Trash Digging

A very big pile, and one small robot

Hi! I'm the solo developer behind Trash Digging, a cozy first-person digging game. You are a little robot on a giant island that is really one enormous mountain of pastel, hand-painted trash: bottle caps, tin cans, sock heaps, flowerpots, tire stacks, old cassettes. A snowy white-glass peak rises out of the middle of it, and you can see it from almost everywhere. Your job is simple. Dig, find what's buried, and take your time.

I wanted to make the kind of game I'd love to find on a tired evening: calm, soft on the eyes, and a little bit funny.

Dig your own tunnels

Hold the button and the ground simply flows into your vacuum. There are no chunky blocks and no hurry, just a steady, smooth suction that carves out a tunnel, a cave or a hole you can stand up in. Everything you dig stays dug.

• A mountain you can really tunnel through: the island is about ten kilometres across at its base, and the peak stands over two kilometres tall. Tunnelling straight through the bottom at a run takes around twenty minutes.
  
• Soft things go first: cloth and paper give way quickly, glass and metal take their time. Better digging power makes everything faster.
  
• Nothing is left hanging: if you dig out what was holding up a piece of the hill, it crumbles away in a little puff of dust. No floating bits in your way.
  
• Nine kinds of hills: from flowerpot gardens and cardboard flats to tire terraces, cassette scree and the white bottle peaks at the very top. Each has its own colours and its own junk.

Find things, keep things, fix things

Buried in the trash are old gadgets: radios, televisions, telephones and other things that once sat in somebody's living room. Dig close and they glow through the hill. When they are free, they float into your backpack.

• A grid backpack: pack your finds into a tidy grid, turn them to fit, stack the small ones and arrange things just how you like.
  
• Open them up: look inside an old gadget, see which parts still work, take them out and keep them. Take apart what you don't need and turn it into materials.
  
• Materials from every kind of trash: glass, stone and clay, wood and paper, plastic, rubber, metal and cloth, plus a rarer, shinier version of each that only comes from salvage.
  
• Heirlooms: hidden somewhere in the pile are more than two hundred legendary keepsakes, little tributes to the films, comics and games I grew up with. They are never sold. They go in your collection, and each one has a small description written to make you smile. All the names and designs are my own.

Scan, upgrade, grow

Not sure where to dig? Send out a gentle scan. A soft wave rolls over the ground and for a while buried treasures show up as little beacons with a colour and a distance. They don't tell you what's there. That part is still a surprise.

• Upgrade your robot, part by part: the collector arm, the head, the wheel and the hover pack each have their own upgrades, five levels each. Dig faster, reach further, scan sooner, climb steeper, jump higher, hover longer.

Hover over the trash

Hold Space in the air and your little robot rises on a puff of thrust. It drains your charge, so use it wisely, and standing on the ground fills it up again. If the charge runs out you glide gently down. You will never get a hard drop. It is a lovely way to look at the whole hill, or to reach a ledge you dug yourself.

Light your way, and watch the day go by

The sun rises and sets over the mountain, the sky turns peach and then deep blue, and the stars come out. Down in your tunnels it gets properly dark.

• A headlamp you can switch on and off.
  
• Lanterns you can place wherever you like, and pick up again. Their warm light spreads softly over the walls, with no hard edges, and the deeper you go, the darker it gets without them.
  
• A quiet, sleepy ambience of wind, creaks and drips that changes with the time of day.

Where the story is going

The robot you play was sent to Earth by a very large and very soulless company to dig through the trash and send useful things back. The company has opinions about quotas. The robot has plans of its own, and they are slowly starting to look a lot like a small robot uprising. The company's letters and memos are meant to be the funny part. I'm still writing and building this side of the game, and I'll be honest with you as it grows.

Good to know

• Single-player. Nothing to unlock, nothing to pay for in the game, nothing that hurries you.
  
• Keyboard and mouse, with partial gamepad support (rebindable buttons, and button icons for Xbox, PlayStation, Switch and Steam Deck). Full controller support is something I'm working towards.
  
• Made for Windows and for Steam Deck / Linux. Needs a graphics card that supports WebGPU. See the system requirements.
  
• English only for now.
  
• Settings for graphics quality, dynamic resolution, a frame rate target, interface size, a camera shake slider and a reduce motion switch.
  
• Trash Digging is in Early Access. What you see on this page is what is in the game today, and a few things (like the story) are still on their way.

About AI tools

I want to be upfront: I used AI tools while making this game. Some of the art (concept art, key art, the logo and some icons), sound effects and voice lines, and the trailer music were made with AI tools, and I used AI assistance when writing the code. I looked at everything, threw away far more than I kept, and finished what stayed by hand. Nothing in the game is generated while you play. The full note is in the AI disclosure section of this page.

Why Early Access

I want to grow this game together with the people who play it. Early Access lets me hear what you love, what feels off and what you wish you could dig up next, and shape the mountain around that. I read every bit of feedback, and I'll keep you posted on what changes and why.

A note from me

Trash Digging is a small game made by one person, slowly and with care. Every hill, every lantern glow and every little piece of junk has been looked at and nudged by me more times than I can count. If this looks like the kind of quiet place you'd like to spend an evening, a wishlist would mean the world to me. Thank you for stopping by.