Power, air, and a hundred and four people. Only two of those are your problem.
You land on a rock with three people and a cracked lander. You leave in a rocket you built, having spent six hours deciding what a colony needs before it needs it.
The colony is a place, drawn from above, and every state you need to know is something you can see. When power runs short the whole colony slows down and dims — you feel it before you read it. When ore has nowhere left to go it spills on the ground outside the silo. When somebody has nothing to do they stand in the plaza doing nothing.
There is one screen of plain English that tells you how things are going: steady, piling up, running out, not enough — at 62%. No graphs, no gauges, no per-second figures to decode. Prices are the only numbers, because spending is the one moment a number is the clearest thing to show you.
When something is wrong you are told the most urgent thing, in a sentence, with a button that goes to what fixes it. Never a wall of warnings. Fix it, and the next thing appears — which is also how the game teaches itself, because there are no tutorial pop-ups anywhere in it.
Your claim is a walled square of graded ground. Buying more pushes the wall out one ring and levels the rock under it — including the ore seams you could see out there and could not touch. You never place a building: the colony finds the best ground itself, because three hundred placement decisions is not a game.
Build the rocket, launch, and pick your next world from a star chart. You keep what you learned and a few veterans by name; everything else you rebuild, faster, on better ground. Twenty-five worlds deep the colony you can build in six hours would have taken you a week on the first one.
No energy timers. No countdown “offers”. No subscription, ever. Nothing stops you playing and asks for money to continue — play as long as you like, for free. Purchases are optional, permanent, and say exactly what they give you.
Adverts are opt-in only: something you can choose to watch for a bonus, never something that interrupts you. No banners, no interstitials, nothing between you and the colony. See the privacy policy for exactly what that means for your data.
Idle Colony is in development and is not on the App Store. This page exists so that the support and privacy pages have somewhere to live while it is built.