Dead Trench Redemption

Getting started

The game runs in the browser. When the page loads you land on the start screen, which counts assets in as they stream from the server. Wait for the counter to finish, then click once. That first click locks the mouse pointer to the window so the camera can orbit; press Esc at any time to release it and click again to re-lock.

From the start screen, open the server browser and pick a camp — every ride happens on a shared server with the other riders in that lobby. See Multiplayer for how lobbies work. You spawn at your own cabin (each rider in a camp is assigned a unique homestead outside one of the three towns) with your horse waiting in the yard and your satchel already carrying the basics.

If a model fails to load, the start screen names the file it could not fetch instead of leaving you on a blank screen. That almost always means the static server was not started from the project root.

Controls

Movement is relative to the camera. The mouse orbits the third-person view under pointer lock, with click-and-drag as a fallback if the lock is refused.

The crouch control does double duty. A tap while you are at a full sprint turns into a slide that carries your momentum; holding or toggling it instead drops you into a quiet crouch-walk for tight spaces and cover.

The territory

The world is a twelve-hundred-unit square walled on every side by mountains. Three settlements sit on the road. Dead Trench is the main town and your spawn. Copper Gulch is a desert mining stop further along the main road. Sweetwater is a small forest hamlet out on the branch road. The streets are flattened and dry, so a town is always level underfoot no matter how the land rolls around it.

A river runs north to south and leaves the map through canyons cut into the mountain wall. Two brooks feed it and there are three lakes scattered across the country; Mirror and Tule run deep enough to swim, while the river and brooks are mostly fordable. Bridges carry the roads over the water where they must. Homesteads dot the land between towns.

There is no weather system. What changes is the light: a full day-night cycle runs about twenty-four minutes end to end, with a moving sun and moon, a shader sky that colors at dawn and dusk, and nights that stay a readable moonlit blue rather than going pitch black.

The mountain wall is scenery, not terrain you can scale. Steep faces cannot be climbed; if a ridge blocks your route, look for the pass or the canyon the road already uses.

Survival

Three bars sit at the bottom-left of the screen: health, stamina, and hunger. They flash when they run critical. Stamina drives sprinting and recovers when you ease off.

Hunger drains steadily over time and faster while you sprint. Eat by selecting a consumable on the hotbar and pressing its number a second time. A full stomach slowly heals you; an empty one turns on you, and at zero hunger your health begins to drain instead. Low hunger also halves the rate at which stamina comes back, so a hungry rider tires quickly.

Health regenerates on its own, but only after you have been out of combat for eight seconds and are not starving. Taking or dealing damage resets that clock, so you cannot heal your way through a fight. Dying respawns you in town for a ten-dollar doctor's fee. Your health and hunger carry over between sessions.

Horse & travel

Your horse is not an item and has no slot in the satchel. You own it outright: it always exists in the world, and its position is remembered between sessions. Whistle it to you with H and it comes running, closing most of a long gap even when it is off-screen. Mount and dismount with E.

The horse steers with momentum. Speed builds as you accelerate and the turn rate tightens the faster you go, so a full gallop has a real turning radius rather than pivoting on the spot. A walk tops out around eleven units a second; a gallop under Shift reaches about twenty and drains the horse's own stamina bar, shown while mounted. Run that bar dry and the horse drops to a walk until it recovers. Hold S to brake without spinning, or to back up at a slow rein-back once stopped.

You can ride through wooded country, but the trunks have tight hitboxes and will stop you dead, so pick your line. Dismount beside one of the hitching posts on the main street to tie the horse there.

There is no fall-damage exploit to lean on. Do not expect to cheese a cliff by riding off it; steep drops are for looking at, not for shortcuts.

Weapons & combat

You carry three weapons: a revolver, a repeater rifle, and a hunting knife. Equip one from the hotbar or the satchel and it attaches to the character's hand, tracking every animation.

Firearms raycast from the crosshair. Each has its own damage, range, spread, recoil, magazine, and reload timing. The revolver holds six rounds, the rifle eight. Right click to aim down the sights: the field of view narrows, the camera tucks in over the shoulder, spread drops sharply, and the crosshair tightens. Left click fires. The knife swings in a short frontal arc on left click and has no sights.

Reload with R. You can reload on the move — there is no need to stand still. Rounds come from cartridge stacks in your satchel, and the ammo readout shows the loaded magazine over your reserve. Shots are stopped by terrain and buildings, draw a tracer, and flash a hitmarker on a hit. There is deliberately no slow-motion or Dead Eye ability; the project is built for multiplayer, where one client bending world time is not something the others can honor.

Downed enemies stay down and can be looted — outlaws drop a little money, wildlife drops hides and meat.

Hunting & economy

The wild country is stocked. Deer move in herds and bolt from gunfire and galloping riders. Wolves and coyotes hunt in the open and will turn on you if you get close or shoot near them. Four solitary longhorn bulls roam the plains; a bull bluff-charges once as a warning before it commits, so a first charge is a chance to back off.

Kill game for hides and meat, which drop for you to collect. Sell what you gather and eat the meat to hold off hunger. Your wallet shows on the HUD at the top-right and again inside the satchel; money persists between sessions along with the rest of your gear.

Only kills you make yourself pay out. When a wolf runs down a deer on its own, that is the ecology doing its work — it earns you nothing and does not draw attention your way.

The law

Crimes need a witness. Rob or assault someone in the open and, if a townsperson sees it, a charge is pending: ten dollars for an assault, thirty for a murder. The witness turns and sprints for the nearest sheriff's post to report you, marked with a bang above their head. You can head this off — intimidate the runner with E or put them down before they arrive — but killing a witness can itself be seen by another, and the charge simply follows the new witness.

Once a report lands, a posse forms: two lawmen to start, more as things escalate, and they will follow you without a leash. Break line of sight and hold more than a hundred and thirty meters away for fifteen seconds to shake them, or drop them one by one — each lawman you kill is worth forty dollars. Survivors give up and walk back.

A bounty does not vanish when the chase ends. Re-enter a town that is still hot and you get an eight-second warning before the law comes for you again. To clear it for good, walk up to any sheriff's post and pay the bounty with E. Dying stands the posse down but leaves the bounty on your head. Surrendering to end a chase without a shootout is planned and not yet in this build.

Multiplayer

The start screen carries a server browser. Pick a server to join a lobby of up to twenty-five riders. Once you are in, you see the other players moving in real time, their name tags, and their shots as they fire.

Every player is given a personal homestead with an interior. Walk up to your own front door and press E to step inside. Talk to the lobby with the in-game chat: press Enter to type a line and Enter again to send it.

One thing to know about this build: the NPCs and wildlife run locally for each player rather than on a shared server. Two riders standing side by side see the same country and each other, but the deer and outlaws each of them meets are their own. Treat the towns and terrain as shared, and the population as personal.

Performance

The game runs in a browser, so it gives you three graphics presets to trade detail for frame rate. The gear button at the bottom-right opens the settings panel; your choice is saved. Each preset drives the pixel ratio, shadows, fog and draw distance, and how thick the ground grass is laid down.

If the frame rate dips, drop to Low first — it turns off shadows and thins the grass, which are the two heaviest settings. Everything the page needs is served from the project with no requests to the internet at runtime, so once the assets are cached the game also runs offline.

Credits & licenses

The game is built on three.js. The world is dressed with low-poly models sourced from Poly Pizza under CC0 and CC-BY licenses; the CC-BY models require attribution, and that attribution lives in assets/CREDITS.md. If you distribute this project, keep that file with it.

Audio — music, ambience, footsteps, and hoofbeats — is credited and licensed per assets/audio/SOURCES.md, which lists every file with its author, license, and source.