Special Interest
TrailForge
Players are dropped into different wilderness biomes and must use real outdoor skills to survive and thrive. Build shelters, start fires with friction, purify water, navigate by stars, identify edible plants, predict weather, and handle emergencies. The only wilderness survival education app on any platform.
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 20 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, and patiently scaffolds learning. On-device AI personalizes the mentor's responses to your kid's progress — never connecting to a server, never collecting data.
Mentored by Ranger
#FFA726 TrailForge is a wilderness survival and outdoor skills simulator for ages 9-14 where players learn real survival techniques across diverse biomes — building shelters, starting fires with friction, purifying water, navigating by stars, identifying edible plants, predicting weather, and handling emergencies.
Characters who teach
Meet the cast
TrailForge's characters each teach one outdoor skill along with respect for the land. Way reads the land to find direction, Watch reads the weather, Shelter builds protection from wind, cold ground, and rain, Tend takes care of water, warmth, and food in that order, and Listen remembers that every trail was known long before us. Tinder, Lash, Graze, Cairn, and Switchback cover safe fires, knots, careful foraging, marking a trail, and climbing gently. Ranger is the mentor who guides them.
Way
Navigation + orienteering — reading-what's-already-there orientation; 'Stop. Look. Find one thing you know. Now you have a starting point.'
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Watch
Weather reading + observation — sky-as-conversation-already-happening; notice the moment it changes
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Shelter
Shelter-building + warmth — three-walls insulation (wind / cold-ground / rain)
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Tinder
Fire-making, safely and leaving no trace
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Lash
Knots and lashing / securing things right
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Tend
Water + plants + body-care — survival-as-attentiveness to body priority-order (the fastest clock first: air, then warmth, then water, then food); DELIBERATELY shared design with CreatureCare + ForgePortal Tend
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Graze
Foraging with caution / know before you eat
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Cairn
Marking the way for others, sparingly and only where needed
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Switchback
The sustainable indirect climb
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Listen
Trail-listening + land-respect — every trail was here before you; credit the source; leave no trace; DELIBERATELY shared design with OriginForge Listen
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Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Learning goal
Players are dropped into different wilderness biomes and must use real outdoor skills to survive and thrive. Build shelters, start fires with friction, purify water, navigate by stars, identify edible plants, predict weather, and handle emergencies. The only wilderness survival education app on any platform.
Question kits
16 curriculum-aligned question kits, 400 questions in all, mapped to recognized standards.
On-device AI mentor
FoundationModels-powered hints, feedback, and adaptive difficulty — all running locally.
Mentored by Ranger — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How TrailForge handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages
TrailForge runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
TrailForge is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch
