Grandfather's hut at the edge of Bergdorf stands empty, and so do the alms above it. The old lift mostly creaks. The tourists stopped coming the winter it broke down.
So you take the post bus two hours up the valley, to the last stop. Dad is waiting. Mom has bread and cheese ready and won't hear a word against it. And Grandfather's axe and pickaxe are still sharp.
Fell your first spruce. Build a workbench. Reopen the overgrown tracks one by one, and bring the village back to life, one season at a time.
See you up there.
What you'll do
A cosy life, high in the Alps
Gather, farm, fish, fight and build your way up the mountain. Every skill feeds the next, and every alm you open brings something new.
Summer
Farming
Wake up the farm alm
Clear the old track north of the square and the fertile ground up there is yours. Till it, sow turnips, potatoes and flax, and carry water from the pond every morning.
3 crops so far, each with its own seasons
Cook what you grow on Grandfather's stove
Keep hens, collect eggs, sell to Alois at the farm shop
Winter
Your own ski area
Build the slopes. Then ski them.
Get the old cable car running and the mountain alm is yours to build on. Lay pistes, set out markers, put up a rope tow and a cafe. Visitors come by themselves once there's a lift, and the better your slopes, the more of them come.
Pistes, jumps, blue, red and black runs
Put your skis on and carve down it yourself
A cafe stocked with food from your own farm
Danger
Adventure
The deep forest and the old mine
The village and the alms are always safe. Danger is something you go looking for: behind the thicket, where boar and wolves don't want visitors, and down the old mine, floor after floor, with only a lamp.
6 creatures to face: bat, rock beetle, boar, hornets, rat, wolf
Copper and tin ore, smelted in a furnace you build
Better tools for every skill, from worn to bronze and beyond
Cosy
Home
A bare hut, and everything you make of it
The furniture was sold the winter the lift stopped. So you make a workbench from your first wood, then a chest, a table, a bench. Dress yourself in lederhosen or a dirndl, and spend a quiet evening with a rod at the stream.
28 things to make, by hand, at the workbench or on the stove
6 fish to catch in streams and pools
Put anything you make down wherever you like
Four seasons
The same square, all year round
Blossom in spring, bonfires at midsummer, cows coming down from the alm crowned with flowers, and a winter market under the lamps.
A spring morning on the square. The bus has just left.
The people of Bergdorf
Everyone has a routine, and an opinion
They open their shops, work their stops, chat on the square, and like some presents a great deal more than others.
Get letters from Bergdorf
71
9
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5
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7