VitalCore Hospital

⚠️ THIS IS AN EARLY ALPHA

VitalCore Hospital is an independent work in progress, not a finished game. Updates land often—sometimes several times a day. Some systems are rough, some are incomplete, and some things will break.

That is the purpose of this build: to find problems while they are still cheap to fix. If you want a polished management sim, come back later. If you want to help shape one, you are in the right place.

🐛 FOUND A PROBLEM? PRESS F8

F8 captures a screenshot, recent logs, and save files, then asks what went wrong. The report is sent directly to the developer when possible, and a copy is saved to your Desktop as a fallback.

Please report small issues too—a patient standing in a wall, clipped text, or a staff member behaving oddly. Those reports often lead to fast fixes.

WHAT YOU DO IN VITALCORE HOSPITAL

• Build it. Lay floors, raise walls, place doors, zone rooms, and furnish reception areas, exam rooms, wards, laboratories, and more.

• Staff it. Hire doctors, nurses, receptionists, phlebotomists, and lab technicians. Let the team operate—or step in yourself.

• Treat patients. Patients arrive with complaints, move through triage and examination, receive tests and imaging, and proceed through diagnosis, treatment, and discharge.

• Take over any case. Open a patient's Care Desk to conduct the interview, order tests, review results, diagnose, treat, and decide disposition.

• Read the chart. Track each patient's MRN, demographics, history, problems, medications, allergies, and past visits.

• Watch the money. Balance daily income and expenses, wages, land costs, and construction bills.

YOUR HOSPITAL, IN YOUR CITY

• Pick a city. Choose from 12 stylized city profiles across six countries. They capture the character of real places—density, sprawl, greenery, and terrain—not their actual street layouts.

• Pick a site. Choose from five lots with different land prices and catchments. Downtown is busy and free; the hillside is expensive but affluent; the industrial parcel is cheaper and brings more trauma.

• Expand. Buy more land and develop pediatric, cardiac, orthopedic, maternity, psychiatric, and oncology specialty hospitals. Refer patients between your sites.

• Earn ambulance arrivals. The ambulance bay stays quiet until you build and staff an emergency department. Then critical cases can begin arriving.

SHARE WHAT YOU BUILD

Save your hospital as a blueprint and share the file. Another player can rebuild that layout on their own plot, in their own city, or you can load a friend's design and run it yourself.

A LIVING CITY

Traffic moves around the roads, pedestrians use the pavements, streetlights come on at dusk, and windows illuminate at night. Patients may walk in from the city or arrive at the front entrance.

CONTROLS

F8 — Report a bug

B — Build menu

H — Staff hiring

M — Management overview

O — Operations board

P — Patient directory

K — Properties and specialty hospitals

J — Blueprints

E — Take over care / open the Care Desk

T — Comfort care

F3 — Patient flow overlay

Z — Toggle low walls / full walls

Esc — Pause menu

WASD moves the camera, middle mouse rotates, and the scroll wheel zooms.

NEW HERE? START WITH CEDAR GROVE

The Cedar Grove scenario is a furnished clinic designed as a walkthrough, with patients already flowing. Once it makes sense, Build Your Own Hospital is the main sandbox experience.

KNOWN ROUGH EDGES

• The save format is still changing. Compatibility and repair systems exist, but old saves cannot be guaranteed throughout alpha.

• City arrivals, referrals between hospitals, and switching the active campus are newer systems and may behave unexpectedly.

• Only the active campus is fully simulated. Specialty hospitals can receive and count referrals, but do not run their own waiting rooms while you work elsewhere.

• City profiles are stylistic interpretations, not recreations of real street maps.

• Staff and patients may occasionally strike an odd pose or stand somewhere they should not.

• Doors remain full height when walls are lowered.

• Performance has been tested on only a limited range of computers.

If you find something not listed here, that is an excellent F8 report.

UPDATES

The game checks for updates on launch and notifies you when a new build is available. Install through the itch app for automatic updates.

FOLLOW DEVELOPMENT

Official website: https://ikali2571.github.io/vitalcore-game/

Official Discord: https://discord.gg/wJsszncrF6

VitalCore Hospital is a work of fiction. It is not medical advice and does not depict any real hospital, person, or medical product. Full asset and audio credits are available in the game's Credits screen.VitalCore is a healthcare institution simulator in active development. Design, operate, and expand a modern hospital campus while balancing patient flow, staffing, surgery, critical care, specialties, finance, teaching, research, and long-term growth.

Early Access is focused on one city, one buildable hospital campus, and a deep single-hospital management loop.

Current focus

• Core stabilization and long-session reliability

• Save management, onboarding, and clearer feedback

• Construction validation and performance work

Follow development and share feedback:

Official website: https://ikali2571.github.io/vitalcore-game/

Official Discord: https://discord.gg/wJsszncrF6

Gameplay screenshots and video will be added after captured in-game low-poly scenes are ready.