Twenty-Five Megabytes Of Island Stranded 2 still eats weekends

25.2 MiB. That is the entire game, unzipped: an island, weather, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, buildable huts, tameable animals, a map editor and a full scripting language. It currently sits on an SSD in Sài Gòn, in the year 2026, and it has already eaten a few dozen hours of my remaining lifetime.

Stranded 2 got me again.

It arrived on a magazine CD

In late 2003 the delivery system for games in Germany was a plastic disc glued to the cover of a magazine, and one of the magazines in my hands was Computer Bild Spiele 12/2003. Somewhere on that CD, between demos and shareware nobody installed twice, sat a free little thing called Stranded. I wasn’t the only one who noticed – four German magazines picked the game up that same November, along with a regional newspaper, which for a hobby project by one guy is a genuinely absurd run.

I installed it. Then I installed it on a friend’s machine. Then a few hundred hours happened.

It was the first survival game I ever touched, and I want to be precise about how little that meant at the time: survival wasn’t a genre in 2003, it was a weird thing this one game did. No Minecraft. No crafting grid conventions to inherit, no hunger bar anyone had opinions about, no twenty-minute YouTube guide explaining the optimal first-day route. You found a stick, you found a stone, you rubbed them together and something happened. That was the whole fucking tutorial.

The man behind it was a schoolkid. Peter Schauß, Hamburg, not yet 18 when Stranded shipped – a detail he confirmed himself in his own forum a few years later, mildly irritated that a magazine had promoted him to adulthood without asking.

Around 2010 I went looking for Stranded 1, because I had suddenly remembered it existed – a memory of a memory, #rememberCeption – and found out that there was a Stranded 2. Public alpha in December 2005, full release in June 2007, still free, still built in Blitz3D by the same one guy. I downloaded it and played it for many nights. Then I did the thing you do with a game like that: I gave it to my best friend, and it took him too.

The weekend that ate two jobs

There was one weekend. He sat at his PC, I sat next to him on the couch with the laptop on my lap, and between us stood an amount of beer I would describe today as structurally unsound. In the background: Get on my horse, jazz edition, on infinite loop. Not for an hour. For the duration.

Two islands, two saves, two completely separate lives. He was doing his thing, I was doing mine, and every so often one of us would push back from the screen and walk over to inspect the other’s base like a neighbor leaning over a fence. Look at the fence line. Look at the storage huts. You planted cacao? I planted cacao. The lions got me twice.

We started Saturday night. We were still playing Sunday night.

My friend went to bed in the early morning, because he had work. I did not go to bed. I kept playing through the entire night, on beer, on jazz horse, on that specific clarity you only get at 5 am when the sun is coming up and your island is finally fenced. When he got up and started getting ready for work, I called my company and took the day, um, off. Then I played Stranded 2 through all of Monday, until he came home from his job and rejoined his own save.

That night I finally slept. He didn’t. He played through the night, skipped work the next day himself, and I went to the office.

A relay. Cooperative absenteeism, executed cleanly, with a handover.

Get on my horse, jazz edition

I would have sworn on something expensive that all of this happened in November 2009. It did not, and the annoying thing about running a blog since 2006 is that the blog remembers better than I do. My Stranded 2 post is dated November 30, 2010. The jazz horse post – FUCKING EPIC, all caps, my own headline – is dated November 10, 2011. Weebl only released the jazz version in March 2010 anyway, so 2009 was never on the table.

So the weekend sits somewhere in that window, and 2010-me wrote both posts in German, in bold, with an exclamation mark per paragraph and an apology for using autoplay. Another time. Another person. Same taste in horses (wait, that sounds wrong).

Getting a 2007 island onto a 2026 Linux box

I run Bazzite 44, NVIDIA edition. The game runs through Lutris and its Wine integration: grab the zip from the official download page, point Lutris at StrandedII.exe, take the default Windows 10 64-bit installer preset, keep the system locale. That’s it. No patching, no compatibility layer voodoo, no forum thread from 2018 with a broken attachment link. It installed without a single error, first try, which is not the sentence I expected to write about a 19-year-old Blitz3D game on a Fedora-based immutable distro.

The 25.2 MiB game then occupies 700 MiB on my SSD, because the Windows environment wrapped around it is ≈27.78 times the size of the thing it is wrapping. The game itself is ≈3.6% of its own installation. I find this hilarious in a way I can’t fully justify.

One thing needed hand surgery: the resolution. Stranded 2 is from the 4:3 era and its options menu only offers you 4:3-adjacent presets, so widescreen means editing /Stranded 2/mods/Stranded II/sys/settings.cfg yourself. The first two lines of that file are width and height. I set them to 1920 and 1080 and the game simply believed me, the way a dog believes you when you say you’re going for a short walk.

I also tried 2560×1440, out of greed. Don’t. The interface doesn’t scale, so the menu buttons retreat into the top left corner as tiny wooden splinters and the item names in your inventory become a rumor. Good old 1080p is the sweet spot. Lutris caps it at 50 FPS by default and I left it there, because the faint stutter it produces is, entirely by accident, period-accurate.

One guy, still building

Schauß never stopped. His other big project is CS2D, which exists because Counter-Strike ran badly on his PC in 2004, so he sat down and built his own 2D version of it. Well. That was an option too, apparently. It’s still on Steam, still free, still updated, sitting somewhere around 1,100,000 [1.1 million] owners. It was called Counter-Strike 2D until 2017, when it quietly became CS2D, and I will let you guess which company’s lawyers were involved.

And then there is Stranded III, which he has been working on since entry 1 of the dev blog, dated August 19, 2012. That is ≈13.97 years. 122 entries. The engine went Ogre3D, then Unity, then Godot, because Godot is free and open source and he’d rather not be anyone’s tenant.

The blog is not a corpse, either. Entry 122 went up on July 26, 2026 – two weeks ago – and it’s about water: a shader with caustics, distortion and edge foam, plus a river tool where you click points and the terrain carves itself a riverbed and fills it. Lakes work by clicking and dragging the water level, and the game refuses to fill an area that isn’t enclosed, so you don’t accidentally drown the map. He also added undo/redo to the map editor and flagged it as a first in over 20 years of shipping map editors, which is the kind of confession only a solo developer can afford to make.

No roadmap. No feature list. No release date, and a polite request not to ask for one. He works on it when he wants to work on it, and he says outright that there might be zero progress for months. Fourteen years of that, in public, with screenshots. I don’t know what to call it other than integrity.

Who owes what to whom

Stranded was one of the first survival games. Not THE first – I’m not going to fight that war – but one of the first, years before the genre had a name, a market, or an early access tag.

I can’t prove that Ark, Raft or Stranded Deep ever had it open in a research folder. I assume it, because it was free, it was everywhere, and it was one of the very few things doing that specific thing. And I like the softer version better anyway: somewhere in those teams sits at least one person who lost a school night to a free German island game with clunky graphics, and never entirely got over it.

Because that’s the part that survives, and it is definitely not the visuals. The sea is a flat sheet of teal, the palms look like green cardboard nailed to brown cardboard, and the lions read as angry orange sofas until one of them is chewing on you. In 2010 I wrote that the graphics are trash, that there is no AI, and that the game is addictive as hell.

Sixteen years later, on a Linux machine, ≈10,000 km from where I first installed it, all three still hold. Only the resolution changed 🏝️

Stranded 2 at a glance

Personal rating:

Developer:

Unreal Software

Publisher:

Unreal Software

Release date:

20 Jun, 2007

Genre:

Action-adventure, survival

Where to get:

Download for free at strandedonline.de.