With all hope lost, how will you cope in this bleak new world? How you handle the many moral choices you'll encounter on a daily basis could be the difference between your family surviving or dying. Combat claustrophobia, radiation and mental exhaustion as you cling desperately to life in the cramp, cold and scary underground shelter. You’ll have to leave the scant protection the shelter offers behind as you’re forced to venture outside into the dangerous desolate wasteland to scavenge for vital supplies which could ensure your families survival for just one more day.

Family Comes First. The teaser shows a nuclear family – Mum, Dad, Son and Daughter. At the start of a new game, you’ll pick the make-up of your family with each member having their own skills and traits. Want an all-girl family? You can do that. Want two dads and two daughters? You can do that too. In Sheltered, it’s not about who you are – it’s about how you work together to survive. 

But nothing lasts forever. Death comes to everyone, some sooner than deserved. A death in the family affects everyone’s mood (which, if you don’t manage correctly, could lead to the remaining family members becoming catatonic), limits the resources available to you (if your daughter is really great at fixing things, losing her will be a serious setback) and leaves you with some very difficult decisions to make about the future.

In our last update, we told you about exploring the wasteland – a necessary evil to ensure that your family has everything it needs to survive. This time, we want to talk about what happens when you chance upon another survivor. 

Encountering another survivor in the wasteland is a stressful experience with big risks. Get your encounter wrong and you could end up with consequences worse than death. Get it right, and you could gain an opportunity to trade, learn more about your surroundings or even gain a human resource for your shelter.

Encounters are rare (life, in fact, is rare in the wasteland), but should you end up in one you’ll need to choose who acts on the group’s behalf. Choose wisely, that person’s statistics, along with your decisions, will heavily affect the outcome. You’ll then decide how your chosen spokesperson will deal with the situation in front of them. Try to set up a trade and you could walk away with something useful. If things are too tense, you could attempt to take flight from the encounter. You also have the violent option – but you should be warned that it’s an extremely risky approach. Combat in Sheltered is unforgiving, and we’ll tell you more about that in the near future. 

We know that customisation is important to you and we’ve been employing some new techniques over the past month that will enable us (and ultimately, you!) to change the looks of the different characters in the game. We’re not quite at the stage where we can talk about this, so stay tuned for more details on character customisation in future updates.