Idle Ant

About the game

Idle Ant is an incremental game, the kind that keeps playing while you are not looking. You begin with a pile of food and a single button: hire an ant. The ant gathers food on its own, the food pays for more ants, and soon you can unlock other kinds of workers and materials, a nest to house them, farms and a science branch that makes every unit better. Numbers grow, new buttons appear, and the fun is in planning what to buy next and watching the colony snowball.

When a world is exhausted you can move on to a new one. Changing worlds resets the colony but keeps a bonus that makes the next run faster, so each pass goes further than the last. The game also keeps running while the window is closed: when you come back, it works out what the colony produced in your absence.

It is a quiet, text-and-numbers game with a clean interface (it uses the Clarity design system), meant to be left open in a tab.

Playing it here

Click Play. The first screen shows your food and the Ant unit: use the Hire buttons to buy one, three, five or more at a time, and open the other entries in the left list as they unlock. The options menu in the top bar turns on a dark theme, changes the number format, shows the changelog and lets you export your save to a text file and import it back. The game saves itself every few minutes and keeps the save in this browser, so clearing the browser data erases it: export a copy first.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Do not spend everything at once. Early on, buy the cheapest ant that pays for itself the fastest, then look at what the new resource unlocks.

Check the "produces" table. Each unit lists what it makes per second, so you can compare which purchase gives the most.

Export before you reset. Changing worlds or clearing the game cannot be undone.

Credits and licence

Idle Ant was made by scorzy (github.com/scorzy/IdleAnt) and is released under the MIT licence. It is built with Angular, the Clarity Design System and a few small libraries, all MIT or ISC; their licence texts are in the 3rdpartylicenses.txt file served with the game. For this site the author's published build is used as it is, with these changes: the Google Analytics tag, the Kongregate integration and the jQuery download from a CDN were removed (jQuery is served from this site), a content security policy blocks any connection to other sites, the browser storage key got an "idleant" prefix, and a small error in the page's reload function was fixed. Saves made on other sites do not carry over.

FAQ

Does it need me to keep it open? No. It works out the time you were away when you return, but only the time the page was closed on this device.

Can I move my save? Yes, use the export option in the menu and import the text on another browser.

Why does the game talk about "worlds"? Each world is a new run with its own goals; finishing one gives a permanent bonus for the next.