The Ant Game

You are one ant. The Ant Game is a real-time colony sim played from the ground. You live in the dirt as a single ant while a whole colony runs around you: foraging by scent, digging its own nest, raising brood, and fighting beetles, spiders and rival colonies for the same patch of meadow.

You don't give the orders from above. You're one ant in the grass, and everything else runs without you.
Play the ant. Walk, forage, carry, dig and fight with your own mandibles. Drag seeds home in your jaws, feed the queen by hand, bite whatever is biting your workers.

The colony runs itself. Workers and soldiers bid for the jobs the colony needs: forage, dig, nurse, haul, defend. When food runs low more ants forage; when beetles reach the door, everyone fights. You set the direction and they do the work.

Scent trails that think. Foragers lay pheromones as they walk. Good routes to food reinforce themselves and dead ones fade, and the colony only knows about food its scouts have actually found.

A living meadow. Four seasons, rain and fog, day and night. Rain washes out trails and sends the beetles home, winter stops the plants growing, and nights get dark enough that you'll be glad of the glowing fungus and the fireflies.

Streams to cross. Streams wind across the meadow from edge to edge, and ants can't swim. Your foragers cross on rows of stepping stones, a slow, shallow ford or now and then a fallen twig, so every crossing becomes a chokepoint.

Ground that changes. Rain swells the ponds and fills the hollows, and a dry summer shrinks them back to cracked mud. In autumn, gusts blow the scent trails downwind and falling leaves cover the scent.

Walk down your entrance and the world turns side-on: a cross-section of the nest you dig, tile by tile.
Plan it, or let them. Press B to draw tunnels and rooms (nursery, food and seed stores, larder, royal chamber) and your diggers carve them out. Drag more of a room against it to make it bigger, and it keeps working while the new part is dug. Or leave it to the colony's own planner, which builds whatever the nest is short of.

The soil fights back. Dig down through dark topsoil, red subsoil and pale clay. Boulders won't budge, roots take twice the work, and buried seeds are a free meal for the queen.

Put the dirt back. Every colony keeps the dirt it digs. Right-click an open cell beside you to pack some back, or mark tunnels and rooms with the Fill tool and your workers fill them in.

Mind the ceiling. Dig a hall too wide and its roof starts to crack. You have 20 seconds to get your eggs and ants out, or to pack a pillar of dirt under it, before the whole room comes down with everything in it. Nest Plans warns you first.

Floods. A long rain runs down the entrance and pools at the bottom of the tunnels. Your ants keep out of it and nurses carry the brood clear, but an ant or an egg left under the water drowns. A dead end dug below the rest of the nest gives the water somewhere to go.

Light underground. Daylight and moonlight pour down the shaft, while glowing fungus and glowworms light the deep passages.

A colony is a queen and everything she needs, and she needs a lot.
Feed the queen. Plant matter, seeds, meat and sugar all become eggs. Meat is the good stuff: one unit is one egg, with no cooldown. The queen and her eggs show what they need in a bubble.

Sweets in the meadow. Now and then something sweet turns up: a handful of jelly beans, a fallen apple, an orange. Fed to the queen, its sugar lays sugar-fed workers that are tougher, stronger, quicker and longer-lived. Eaten, it gives the whole colony a Sugar Rush.

Ants grow into their work. The young nurse deep with the brood, the middle-aged keep house, and the oldest go out to forage, as many as the pantry calls for.

Give the orders. Queen & Brood sets how she lays: only from food the colony can spare, freely, paused, resting through winter or stopping at a size you choose. The brood mix balances itself, raising more soldiers when you're threatened and fewer when food is short, or you can set it yourself. Workforce sets how many ants forage, nurse and patrol, and sends gatherers after seeds or plants and hunters after meat.

Keep the brood warm. Nurses tend the eggs and move them deeper as the nest grows. Brood hatches fast in warm soil and stalls in frozen soil.

Stock up for winter. Store seeds for the lean months and keep meat in a cool larder before it spoils. In autumn and winter the colony keeps more back, and the queen leaves the seeds for the lean days. Workers eat from the stores, and when the stores run dry they starve.

Carry out the dead. A dead ant rots where it lies, and the ants around a rotting body fall sick: slower, weaker and hungrier, and they pass it on. Only the old and the starving die of it, but the smell brings beetle raids sooner. Your haulers carry the dead out to the midden, and you can carry a body yourself, even into a rival's nest.

Evolve the genome. Everything the colony does earns XP. Level up and spend perks in the Genome Lab on Agility, Vitality, Mandible Force, Metabolism and Fecundity, which make every ant faster, tougher, deadlier, thriftier and more numerous. Each level also makes you, the ant, harder to kill.

Plenty of things in the meadow eat ants, and a few of them are worth hunting.
The Giant Beetle. A world boss in a lair out on the meadow. Its carapace shrugs off small bites until you shatter it, which opens a 5-second window where it takes extra damage. Its telegraphed ground slam sends your ants scrambling out of the ring. It also gets stronger as the world levels up.

Bring an army. Rally a war band (a dozen soldiers, or every ant you have, hundreds deep) and lead it to the lair. Your band fights whatever you fight.

Claim the loot. A kill pays over a third of a colony level in XP, plus a Perk for the Genome Lab (the only way to earn one without levelling) and Royal Jelly for your queen. The jelly rolls one of six colony-wide buffs (Brood Rush, Hardened Carapace, Frenzy, Swift Legs, Rich Harvest, Queen's Vigor), and you can stack three at once. The boss is back five minutes later, and rival colonies send their own hunting parties to get there first.

Every kill is meat. A beetle or spider killed out on the meadow leaves its body, a store of meat (a spider holds far more than a beetle) that your ants cut up and carry home, laying a red trail that leads more of them back to it. Rival ants that find it cut it up too.

Windfalls. Now and then something big is found dead between the nests: a wolf spider, a Goliath, or the biggest feast of all, a dead sparrow. Every colony races to strip it first.

Elites. Tougher beetles with a gold health bar that pay bonus XP. They turn up more often as the world levels, both in the wild and in the raids on your nest.

Beetle raids. Beetles raid your nest, sometimes gathering first at a burrow nearby that you can dig out. Now and then a second, smaller wave follows half a minute behind the first, and you're warned when one is coming.

Five spiders, five different fights. The jumping spider pounces from range. The widow bites, then backs off while her venom does the work. The trapdoor spider hides under its lid until something trips its silk lines. The orb weaver's web holds anything that walks into it, whether that's you, a forager or a whole war party. The wolf spider runs down the weakest ant in your band, and pays boss-tier loot when it falls.

And the Goliath. 60,000 HP behind armor. It walks in from the edge of the map, heads straight for your front door and hunts every ant in reach. You can outrun it, but your colony can't.

MMO-style combat. Click to target, Q to cycle targets, right-click to auto-attack. Crits land in gold, and a real threat table means hitting hard pulls an enemy off your workers and onto you.

You aren't the only colony. Every rival digs, forages, breeds, levels and evolves the same way you do, and they all share your meadow.
Find them first. A fog of war shades whatever your ants can't see and hides the creatures in it. Each of your ants lights the ground around it, and a rival's nest stays hidden until your ants first find it.

They have minds of their own. Each rival has a temperament (Warlike, Raiding, Hunting, Peaceful or Scheming), evolves to suit it, and decides for itself when to build, when to hunt the boss and when to go to war. Pick the mix when you make a world, from all Peaceful to a pack of Warlike.

They guard their ground. Warlike, Raiding and Scheming rivals chase other colonies' foragers away from their nests, and the killings start feuds.

They remember. Kill their ants, smash their eggs or storm their nest and they'll hold a grudge and come for you later. They pounce when your army is away, and in winter, hungry rivals raid more often.

War parties. A rival conscripts real ants, as many as your strength calls for and it can spare, and marches them across the map. They gather outside your nest, storm in together and go for the eggs first, then the workers, then the queen. Your soldiers sortie to meet them at the door, and every attacker that falls becomes meat for your queen.

Raiding parties. A raid is a hit-and-run: it comes for your brood and your ants but leaves the queen alone, and its workers carry food out of your stores. Kill them before they get home and they drop it.

Take the fight to them. Rally your own war band, march it to a rival entrance and storm the nest yourself. The last colony standing wins the map.

Pick how hostile they are. On Easy they leave you alone until you bite. On Normal, walking into their nest raises the alarm. On Hard they hunt you in the open.

A colony dies with its queen. A bloodline doesn't have to.
Hatch again. Die with a nest and you hatch again from an egg. On Easy and Normal the queen lays you a fresh one. On Hard you hatch from one of your line's own eggs, and with none left, that death ends the game.

Raise princesses. Rear royal brood in the royal cell. If the queen falls, a princess takes her place.

The nuptial flight. On a warm afternoon after rain, a princess walks out and sets off across the meadow to found a daughter colony. The farther she goes and the more predators on her route, the lower her odds of making it.

Daughters inherit. Each daughter carries a random share of her mother's level and genome, sometimes a little and sometimes half, so no two turn out the same.

Rule them all. Walk into any nest of your line to take control of it. Lose a nest and your line carries on in the others, until the last one falls.

Fly On. Outlast every rival and your princess leaves the world you won to found a new one, carrying a roll of your line's genome onto a fresh map.

Play as a single ant inside a full real-time colony simulation

A side-view nest you dig tile by tile, with rooms, soil layers, boulders, roots, cave-ins and floods, and dirt you can pack back

Colonies of hundreds of ants, each one choosing its own job and growing into its work with age

Sweets in the meadow: sugar for a Sugar Rush, and tougher sugar-fed ants

The dead rot where they fall: carry them to the midden, or sickness spreads

A world boss, elite beetles, beetle raids, five species of spider and the Goliath, and the bodies they leave for your ants to carry home

Rival colonies with their own temperaments, territory, grudges, war parties and raiding parties

A fog of war: rival nests stay hidden until your ants find them

Colony levels, a five-trait Genome Lab and six Royal Jelly buffs

Questlines that pay XP, perks, Royal Jelly and colony titles, tracked in the Journal

Princesses, nuptial flights, daughter colonies and a bloodline that outlives its nest

Streams to cross, ponds that swell and dry, and an autumn wind that blows scent trails off course

Four seasons, weather, a working thermometer, and a real day/night cycle with dynamic lighting

Procedurally generated, seeded worlds: share a seed to share a map

Easy, Normal and Hard