Read the official posts and you will count three camps. The 3 June 2026 announcement introduces the demo’s two opponents, a bandit faction and a mutant faction, and the 15 June post names the player’s side as the Fourth Industrial Empire. Three.
The files hold four. The demo’s faction table lists AI_Empire, AI_Mutants, AI_Renegades and AI_Travelers. The first three map cleanly onto what has been announced — for two of them the mapping is not a guess, it is readable in the data: the mutant faction record points directly at the mutant barracks, bio-reactor, factory, refinery and crane, and the renegade record points at its own barracks, generator, factory and silo.
The fourth is different. Thirteen entries carry its prefix: seven units — Ballista, Drone squad, Drone collector, Heavy liner, Seeker, Arc Spear, Plasma tank — and six buildings — Light Infantry Workshop, Mechanoid Factory, Reactor, Cleaning center, Storage, Plasma turret. Every one of them has an official name and an official description in the game’s own localisation table. They have icons. They are, visually, a coherent set: smooth pale ceramic shells, rounded forms, a cold cyan glow, where the Empire is angular riveted steel with red-orange lights. One of their images is an emblem carrying the words “FOR A NEW LIFE”.
And here is the measured fact that matters. 106 of the demo’s units and buildings carry hit points and armour; these thirteen carry none. No hit points, no armour, no weapon — the prefabs those entries point at hold no combat components at all. That is not an extraction failure on our side: every other faction’s entries resolve normally through the same script.
What we will not do is tell you what that means. An entry that is present but empty could be content being built, content cut and left behind, or content deliberately disabled for the demo. The developer has said nothing about any of it, and a label is not evidence — reading intent out of a file layout is exactly the kind of guess this site refuses to publish.
What we can say is this: as of the demo build 23882143, measured on 17 August 2026, a fourth faction exists in the game’s data, it is named, described and illustrated, and it cannot fight. If that changes in a later build, the comparison will show it.
Values read from game files · version 23882143