Fossil Quest is a cozy, chill fossil digging life sim. You have always dreamt of creating your own dinosaur museum and now you finally have the space to do it.

Fossil Quest is getting turned into a full game thanks to all the support we've gotten here on Itch. We are really excited about the future of this project. Every wishlist helps us get one step closer to making this game bigger and better!
This is still a Prototype
It is a work in progress and some things may still be a bit rough around the edges :-) We will be posting updates whenever we have new content. We want to add awesome features like: bone identification, shops and upgrades, more customization, a town with awesome characters to get to know, and of course way more fossils to find and display.
Unfortunately the game is not currently working in FireFox.I am really trying to figure it out but its complicated... :-( Super sorry.
Got feedback?
We want as much community feedback as we can get! Send us your suggestions, requests, likes and dislikes.
Join the expedition!
We're a two person team and we appreciate every bit of support we can get to make great games. Here are some (free!) ways you can support us:
| Updated | 2 days ago |
| Status | In development |
| Platforms | HTML5,Windows |
| Rating | Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars (40 total ratings) |
| Author | Unsigned Double |
| Genre | Simulation |
| Made with | Unity |
| Tags | Casual,Cozy,Cute,Dinosaurs,Exploration,Isometric,Management,Non violent,paleontology,Relaxing |
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I managed to get as far as starting to uncover my first fossil in Montana, but then the game froze. Not sure if my laptop is just too warm or whether I should re-launch from the Itch app. Stupid hot weather. But I've been fine playing other games. Anyway, I've wishlisted on Steam. I'll try again, since it looks like my kind of game, and I do want to play it. I'll play it when it comes on Steam anyway.
I did re-launch, and hadn't saved, so started from the beginning. Tried Saskatchewan instead this timed, and found my seventh fossil just before the game froze again. Sigh. Wish the game auto-saved. I did find another fossil, but it was partly in the green stuff and I couldn't get the whole fossil uncovered. Ah well.
Hi there, I am really sorry about that. Because of the nature of the things we added/changed we had to wipe the save games otherwise things would have been very broken :-(
We are really sorry. I know it sucks. It's hard In the early stages of development when things are changing so much. In future we promise we will try our best to not wipe saves if possible!
Hello there! Devs here. Quickly wanted to let everyone know that the update we were planning for today is delayed until tomorrow. We need some extra time for testing and polishing a bit.
There will be a new location to travel to and some new fossils to find and.. A SHOP! you will now be able to spend your money :D Plus a host of other improvements. See you tomorrow!
We've been hard at work trying to figure out why it's crashing on FireFox, unfortunately not with much luck yet. Web builds can be tricky! It hard to say if yours is the same issue or something else without more information. Were you on a windows PC when you tried?
Either way I'm sorry for the frustration! Maybe try again when we push the next update and let us know? It should be up tomorrow. Or try to play the downloadable build :D
We are getting ready to push an update that will allow you to upgrade your aeroplane to travel further ;) the first new location we have added is The Karoo, South Africa. It should be up tomorrow.
Your other suggestions are great!! We'd love to add a brushing/cleaning mini-game and more customisation options are on the cards for future updates. Thanks for playing!
AHH yes I felt the same when I found out!! It's very rare to find a complete skeleton, sorry for breaking the illusion!
...BUT seeing as we already have, you may as well also know: Most of the big complete dinosaurs you see in museums (esp the ones not behind glass) are made up entirely of casts and the real things are kept in the back where they are safe. In most cases they are too fragile and valuable to display out in the open :-) Next time you are in a museum you can ask a curator which ones are real bones and they should be able to point them out.
I didn't know that either!! but thanks for sharing, I bet you learned a lot about this stuff while making the game, there's loads of information in it.
Makes me so happy to play games developed by teams that really put their heads on the theme and went further to add accurate info. Learning even random stuff while playing and having fun feels amazing! I hope you guys are able to develop the game with all the ideas you want to!!
Thanks again for all the dino info<333
I LOVE THIS GAME so much I love it so much
I think my recommendation is for when you collect all the common skeletons in the dig sites that's when it opens up newer dig sites, or maybe you have to buy them, one or the other lol :P
I also think it would be cool if there were more decor options and the ability to move the decor desk, dig site desk and shop desk when rearranging the room!
These aren't even critiques because I don't think they're needed at all I just think it's cool
I really love this game and do NOT listen to the haters, they're mad you came up with this first I love this game so much it's probably the number one thing I've been looking for since I was a wee boy
Lots of love :D
Your comment really made my day, thanks for taking the time to leave us some feedback!
All of your ideas are awesome and pretty much all of them happen to be things we have planned to do already so that's super cool! In the next update which will be up either Wednesday or Thursday we will have a shop where you can upgrade your airplane (and other things too!) so you can fly further to new dig sites.
Being able to move all the tables is a great suggestion and something which we've added to our list of to-do's
So stoked that you like the concept of the game so much!! I hope you enjoy all the future updates coming your way :D
WOW!! The idea of going out to dig and find fossil pieces for a museum is amazing! Also, exploring different parts of the world and highlighting those locations teaches us where dinosaurs used to live. The art is beautiful, I’d love to see more of this project! Is there a sequel planned? I think it could be expanded into something bigger for Steam — keeping the exploration and fossil-hunting mechanics, but adding the process of cleaning what you find and organizing it in your museum, unlocking new exploration sites and dinosaur information. It sounds awesome! I’d love to see this idea developed further because it’s truly great!
Thank you random adjective!!
We're actually thinking about all the things you've mentioned and we are going to release a full version on steam. While we work on the full game we will also continue updating the prototype on itch though so everyone here can still experience the new content.
Thanks for playing and thanks for leaving such a lovely comment. Have a rad day!
After sorting out my tech difficulties (skill issue, not game design), I can say that the game is as charming as it looks.
The art style is good at balancing a variety of factors. It is adorable, it is detailed enough to convey the fossils as stone remembering bone, and is simple enough to be pleasant while doing both. There are a few main themes for decorating your museum that mix and match quite well. And, again, these add to the experience without being distracting. Very well done.
The music is pleasant but unobtrusive.
The gameplay was fun. Describing why things are fun is not my strong point, but it worked for me. Perhaps as important is how delightfully intuitive it is. No tutorials and minimal popups, but easy to play anyway. I tend to do poorly at games without in-game tutorials, but I only made one mistake when I started playing. And that only a very minor one. I would call this very good design.
I quite enjoyed putting the dinosaurs together. Neither of mine were complete, as it is a bit late for playing through more than one dig site, but it settled the part of my brain that is always looking for a nice, low-pressure puzzle.
I like the writeups about the dinosaurs. I only played through one dig site, so I'm not sure how many dinosaurs are currently in the game, but it was fun to read about the history of paleontology. For both of them. And obviously learning about dinosaurs is always fun.
A very good game on the whole. My only problem is both small and might have been my fault. I struggled to find a way to exit the game once it was running. There didn't seem to be any button for it, and neither the escape key nor any of the letters provided an exit option. Needing to pull up the task bar to manually close the window to exit a game is not my preference. I did go back and double check that I hadn't missed an instruction on the starting menu and loading screen. Still, this is a very minor issue and as it is late and I am bad at tech may well be my fault.
On the whole, a very pleasant game. I look forward to playing again and to seeing it expand.
We are happy you are enjoying it so far. Thanks for pushing through the technical issues and trying to download it again.
It is not your fault at all, we have not yet added a pause menu or an exit game button. You can never leave! Lol jokes! sorry about that :-P I know it's a pain to have to manually close the window. We will chat about if/when we could add one in to the prototype.
Hope you enjoy the future updates too!
The movement is incredibly slow/jank - the pickaxe should not force you in an unskippable animation that follows through/enacts whenever you hold down those buttons (maybe let the player move while doing it?)
When it comes down to it, there needs to be more depth/interest in these minigames - if you feel that they can have an "auto complete" system (as in the assembly function for the fossils), that means that the system/function likely isn't interesting enough to participate with on its most basic level (it could still be a feature added later on if you don't want to fix/achieve things).
I see some potential if you explore the players intentionally messing up their fossils to make new abominations - falsifying descriptions, or anything else (if that is fleshed out/expanded upon more, I feel that it could become a whole "good" vs "bad" player thing).
There are a lot of ways this game could expand in, as I feel it is somewhat flavorless in all of them (but especially the exploration part - why not add some combat or some other bs in the caves?)
My gripe is that everything here is effectively one giant fetch quest (as most games go), that the player can immediately recognize is a fetch quest. There needs to be depth/detail to the story to distract the player from that.
Perhaps you can change this a little bit - making it more fantasy-esque, and turn it into something where you are an archeologist that dips his hands into necromancy - bringing back the skeletons as loyal minions/pets - you could then take that added feature into an entirely different direction, where you make a combat/autocombat system (akin to pet autobattlers), or you could just have the skeletons follow you around and assist in the excavation (in addition, this would add more depth, where you are able to tie the individual pieces to stats - you could have the stats be used for you creating your own "unique" fossils, and would give that much more of a reason (lore and gameplay) for people to come and "pay" to view your artificial creations.
I don't think our vision for the game aligns with yours at all. We're not looking at making a combat game, rather a more relaxed game and one that is more faithful to paleontology. If that's not your vibe, then I don't think this game will ever suit you.
We're never going to add combat or autobattlers or fake dinosaurs.
Just wanted to make that clear.
There are a ton of combat games out there that are fun and I think would satisfy your urges but I don't think that's the point of this game.
Thats fine - I just think that this game won't be able to break any barriers like stardew valley did - stardew valley was a broad, all-encompassing field that included things such as digging, farming, etc.
Those were just ideas to do if you were open to the consideration.
If you want to keep it going in this direction, I would still recommend tailoring those sorts of features (ignoring the battler part), as it could be fairly interesting and allow you to stand out - the idea of customizing pets/"creatures" through the necromancy of dinosaur fossils.
Hi! Thanks for sharing your feedback! We really appreciate it. This game is a very very (really very! haha) early prototype. We agree there a lot of ways the game can be expanded on and that is the plan. Hopefully in the future once we have posted a few rounds of updates you will enjoy it more, we have lots of things we plan on adding :-)
Thanks for your feedback on the movement during the digging phase, that is something we plan to look at improving!
Thanks for playing!
This looks really fun and interesting, but unfortunately I can't play it.
When I try the web version it doesn't load properly. After the Unity screen it is just black. There is some music that starts up if I click on the screen though.
When I tried the download version it crashed and gave me this error message: Unable to parse Build/Web_0.1.2.framework.js.br! This can happen if build compression was enabled but web server hosting the content was misconfigured to not serve the file with HTTP Response Header "Content-Encoding: br" present. Check browser Console and Devtools Network tab to debug.
I hope this is helpful.
Hello! I'm so sorry the web build doesn't work on Firefox. We looked into fixing it but it's quite complicated and it seems likely we will never get it to work on Firefox for various reasons :-( Sorry about that. Web builds can be tricky and often come with issues.
With regards to the download crashing, could you let me know which file you downloaded? What was the executable called? Your error message mentions "Web_0.1.2" which is strange. Makes me think you somehow downloaded the web build so I just want to double check that. I have attached a picture with the correct download file underlined if you could let me know if that's the one you have.
Thanks for sharing the error message. I hope we can figure out why your download version crashed. Sorry for the frustration :-) 
It's such a cool game, the exact kind of vibe I like.
I wish there was a parameter button that I could click to dissable the sound though. Or maybe I just couldn't find it. To tell the truth, the reason I was searching for it was because unfortunately the music was terribly glitchy for me...
But other than that, like I said, I really like the game. It's cosy, and cute, and not boring. I had a great time playing.
Thank you for sharing!
nice game, excited to see it get updated. i like the assembly, feels very tactile in opposition to most museum-type games i've played.
note: audio options & a way to play in windowed mode would be helpful. i like to listen to other things when i play games, but i had to set volume to 0 in volume mixer for this one. easier to have ingame settings.
I made an account to comment because I liked the game so much. It's really cute and scratches the same itch that animal crossings/stardew valley does, which is just what I was looking for. I think one of my fossils is stuck in the blue blocks area? I can't pick it up. Also I'm really curious to learn about the method behind the fossil quality or is it randomized? Every fossil except one was 70% quality and I can't figure out why, lol. Great game and I really enjoyed playing it!!
Thanks for making an account just to let me know! I really appreciate it!
Ah sorry you got one of our known bugs in the web build. I posted a dev log today with a bit more info about them. Basically for now if you leave that stuck bone behind it will respawn in another location so you can still get it somewhere else.
Haha you also shouldnt be able to see the sky there but that'll be fixed in the next build too 😅 sorry about the bugs!
Currently the fossil quality is random and you can pick up better quality bones over time that will swap out. Also if you hit the bones when excavating them it lowers the quality. Do you think it's unclear the way it is now? Let me know if you think we need to explain this to the player or change how it works? thanks for playing and I hope you'll come back and test out the next update, we have lots more content coming 😉
I didn't even notice the sky, haha, so not a big issue :). I was only confused on the bone quality because when I broke blocks, the dirt would sometimes take one hit and other times it would take two hits. So I didn't know if I was like...messing up while digging and making the quality worse (I hope that makes sense, lol). I think a short tutorial would be the best solution to clear up that bone quality is randomized and that breaking dirt blocks is supposed to take 1-2 hits. Also because my first bone only had blue stone on it that needed a pickaxe and I didn't realize that the tools were for different things and totally obliterated that bone, whoopsies.😂
This is such a charming and relaxing game concept! The gameplay loop of digging, scanning for fossils, and then carefully excavating them in the mini-game is incredibly satisfying. Getting to take your finds back to build and decorate your own museum is a fantastic reward that ties everything together beautifully.
Thanks for playing and sorry about those bugs!!
I'm busy fixing the issue you posted a screenshot of, should have a fix up later today. Also looking at the sound issues.
The firefox issue is a really hard one... I'm looking into it but its complicated. Hopefully I can find a fix for it. Sorry about that.
Yeah thats exactly it. It's overlapping very slightly with the block on the right which is an indestructible block. So I'm just updating that code to ignore overlaps with indestructible blocks.
I'll try push an update later today with this fix as well as a couple of other ones.
Unfortunately web builds come with a bunch of annoying problems and because so many people are playing im a bit nervous about pushing a big update and accidentally causing other (potentially worse) issues.
This game is lovely! I really enjoy both finding and building the skeletons, and the decoration options are good. My only problem is that whenever i scroll down the page, (ie leave the game window), or when a loading screen appears, the audio glitches out, repeating a single note over and over again until the normal game resumes.
I knew I'd love this game from the moment I saw it. It's so cozy and adorable, and such a unique concept. I'm sure the complete version will be amazing, great job devs!!! The artwork is also amazing, the game really has a style. I love the cute character models and the pretty museum decorations.
Anyways here's my dino! Such a cutie <3
Hi there. I am really sorry about that, that's frustrating! We will take a look at this first thing tomorrow morning and try fix it! If you are up for it and have the time to send us your player log file it would help us figure out why it might be crashing for you?
You can find the file here on your pc:
%appdata%/../LocalLow/DefaultCompany/Fossil-Hunter
You can email it to: lasse@unsigneddouble.com or find us on our discord :-)
I am glad you enjoyed it. Sorry about the audio glitch! It seems to only happen in the web build and not when you run the downloaded version so that's a temporary fix if you want to keep playing? but we will try to fix the audio issue on web asap, I know the sound it make is horrible when it does that :-( sorry.


cool game but i found a bug where the map didn't block the sides so i ended up falling off the map. i can't go back up and had to refresh the page but it did save my progress and let do the level again. Also noticed some small visual bugs. the double text and bones being shown without being unburied. idk if the bone one was a chance to happen but i did see another one do it on the same level. love the game just like to bug hunt to help out!
Glad you had a fun time! As for the digging getting tedious: sorry about that. When we initially started we had 1 dinosaur so there wasn't as much digging involved.
We're actually right in the middle of working on the shop and one of the upgrades is actually a better/faster digging tool. So that's coming soon!
Thanks for playing and have a rad day.
Ah yes, sorry, there are only two full Dino's and two smaller single find fossils at the moment! We are going to add more in future updates over the next couple months though along with some other features! If you follow us you should get a notification whenever we add a major update. I have a long list of dinosaurs/fossils that we plan on adding 😬
The game has potential, the build your own dinosaur mechanich is really interesting, to be able to recover the dinosaur skeleton bone by bone and build it yourself.
The fossil excavation mechanic can be fun, it feels like the typical updgrade game (dig 1 and dig 2).
I would like to play a finished version of this game.
I feel that the main point of development should be the gameplay loop for the fossil excavation mechanic: setting objectives, encountering limits, improving the gear, overcoming the limits and encountering new ones and son on. Besides some quality of life improvements to make the excavation feel nicer. Maybe there should also be a reward for obtaining fossils, to make it an objective.