Smalland: Survive the Wilds takes the basic premise of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, throws in crafting, base building, giant insects, brutal weather, and multiplayer, then leaves you to figure out how the hell you’re going to survive when even a puddle can kill you.
If that sounds a little like Grounded, you wouldn’t be wrong. But despite the obvious similarities, Smalland quickly manages to establish its own identity through its creature taming, Great Tree bases, harsher survival mechanics, and a world that often feels genuinely dangerous.
When I first played Smalland, it was still in Early Access. Since then, the game has grown considerably, leaving Early Access in February 2024 and receiving multiple major updates that have changed taming, multiplayer, creatures, building, progression, and more.
Now, with Smalland 2: Lost Realms on the way, it’s a good time to look back at the original and ask one important question: is Smalland: Survive the Wilds still worth playing in 2026?
Smalland: Survive the Wilds
Smalland: Survive the Wilds is a challenging survival game where players explore a huge world from a tiny perspective. Battle and tame creatures, build impressive encampments, and survive dangerous weather.
- Reviewed on
- PC
- Time played
- 24 Hours
- Version / build
- Release
- Graphics8
- Audio8
- Gameplay9
- Replayability9
The Good
- Beautiful miniature world
- Up to 10-player multiplayer
- Challenging survival mechanics
- Continued post-launch content
The Bad (& Ugly)
- Nights can be extremely dark
- Traveling on foot can feel slow before unlocking better options
Reviewed byKegan MooneySurviving Smalland’s Elements
One of my biggest issues with many survival games is how quickly the actual survival part disappears. You start with nothing, everything wants to kill you, and food feels like a luxury, but a few hours later you’re running around like the local warlord with enough resources to survive several apocalypses.
Smalland does a much better job of holding onto that feeling of danger. Within minutes of starting, almost every insect you encounter seems savagely determined to rip you apart, but the creatures are only part of the problem. The landscape itself is dangerous, and when you’re tiny, even streams and puddles can become serious obstacles. Getting from one side of the map to another isn’t always as simple as walking in a straight line, especially during the early game when you don’t yet have access to some of the better methods of transportation.
The weather adds another layer to that challenge. Storms periodically roll across the map, giving you a short warning to seek shelter before the wind picks up, visibility drops, and the world around you starts to feel genuinely hostile. It’s one of those mechanics that perfectly sells the scale of Smalland. You’re not some fearless survival expert battling the elements. You’re absolutely tiny, and a bad bit of weather is legitimately dangerous.
During my original playthrough, I found myself building small shelters around the map just so I had somewhere nearby to hide whenever a storm arrived. Lower-tier buildings can also take damage during severe weather, adding even more incentive to upgrade your base rather than living in the Smallfolk equivalent of a garden shed forever.
It might occasionally be annoying, but I would much rather a survival game give me reasons to prepare than simply let its survival mechanics become irrelevant after an hour.
Smalland’s Gameplay
Smalland throws quite a few systems at you, including crafting, building, combat, armor, exploration, taming, factions, quests, and multiplayer. Thankfully, it doesn’t simply throw you into the wilderness and wish you luck.
The game’s tutorial and early progression have been reworked since the original Early Access version, making the opening stages easier to understand without removing the challenge that made the game interesting in the first place. You’re probably going to need the help too, because Smalland can still be brutal at the start, especially if you’re the type of player who sees something significantly larger than you and immediately thinks, “I wonder if I can kill that.” I am that type of player.
As you explore, you slowly unlock better crafting materials, tools, armor, weapons, and building pieces. That creates a satisfying progression where reaching a dangerous new area isn’t simply about seeing somewhere different. There’s usually something there that you actually need.
Flint is a good example. It’s an important step toward better equipment, but getting it means traveling into more dangerous territory. If you’re struggling to find it, we’ve got a separate guide covering how to find Flint in Smalland: Survive the Wilds.
This constant balance between needing better equipment and having to enter increasingly dangerous areas to get the resources for that equipment gives Smalland a satisfying risk-versus-reward loop.
Multiplayer Is Much Better Than It Used to Be
This is probably one of the biggest differences between the game I originally reviewed and Smalland today. Smalland supports multiplayer for up to 10 players, which is still a seriously impressive number for this type of survival game.
Originally, multiplayer had some frustrating limitations. There was no proper group system, finding other players could be annoying, and hosting was nowhere near as flexible as it is now. Thankfully, those complaints are no longer particularly relevant.
Smalland now supports dedicated servers, and the addition of guilds has made playing as a persistent group much more practical. Players can create server-based guilds and share Tree Encampments, while permissions determine who can build, customize, and interact with parts of the settlement. Guild members can also revive each other using revival items.
That’s a huge improvement over the original experience and makes the game much better suited to a long-running multiplayer world rather than simply letting several people exist on the same map together.
Of course, playing with nine other people also means someone is inevitably going to “borrow” the resources you’ve been saving. No update can fix your friends.
Taming Creatures
Taming was one of the features that originally helped Smalland stand apart from Grounded, and it has become considerably more important since launch.
The original system was relatively simple. You fought creatures, weakened them, and offered them the appropriate food to gain their trust. That’s no longer how the system works.
The modern taming system uses traps and bait, with multiple tiers of traps offering better chances of capturing creatures. Almost all creatures can now be tamed, and individual creatures can have different traits that make finding a particularly good companion much more interesting.
Companions can also be stored in stables, summoned when needed, and given commands, making them feel much more like an actual part of your survival setup rather than something you tame once because riding a giant grasshopper looks funny. Although, to be fair, riding a giant grasshopper does still look funny.
Tames aren’t only useful in combat either. Some creatures dramatically improve how quickly you can travel around the map, and once you’ve spent enough time slowly navigating the world on foot, getting access to a decent mount feels like an enormous upgrade.
If you’ve played ARK, there’s a familiar satisfaction here. You start off terrified of everything around you and eventually reach the point where some of those creatures are working for you instead. It’s nowhere near as complicated as ARK’s creature system, but that’s probably a good thing for anyone who doesn’t want taming something to become a part-time job.
Smalland’s Graphics and World
Smalland is still an undeniably beautiful game. The decision to make the player tiny gives the developers an enormous amount of room to turn otherwise mundane environments into impressive landmarks. Trees become skyscrapers, cracks become valleys, and discarded human objects become enormous structures.
The combination of nature and abandoned man-made objects scattered around the world makes exploration genuinely interesting. There’s usually something in the distance that makes you wonder what it is and whether getting there will result in useful loot or something eating your face. Potentially both.
Day and night also feel completely different. Nights are incredibly dark, sometimes frustratingly so, but glowing mushrooms and nocturnal creatures give the world a completely different atmosphere once the sun disappears.
Your antenna senses help highlight nearby resources and make navigating the darkness slightly less painful, while torches and lights around settlements create some genuinely impressive nighttime scenes. The lighting remains one of Smalland’s strongest visual features, with sunlight breaking through the trees during the day helping to emphasize the enormous scale of the environment, while the darker nights make the world feel considerably more threatening.
Building in Smalland
If you’re a fan of building in survival games, this remains one of Smalland’s strongest features. Building is relatively straightforward, but there’s enough variety in the available pieces to make something considerably more interesting than a giant wooden rectangle with a door slapped on the front.
You gradually gain access to stronger materials and more advanced structures as you progress, giving you a reason to keep improving your encampment rather than simply building everything you need within the first couple of hours.
The resource progression also feeds naturally into exploration. You might know exactly what you want to build, but getting the materials for it is another matter entirely.
Resources such as Flint push you toward more dangerous parts of the map, where stronger creatures make farming considerably riskier.
That means improving your base and improving your equipment often become part of the same progression loop, but the Great Tree system is where Smalland’s building becomes particularly interesting.
Players can claim massive trees and construct settlements high above the ground, creating a safer and much more impressive place to live. Great Tree Encampments can also travel between Great Trees, saving you from having to rebuild your entire home every time you want to relocate.
It’s such a simple quality-of-life feature, but anyone who has played a survival game and regretted building their enormous base in completely the wrong place will appreciate it. With guilds now allowing players to share encampments, building with friends is also considerably better than it was when Smalland originally launched.
There’s Much More to Smalland Now
It’s worth remembering just how much has been added since Smalland’s Early Access days. The full 1.0 release expanded the story and introduced additional world content, factions, events, and progression, while later updates have redesigned creature taming, expanded building, improved multiplayer, and added guilds, stables, new areas, and more enemies.
The Wyrdweaver update in April 2026 expanded the Caverns with another major encounter and new rewards, showing that the original game hasn’t simply been abandoned because a sequel is coming.
Smalland also arrived on Nintendo Switch 2 in May 2026, bringing the game to another audience years after its original Early Access debut. For a survival game that has been around for several years now, that’s a healthy amount of continued support.
Smalland vs. Grounded
Comparisons between Smalland and Grounded are inevitable. Both games shrink the player down and turn ordinary gardens and insects into enormous survival threats, but they don’t feel identical once you actually start playing them.
Grounded places much more emphasis on its handcrafted story and backyard mystery, while Smalland leans harder into traditional survival mechanics, large-scale exploration, mounts, taming, and its Great Tree building system.
Smalland also feels harsher during its early stages. The environment itself is regularly trying to ruin your day, while its creature progression often encourages you to venture into dangerous areas before you’re completely comfortable doing so.
If you’ve already played Obsidian’s take on miniature survival, our Grounded beginner’s guide and survival tips can help you survive the backyard too.
Personally, I wouldn’t say one makes the other redundant. If you enjoy the core idea behind Grounded but want something that leans more heavily into creature taming and traditional survival progression, Smalland offers enough of its own ideas to justify playing both.
Should You Play Smalland Before Smalland 2?
This is probably going to become an increasingly common question as Smalland 2: Lost Realms gets closer to release.
The sequel isn’t simply continuing directly from the end of the first game. It’s set ages before the events of Smalland: Survive the Wilds, in a time before the Giants colonized the world.
Lost Realms is expanding many of the original game’s ideas, including creature companions, multiplayer for up to 10 players, new lands, cultures, outposts, trade routes, crafting, and exploration.
That means you shouldn’t need to finish the first Smalland to understand the second, but I still think the original is worth playing. The setting remains unique, the building is excellent, creature taming gives exploration much more purpose, and the developers have fixed or expanded several of the weaker areas from the Early Access version.
If anything, playing the first game should make it more interesting to see how Lost Realms changes the formula.
Is Smalland: Survive the Wilds Worth Playing in 2026?
Yes. Smalland isn’t a perfect survival game, but it does something that far too many games in the genre struggle with: it makes exploring the world feel dangerous for more than five minutes.
Its miniature setting isn’t simply there to look different. It directly affects how you explore, how you build, how you survive the weather, and how threatening the creatures around you feel.
The building system remains impressive, and the vastly expanded taming system gives players another reason to keep exploring long after they’ve established a base. Most importantly, several of my original complaints have effectively disappeared. Dedicated servers are now available, guilds exist, shared encampments make multiplayer much more practical, taming is much more substantial, and new content has continued arriving.
If you enjoy Grounded, ARK, Valheim, or survival games where building and exploration matter just as much as punching whatever happens to be standing in front of you, Smalland is still absolutely worth looking at.
With Smalland 2 approaching, now isn’t a bad time to finally see what all the tiny fuss was about.
Support Unboxed Reviews
Unboxed Reviews is fully independent — no publisher funding, no pay-to-win scores. If our reviews, news and guides have helped you, consider buying us a coffee. It helps keep the lights on.
Donations are entirely voluntary. Supporters receive no editorial influence — our reviews remain 100% independent.