Citrus & Stone

What Is Citrus & Stone?

Citrus & Stone is a cozy pixel-art base builder from solo developer Oort, coming soon to Steam. You play as a grapefruit named Tony or a cherry named Sherry, washed up on an island overrun by mushrooms. By day you gather, craft, and build a camp around your campfire. At six every evening, mushrooms pour out of the Rotten Bushes and try to put that campfire out. If the fire dies, the run is over.

It plays solo, in online co-op with a friend joining as Sherry over Steam, or in split-screen couch co-op where player two can pick up a controller and drop in at any time. The soundtrack is built around acoustic guitar played by Oort, which tells you the tone before you even launch it: cabin-in-the-woods warmth wrapped around a tower-defense spine.

Citrus & Stone Details

How to Play Citrus & Stone

The Day-Night Contract

Everything in the game hangs on one rule: the campfire must stay lit. Days are for preparation, nights are the exam. Each morning you gather wood, break rocks, fish, and cook. Each evening, mushroom raids come in bigger groups than the night before. That escalating curve means a camp that barely survived day three is already obsolete on day five, so the game quietly pushes you to keep expanding rather than turtling in place.

Daytime Work

The island gives you a wrecked boat and a broken campfire to start. From there, the daytime loop covers the survival basics with a few twists:

• Gather and craft. Chop trees, break rocks, smelt iron, and work your way up from a makeshift axe to walls, gates, and archer towers.
• Upgrade the campfire. The fire has four levels, and each upgrade unlocks new recipes. It is both your base heart and your tech tree.
• Farm and cook. Grow wheat and fruit from bananas to dragon fruit, then cook recipes ranging from Guava Chiffon Cake to Sea Serpent Sashimi Boat.
• Fish. From the beach or from your rowboat once you build one and push out to sea.

Hiring Survivors

The island is not empty. Survivors are camped around it, and you can pay them to join your camp. Each one takes a job: builders put up and repair walls, archers man the towers, trappers lay traps. They level up as they work, and you can upgrade their gear. The trick is matching jobs to the raid pattern your nights are showing you. If mushrooms keep chewing through one wall section, that is where your next builder and a tower belong.

There is one more management tool, and it is the most charming system in the game: grow wheat, brew it into beer in a keg, and serve it at the Bar Tab. The little green survivors love it, and it may motivate them to work harder. A round of beer as a productivity bonus is exactly the kind of cozy-game joke that sticks.

The Five Shrines

The long-term goal beyond surviving is escape. Five shrines are hidden around the island, and each asks for its own category of offering: crops, materials, dishes, mushroom loot, and fish. That list doubles as a checklist of every major system in the game, so treat the shrines as your progression guide. Complete all five offerings and your boat is ready to sail.

Because mushroom loot is one of the five offering types, night raids are not pure punishment. Everything the mushrooms drop feeds your escape plan.

Night Defense

At 6:00 PM the mushrooms come. Early raids are small pushes aimed at the fire. As days pass, the groups grow, and some nights bring something bigger: boss encounters that need real preparation, not just a wall and hope. The official site promises many boss fights to prepare for across the campaign.

Defense layers together: walls and gates slow the raid, traps thin it out, archer towers chip away, and your survivors handle repairs and shooting. Your own character joins in too, but the design clearly wants your base to do most of the fighting by mid-game, while you manage the economy that keeps it supplied.

Co-op, Both Kinds

Citrus & Stone handles two players unusually well for a cozy builder. Split-screen couch co-op runs two separate inventories on one screen, and player two can join at any time with a controller. Online co-op casts your friend as Sherry over Steam. The natural division of labor: one player holds the base through the night while the other fishes, farms, and feeds the shrine offerings. One of you fishes while the other rebuilds the wall, as the official site puts it.

Tips and Tricks

Fix the fire on day one. The broken campfire is your spawn point and your lifeline. Everything else, even the boat, can wait a day.

Walls pay rent every night. A single wasted day of gathering is annoying; a failed night is a run. Defensive structures convert daytime surplus into run insurance.

Brew before the boss nights. If a bigger raid is coming, a keg of beer for the crew is cheap insurance on survivor output.

Fish toward the shrine. Fish offerings are one of the five escape requirements, so every fishing trip is progress, not downtime.

Watch the 6:00 PM clock. The raid timing is fixed and announced. End outdoor projects early enough to be inside your walls when the mushrooms surface.

System Requirements

Oort has not published system requirements yet. The pixel-art presentation and the game's playable-without-timed-input accessibility options suggest modest hardware will be fine. Check the Steam page when the release date lands.

Comparison With Similar Games

Citrus & Stone shares DNA with several cozy-survival titles but splits the difference in its own way. Compared with pure farming sims like Stardew Valley, it has a hard fail state and a defense layer. Compared with base-defense games like They Are Billions, it is smaller in scope, gentler in tone, and built for two players on a couch. The closest neighbors are games like Core Keeper or Don't Starve for the gather-by-day cycle, but the campfire-as-tech-tree plus shrine-offering escape route is its own structure.

FAQ

When does Citrus & Stone release? No date yet. The Steam page and official site both say coming soon.

How much will it cost? Not announced.

Can I play it with a friend? Yes, three ways: online co-op over Steam, split-screen couch co-op with separate inventories, or Remote Play Together.

Do the mushrooms ever stop? No. Raids grow every night, with boss encounters mixed in on some nights.

Is there an ending? Yes. Complete the offerings at all five shrines and the boat sails, ending your stay on the island.