Two Ways Through the Wasteland

The world ends. Then what?

Two builds on drive L: answer that question in opposite directions, and they make a good pair precisely because they share nothing else. Different catastrophes, different decades after them, different roads. Nothing in either file mentions the other. They simply arrived in the same month and turned out to be arguing.

Stay

A.C.R.E. 2 says: stay. Thirty-one years after the Flash, a machine wakes up in a dead school bus, counts five survivors and starts making a list. Scrap from the wrecks. Water. Power before the long night. Oil from the seeps, a workshop, a saloon, a buggy for the brave. Time is measured in days, and every seventh one is dark. Progress is a shack that becomes a street. The question it leaves you with is not whether the colony survives but what kind of thing is running it.

Go

Rust Highway says: go, and do not stop. Twenty years after the Sixty-Minute War, fuel is the only currency and the last road across the continent belongs to whoever wins The Run. Time is measured in seconds. Progress is the next curve. The only thing you build is speed, and the only thing you salvage is whatever falls off the car in front of you.

The same dust

Put them side by side and the genres tell the story. A.C.R.E. 2 is a settlement strategy game played from above, slow and deliberate, where a bad decision shows up a week later. Rust Highway is a pseudo-3D road racer played from the driver's seat, where a bad decision shows up in the next half second, usually as a rival's bumper.

One looks at the wasteland and sees material. The other sees a finish line. Both are right.

Build something, or outrun everything. The next two build files are yours to choose from.