Hanford Reach

Hanford Reach is the beginning of a cozy settlement-building game, made as a gift for one player. It's set in the ruins of a mid-century small town on the Columbia River, in a fictional, quiet, post-apocalyptic version of southeastern Washington: sagebrush steppe, basalt bluffs, wind, dust, rust and river light.

It's a work in progress. Right now the world is built and you can explore it, in first or third person. Gathering, building and saving are the next phases on the public roadmap. The design brief rules out combat, enemies and NPCs for good: the goal is "one person losing an afternoon happily rebuilding a home-fort".

What's there now

• A whole town on a highway strip: gas station, diner, motel, five storefronts, a church, six houses, a water tower, silos, power poles and wires, car hulks, fences and rubble.
• The land around it: a river channel and gravel bank, the town terrace, open steppe, and a basalt rim and bluffs across the water, all generated from deterministic noise.
• Light: a fixed late-afternoon sun with cascaded soft shadows, a sky rendered into an environment map so shadows pick up sky colour, thin drifting cirrus, and ambient occlusion and bloom tuned to stay natural.
• Instanced grass, sagebrush and rocks that sway in the wind, and dead cottonwoods.
• Everything is drawn in code at load time. Nothing is downloaded while you play.

How it was made

Built with Fable 5.2 on Three.js r185 and Vite, a milestone at a time. Each milestone is a pull request that the owner play-tests on a preview link before merging. The brief (CLAUDE.md), the roadmap (plan.md) and a session-by-session build log are all public in the repo, including the bugs found along the way (swapped A/D keys, inverted mouse look, a storefront with a second wall built inside it).

Credits

Made by chzbloom123.

Getting started

Click the game to capture the mouse. You start at the west end of main street, looking east with the sun behind you. There are no objectives yet: this stage is about exploring.

Places worth walking to

• Main street: the gas station, the diner, the motel and five storefronts with open display windows and doors.
• The houses and the church, and the water tower and silos on the skyline.
• Down to the river: the gravel bank and the river track along the water.
• Across the water, the basalt bluffs catch the late light.

First or third person

The game starts in first person at eye height. Press V to switch to an over-the-shoulder third-person view; the game remembers your choice. In first person you can't see your body, but you can see its shadow on the ground.

If it runs slowly

• Press Q to cycle quality between Low, Medium and High (the page reloads).
• You can also force a level for one visit by adding ?q=low, ?q=medium or ?q=high to the address.
• F3 shows the frame rate, the 1% low and draw calls. F4 copies a performance report to the clipboard, which is useful for a bug report.
• If the mouse feels too touchy or too slow, [ and ] change the sensitivity (remembered).

Controls

Key	Action
W A S D	Move
Shift	Run
Space	Jump
Mouse	Look (click the game first)
V	First / third person
Esc	Release the mouse
H	Hide the key list
[ / ]	Mouse slower / faster
Q	Quality: Low, Medium, High
F3 / F4	Performance numbers / copy report