Inventory, hotbar & crafting — slots + carry-weight, a 9-slot hotbar, equipment, and hand crafting in a tabbed, drag-and-drop menu — server-authoritative.
• Gathering — tag any mesh Gatherable: hold-E or tool-swing, per-hit yields, and reaction hooks (a reed sways; a tree fells and leaves a stump).
• Combat — melee & bow — click to swing, or aim a bow and loose arrows that arc under real weight. One server-validated combat:hit / combat:kill schema.
• Mobs & AI — a shared FSM substrate: hostile mobs chase & attack, passive animals flee. Behavior is data — a mob's faction picks the profile.
• Quests & achievements — event-driven goals: quest chains with objectives, rewards and quest-giver NPCs, plus milestone achievements with toasts — both tracked automatically from what players already do (gather, craft, fight).
• Hunting & loot bags — slain animals leave butcherable carcasses (knife required, real yields); player death drops everything into a lootable bag with a countdown — get back to it before it's gone.
• Player trading — walk up, offer items, both confirm: a server-authoritative, dupe-proof face-to-face swap (nothing moves until both agree, then atomically).
• SurvivorCore Studio (no-code admin plugin) — one floating window with sidebar + search: tune every engine config section (movement, combat, mobs, loot bags, UI theme colors & fonts, …) as locked deltas that survive engine updates; create items, weapons, ammo, mobs, quests and achievements from forms; override code-registered content field-by-field; drop any of it into the world. No scripting.

Everything is content-free by design, server-authoritative, and restyleable — the UI is real Instances driven by attributes, and every default is overridable.

Quickstart

local SurvivorCore = require(ReplicatedStorage.SurvivorCore)

-- register content from code (or author it no-code in the admin plugin)
SurvivorCore.Items.register({ id = "berry", name = "Wild Berries", stack = 20 })
SurvivorCore.Mobs.register({ id = "husk", faction = "hostile", health = 60 })

SurvivorCore.start()  -- boots stats, inventory, gathering, crafting, combat, mobs…

The built-in HUD loader calls SurvivorCore.startClient() for you.

Install — drop SurvivorCore.rbxm from a Release into ReplicatedStorage, or add it via Wally:

# wally.toml
[dependencies]
SurvivorCore = "temujincalidius/survivorcore@0.8.0"

Working from source? Clone and rojo serve the demo.project.json place.

Creator-owned, no code

Build any mesh, tag it with a component, set attributes — no engine-side definition needed:

Tag	Set	It becomes
Gatherable	Resource = "oak_tree"	a harvestable node (item/HP/tool/yield from the def)
Mob	MobType = "husk"	a creature that runs the AI FSM

For game-specific flourish (a tree that physically fells, a custom death effect), hook the engine lifecycle instead of forking it:

SurvivorCore.Gather.onReaction("oak_tree", "depleted", function(ctx) fellTrunk(ctx.instance) end)
SurvivorCore.Hooks.on("combat:kill", function(ctx) awardXp(ctx.attacker) end)

The admin plugin turns all of this into Studio forms — see docs/admin-plugin.md and docs/content-authoring.md.

Docs

Architecture · Survival stats + HUD · Inventory · Harvesting · Crafting · Combat · Mobs & AI · Quests · Achievements · Loot bags · No-code content · Admin plugin · Design language · Extending

Project layout

src/
  init.luau          -- SurvivorCore root: .start() / .startClient() + the public API
  foundation/        -- Config, Assets, EventBridge, Hooks, Reactions, Registry
  registries/        -- Items, Recipes, Resources, Stats, Mobs, …
  components/         -- creator-facing tag/attribute components (Gatherable, Mob)
  systems/           -- Inventory, Harvesting, Crafting, Combat, Mobs, SurvivalStats…
  client/            -- HUD + UI binders, combat/harvest input
plugin/              -- the Studio admin plugin (separate Rojo tree)
demo/                -- a runnable demo place that consumes the engine
site/                -- the landing page (deployed to GitHub Pages)
docs/                -- documentation

Sponsor

SurvivorCore is free and open source. If it's useful — or you just want to help the engine grow — support development via GitHub Sponsors. 💛

License

MIT © 2026 Samuel Lison