Flotsam free on Epic: claim the garbage-sea builder by 12 Nov

Epic has swapped its weekly giveaway, and this one is worth a minute of your attention rather than a reflexive click. Flotsam free on Epic runs from 5 November to 12 November 2026, and the game behind it is a finished, well-reviewed city-builder that only left Early Access eleven months ago — not the usual pile of forgotten shovelware.

One figure from our own record before anything else. Reading it on 5 November 2026, the lowest price we have logged for Flotsam since 26 September is $10.45, at GAMIVO on 15 October, and across the thirty-four daily readings we hold from that window the cheapest listing anywhere never went below it. Since 23 October every reading has sat several dollars higher. In other words, this week is the first time the game has cost nothing, and you are claiming it at the point where the open market had already stopped being generous.

Nothing here stands on land. Every platform you see has to be built from rubbish you fished out of the sea first. (Official Steam screenshot)

What Flotsam free on Epic actually gets you

Flotsam is a survival city-builder set on a drowned world, developed by the Belgian studio Pajama Llama Games and published by Stray Fawn Publishing. It spent years in Early Access and reached version 1.0 on 4 December 2025, which matters for a giveaway: you are being handed a completed game with a finished progression curve, not an abandoned build.

Our data has it at 81% positive from 4,649 Steam reviews. That is a solid rather than spectacular score, and the shape of it is worth knowing before you commit an evening. Flotsam is single-player only, has no combat, and offers full controller support and save-anywhere — it is a game you play with a cup of tea, not one you organise a group around.

The claim window is short. The offer opened at 16:00 UTC on 5 November and closes at 16:00 UTC on 12 November, replacing the giveaway for Sorry We're Closed, which we covered when it went free last week. Claiming takes a few seconds and the licence is permanent, so there is no reason to think about it for a week and then not do it.

The loop: a town that drifts, built from what floats past

The hook is specific. Your settlement has no ground under it. You collect floating plastic, driftwood and salvaged scrap out of the water, then recycle it into homes, workshops and walkways that stay afloat, and you keep the whole raft-town moving across the garbage sea rather than settling anywhere.

That constraint drives everything else. Water has to be desalinated before anyone can drink it. Fish have to be gutted. The old world you are sailing through is polluted, so your drifters catch pollution-borne diseases and you end up researching cures rather than defences. The technology tree runs from burning firewood towards a cleaner generation system the game insists on calling eel-ectricity, which tells you most of what you need to know about its tone.

Production chains have to be laid out across platforms you also have to keep afloat, which makes space the real currency. (Official Steam screenshot)

The other half is exploration. You sail to soaked ruins, rusting factories and forgotten islands, rescue stranded survivors and animals, and recruit specialists — a Birdkeeper, a Chemist, an Electrician — each of whom unlocks buildings and a personal story quest. Those quests are how new mechanics arrive, so the people you pick up are the progression system rather than decoration.

The 1.0 launch trailer, uploaded by developer Pajama Llama Games, shows the drifting-town loop better than a description can.

What the price record says about the timing

We log the cheapest live offer for Flotsam every day, and the past six weeks make an unusually clean shape. From 26 to 30 September the cheapest listing anywhere sat in the $22 range. Then a discount window opened: our Steam readings came in at $12.49 on 1, 8 and 17 October, with keyshops undercutting that slightly, and the floor kept sliding to the $10.45 low on 15 October. On 23 October it broke upwards again, and the readings from 28 October onwards sat in the high teens.

Two conclusions follow. The first is that Flotsam does discount properly, roughly by half, during store-wide sale events — so if you miss this week, the thing to wait for is a sale rather than a random Tuesday. The second is that the window had already closed before Epic's giveaway opened, which makes this week's offer the best price the game has had in our record by a wide margin. If you want the mechanics behind why we treat that dated floor as the only number worth quoting, we set it out in our piece on historical lows.

One caveat on the sellers in that record: most of the cheap October readings came from keyshops rather than Steam itself, and those carry the usual caveats about activation regions and support. Our guide to buying from keyshops covers what to check. It is academic this week, because Epic is giving the game away on its own store, but it matters if you go looking for the sequel to this deal.

If Flotsam clicks, the cheap next steps

Flotsam is a small game with a specific appetite — if the salvage-and-sustain loop lands, the obvious follow-ups are colony builders with the same resource pressure and a far lower cost of entry than a new release.

Against the Storm is the sharper one: a roguelite city-builder where each settlement is a timed run under permanent rain, and it is one of the cheapest genuinely excellent strategy games we track. Timberborn is the slower, more architectural choice, a beaver colony sim built around damming rivers and surviving droughts, sitting at 96% positive from nearly 42,000 reviews in our data. Live prices for both are on their game pages.

Expeditions are how the map opens up, and how you find the specialists who unlock the rest of the tech tree. (Official Steam screenshot)

Timberborn solves the same scarcity problem on dry land, by rebuilding the river instead of the town. (Official Steam screenshot)

If you would rather not rely on Epic's schedule, our standing guide to free PC games tracks the giveaways that run every week, and our store comparison explains what you actually own on each platform — which is the thing people most often get wrong about Epic claims.

The bottom line

Claim it. Flotsam is a finished, 81%-positive builder with an unusual premise, and our record shows that nothing close to this price has been available since the middle of October. The only real caveat is temperamental rather than technical: it is single-player, slow and has nothing to fight, so if you want a builder with threat in it, claim Flotsam anyway — it costs nothing — and spend your money on Against the Storm instead. The offer ends at 16:00 UTC on 12 November, and the licence is yours permanently once claimed.

A mature town, several in-game seasons in, once the tech tree has moved past firewood. (Official Steam screenshot)