System Requirements

System Requirements

Nivalis is a PC-exclusive title, officially retitled Nivalis Nights, launching September 29, 2026 on Steam (App ID 1488490), with an Epic Games Store version to follow. No console versions have been announced. No Mac or Linux versions are planned. The game runs on Unity (the same engine used for Cloudpunk, refined for far greater detail), and its dense, voxel-built city carries meaningful hardware requirements, particularly for the GPU. Below are the minimum and recommended specifications based on the official Steam store page.

Hardware Specifications

Specification Notes

The 16 GB RAM requirement at both minimum and recommended tiers is worth noting. This is a firm baseline rather than something you can squeak under. Games with dense environments tend to be memory-hungry, and Nivalis, with its detailed voxel art style and vertically layered city, is no exception. If your system has 8 GB of RAM, you should expect performance issues or an inability to run the game at all.

The GPU requirement jumps from 6 GB VRAM at minimum to 8 GB VRAM (with an RTX 2070 or equivalent recommended) for the recommended tier. The difference between these two tiers is not just resolution; it is the quality of the lighting. The city's layered lighting, a mix of baked light probes, real-time, and volumetric lighting, is responsible for much of the game's visual atmosphere. Running at minimum settings will likely mean reduced lighting quality, which in a game where neon-lit nights and rain-slicked streets are a major part of the experience, is a significant trade-off.

Storage is listed at 30 GB for both tiers, but the recommended spec calls for an SSD rather than a traditional hard drive. This is primarily about loading times. The game's many hand-crafted districts contain a lot of unique geometry and texture data, and an SSD will reduce the time spent waiting during transitions and initial load.

Platform Availability

ION LANDS has indicated that Steam Deck compatibility is under exploration, but no official compatibility rating has been announced. Given the hardware requirements (16 GB RAM, 6 GB VRAM minimum), running Nivalis on the Steam Deck's APU will likely require significant graphical compromises if it is supported at all.

On consoles the developers have been consistent rather than silent: PC is the current focus, and other platforms are something they are looking into without any commitment or timing attached. That is why the console rows above read as not announced rather than ruled out. Mac and Linux are further away still, described as something the team is not exploring at the moment, with any change to be announced through the official channels.

Steam Features

Nivalis supports several Steam platform features.

Full controller support means you can play the entire game with a gamepad, including menus, the business management interface, and cooking interactions. The game was designed with both keyboard/mouse and controller inputs in mind, so neither input method feels like an afterthought. Ultrawide monitor support is confirmed, which is worth noting for a game with detailed environmental art; the extra horizontal field of view should enhance the sense of being inside the city's dense lower levels.

Offline play is supported. Nivalis Nights is a singleplayer-only game with no online functionality, and the developers have said outright that you do not need an internet connection to play beyond whatever the storefront requires to update the game. Cloud saves are the one feature that does need a connection, and they keep your progress synced across machines if you play on more than one PC. The store's requirement block does carry a broadband line under both tiers, which is why it appears in the table above, but it does not describe an always-online check.

Accessibility and Comfort Features

The store listing now carries a set of accessibility and comfort capability tags alongside the usual platform features. These are declared by the developers rather than inferred, so they are a reliable picture of what the game commits to at launch.

Two of these matter more than they might sound. "Playable at your own pace" and "playable without timed input" together mean the game does not gate progress behind reaction speed or timed button presses, which fits a slice-of-life sim built around a 2 AM curfew rather than around twitch skill. "Save anytime" means you are not tied to sleeping or to fixed checkpoints to bank progress. Camera comfort is a first-person-specific tag, covering things like field of view and camera movement, which is worth knowing given the game is played entirely in first person.

Supported Languages

Nivalis supports 11 text languages at launch. Voice acting is in English only.

All 11 languages include full text localization for the game's roughly 200,000 words of dialogue. The voice acting, which covers 135-plus characters with distinct performances, is English-only. Given the scope of the recording (over 8,000 auditions for 100-plus roles), localizing the audio into additional languages would have been a significant additional investment for a studio of ION LANDS' size.

Additional Details

Optimization and Performance Targets

The developers have shared specific details about how the game is being optimized ahead of release, which helps set expectations for how it should run on the hardware listed above. The stated performance target is a steady 60 frames per second. At that frame rate the frame budget is only 16.66 milliseconds, so the team has prioritized reducing memory allocations in order to minimize the stutters that garbage collection can otherwise introduce.

Several techniques support that goal. Because the world is built from voxels but does not use a traditional voxel engine, it carries much higher polygon counts than usual, so the game relies heavily on multiple levels of detail (LODs) to keep rendering costs down. The light probes that capture environmental lighting were completely overhauled, and furniture assets were polished, which together cut memory usage significantly. An NPC "Ghost system" simulates characters at three tiers of detail depending on whether they are out of district, in the player's district but hidden, or visible, and an object-pooling system reuses a managed pool of more than 10,000 elements such as tables, chairs, and dishes instead of constantly creating and destroying them. These systems are why a dense, detailed city like Nivalis can target smooth performance on mid-range hardware.

Quality Assurance and Localization Testing

Ahead of release, Nivalis runs through three separate quality-assurance teams. ION LANDS' own internal team tests new features and bug fixes inside the editor and on Steam builds. Once a build is pushed to the Steam testing branches, the publisher's primary QA team and an external partner studio take over. Between them they cover general stability and blocker identification, save and load functionality, quest and story progression, environments and movement and interactions, character simulation, the user interface, and memory consumption and performance.

A dedicated team handles localization testing for all 11 supported languages, including verifying that the English voiceover stays synchronized and that on-screen text is accurate in every language. For Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, the team bakes two optimized fonts per language before each translation update so that every required character is available. The external partner also assists with compatibility testing, working from Steam hardware-survey data to validate a range of configurations and to finalize the minimum and recommended specifications shown on the store page.

Performance Expectations

Because the game has not yet released, detailed performance benchmarks are not available. However, based on the hardware requirements and the engine, players should plan for a GPU-intensive experience. Dense, detailed environments lean heavily on the graphics card, and the lower-city areas of Nivalis, with their layered neon lighting and atmospheric effects, will likely push hardware harder than open sky or sparse environments would.

Players on minimum-spec hardware should expect to run the game at lower settings and resolutions. Those hitting the recommended spec (RTX 2070 class GPU with 8 GB VRAM, SSD) should be able to enjoy the game at medium to high settings with stable frame rates, though exact numbers will depend on ION LANDS' optimization work prior to release.