A game from Applied Flux · Android · Handheld · Web
Drywater.
Ride out prepared, or don't ride out.
A single-player Old West survival and taming game. Earn the trust of wild animals, raise an outpost, ride into frontier towns, and stay ahead of the cold. No dead ends and no unfair deaths — just graduated, recoverable consequences for anyone who rides out unprepared. One price. No ads. Fully offline.
Trailer
Thirty seconds
on the frontier.
Play it now
No install.
Just ride.
What's in it
Preparation is the
whole game.
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Tame and ride four wild species
Track, feed, and earn the trust of an elk, bear, horse, or cougar — and every animal you tame rolls its own speed and carrying strength, so no two mounts are the same. Taming is a nerve game, not a button press: feed an animal while it's receptive, watch trust climb and nerve fray, and back off before you spook it.
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Frontier towns New in v1.5
Ride far enough and you'll find one: a main street with a saloon, a general store and a jail, and a sheriff who explains the rules before you can break them. Some towns have a gunsmith, a clothier or a stable. And every town has a bank with a vault in the back. Crack it and the whole street comes after you for a season. Settle your bounty and they'll call you a stranger again.
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Cold, heat, and the turning seasons
Temperature is the constant threat, and both extremes are lethal. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter each shift the ambient temperature, and where you stand matters as much as when — the forest runs cooler than the valley, the mountains stay bitter year-round. Build shelter, craft hide wraps and fur coats, cook hot meals. Or ride a bear, and take your heat with you. Days fade through dusk into firelit nights.
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Build and staff a frontier outpost
Lay foundations, raise walls and doors, and place forges, workbenches, cooking, tailoring, and smithing stations. Sealed walls and good furniture make a space genuinely cozy — and coziness is a mechanic, not a decoration. Workbenches and crafting stations draw from every chest on the same floor. Hire hands out in the wilderness and post them at a station or a storage box: they craft, smelt and gather while you're away.
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Deep crafting and an economy that moves
Refine stone, ore, and timber into ingots, planks, steel, and silver. Craft tools, bows, revolvers, rifles, and heavy forge equipment. Trade with a frontier merchant whose prices genuinely shift: every good swings with the season, prices sag when you flood the market, and the better your standing the less you pay.
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Portals between your outposts
Build a pair of portals and step between your outposts — your mount comes with you.
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Built for thumbs, controllers, and airplane mode
Fully offline single-player — no internet, no account, no ads, no in-app purchases, no tracking. Custom touch controls with a virtual joystick and thumb-sized targets, plus controller support — including PortMaster handhelds.
The mounts
Four animals.
No best one.
| Species | Speed | Carry | Climbs cliffs | What it's for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cougar | 160 | 5 | Yes | The fastest thing you can sit on, and the only one that climbs. Carries almost nothing. |
| Elk | 147 | 15 | No | The frontier all-rounder — quick on its feet and a genuine hauler. |
| Horse | 133 | 10 | No | A dependable, even-tempered ride for steady overland work. |
| Bear | 93 | 20 | No | Slow, immensely strong, fights back — and its body heat keeps you alive in the cold. |
Base values. Each tamed individual rolls its own multiplier on top, and taming it well adds up to a further 25%.
Screens
The frontier, as it plays.
Privacy Policy
Nothing collected.
Nothing sent.
Updated October 8, 2026: these statements also apply to the Drywater PortMaster build distributed through itch.io. The game itself is unchanged in what it collects: nothing.
Drywater is a single-player, offline game. It has no backend, no accounts, and makes no network calls.
Zero data collection and tracking
Drywater collects, stores, transmits, and tracks no personal user data, no device identifiers, no location data, and no usage metrics.
Local storage only
All save files and game progression are stored locally on your device. Uninstalling the application removes those local save files.
No online connections or ads
The game functions completely offline. It contains no third-party advertisements, no in-app purchases, and no third-party analytics software.
App permissions
Drywater does not request or require access to your camera, contacts, microphone, or external storage.
This website, and the playable web build
The statements above describe the Drywater Android application. This page you're reading is part of appliedflux.com, which uses Google Analytics to count visits — standard web analytics, unrelated to the game and not connected to it.
This page also embeds a playable web build hosted by itch.io. That build is served by itch.io, not by Applied Flux, and itch.io may set its own cookies and collect its own usage data under their privacy policy. The zero-collection statements above apply to the Android application; they do not extend to itch.io. Below 700px viewport width the embed is not loaded at all, and no request is made to itch.io unless you follow a link.
The trailer on this page is hosted by YouTube and embedded from youtube-nocookie.com, which loads when you scroll the trailer into view. YouTube's own privacy policy applies to that player, not this one.
Questions
Email [email protected].
Found a bug?
Want to say something?
Drywater is built by one person — Ricky Cadden — under Applied Flux. Bug reports, feature arguments, and screenshots of your outpost all land in the same inbox, and I read them.
[email protected]