CaveDefender

Welcome to CaveDefender!

CaveDefender is an online, audio-only game. There is nothing to see on screen; everything is spoken by your screen reader and placed around you in 3D spatial sound, so you play entirely by ear. You sign in to an account on a server and share a living world with other players: chat, move around together, make rooms, and battle over four walls in three different game modes.

What you do here

You connect to a server, create or sign in to an account, and drop into a shared lobby with everyone else who is online. From there you can talk, explore, form rooms with your friends, and launch games together. The heart of the game is a wall-defense battle called Wallbreaker, and it comes in three flavors.

Three ways to play

Defend (PVE). Four walls stand around a cavern, each starting at a random strength, and waves of enemies come to smash them down. You gather wood that drops around the cave and spend it to reinforce the weakest walls, racing to shore them up between attacks. Enemies swing axes, bats, crowbars, and hammers, and you hear every blow land on the wall it strikes, louder as that wall weakens. Survive as long as you can; each round you clear gets harder than the last.

Attack (EVP). The same battle, flipped around. Now you are outside the cave with a weapon in hand, and it is your job to smash the walls down while builder bots scramble to repair them. You hear the bots roaming the cavern, gathering wood, and mending the walls from the inside, all muffled and echoing as if leaking out through the stone. Part of every hit you land is permanent, so you always gain ground; bring every wall down to clear the round.

Player versus player (PVP). The wall fight with real people on both sides. One team attacks the walls from outside while the other defends them from within, and nobody ever crosses the walls between them. The arena is a bullseye: defenders hold the center, the four walls ring them, and attackers roam the band outside. Attackers win by breaking every wall; defenders win by keeping just one standing until the clock runs out. Wins and losses are saved to your account.

Built for sound

Every footstep, wall hit, and piece of wood is placed in true 3D around you, using HRTF spatial audio. Down in the cavern sounds carry a natural cave reverb; out on the open gravel they stay clear and dry. In player versus player, you even hear the far team through the walls muffled, as if through stone. Locator keys help you find your way: hear the strength of any wall, locate loose wood or other players nearest-first, and check the round status at any time.

A real community

CaveDefender is as much a place to hang out as it is a game. Talk to everyone in global chat, to just your neighbors in local chat, or privately one to one. Global chat is split into language channels so each language has its own conversation, including an opt-in unfiltered channel for talking freely. There is also live push-to-talk voice chat, relayed through the server and placed at the speaker's position in the world.

You can build rooms, public or private, invite people in, and start games for your group. You can also watch games in progress from a floating deck above the battle, chatting with the players as it unfolds. Personal per-player muting, chosen pronouns, custom nicknames, and a players menu with a full information card on anyone round out the social side.

Accounts, servers, and staff

Your progress lives on the server under your own account, protected with a modern password hash. You can save multiple servers and multiple accounts on your computer and switch between them easily. Every server runs its own rules, which you read and agree to once before you play, and is looked after by a team of staff, moderators, administrators, and developers, with tools to keep it safe and welcoming. Even connection drops are handled gracefully: lose your link mid-game and the server holds your place for 45 seconds while the game quietly reconnects you right back where you were.

Getting started

Grab the client, connect to a server, and make an account. Move with the arrow keys, hold alt to run, and press slash to chat. Type /help in game for the full list of commands, or read the in-game readme for everything else. That's all it takes to join the world.

CaveDefender is playable entirely with a screen reader and keyboard, no sight required.

Enjoy, and happy defending!