Idle Space

About the game

Idle Space is an incremental game about growing from a couple of mining robots into a whole interstellar industry. You start with metal, crystal and energy, a mining drone and a crystal drone. Drones produce materials, technicians support them, and districts give them room to work. The materials pay for more machines, and the machines produce more materials, in a loop that speeds up the longer you play.

As it grows the game widens. A laboratory researches technology that boosts almost everything, a shipyard builds fleets, and you design your own ships from classes and modules (lasers, armour, thrusters, shields and more). Enemies come in waves, and the battle screen shows your fleet fighting them, so a fleet that is too weak or badly built loses. Automators take over the repetitive buying, and when you have pushed as far as you can, you can ascend: a prestige reset that gives permanent bonuses so the next climb starts from a higher place.

The game keeps running while you do something else, and rewards a mix of long idle stretches and short bursts of planning.

Playing it here

Click Play. The left list holds your materials, robots and districts: click an entry to see what produces it and to buy more. The header has the pause button, an information menu and the options, where you switch between a light and a dark theme, change the number format and the autosave, and export or import a save as text. The game saves in this browser every few minutes. The cloud save buttons that depended on the author's online account were removed, so use the export to back up.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Watch your energy. Machines use power, so keep an eye on that number before you add more drones.

Research early. The laboratory is cheap compared with how much it speeds up everything else, and the Info menu has a "How to Start" page.

Design ships before the first fights. A fleet that matches what the enemy attacks with (armour against lasers, for example) wins battles you would lose with a plain mix.

Export before you ascend. Prestige resets your progress for the permanent bonus, so keep a copy in case you want to compare.

Credits and licence

Idle Space was made by scorzy (github.com/scorzy/IdleSpace) and is released under the MIT licence. It is built with Angular, the Clarity Design System and a few libraries (break_infinity.js, lz-string and others), whose licences (MIT and Apache-2.0) are listed in the 3rdpartylicenses.txt file served with the game. The icons come from Clarity and from game-icons.net, whose authors (Lorc, Delapouite and others) release them under CC BY 3.0, as the game's own Credits page says. For this site the author's published build is used as it is, with these changes: the Google Analytics tag, the Kongregate and PlayFab scripts (and the cloud-save buttons that need them) 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, and the browser storage keys got an "idlespace" prefix. Saves made on other sites do not carry over.

FAQ

Is it the same as Idle Ant? It is a different game by the same author, with the same kind of interface and a different theme.

Can I use my save from the author's site? Export it there and import it here from the options menu; the game still reads the text format.

Why are there no cloud saves? They need the author's accounts on other sites, which are not part of this version.