The Ant GameThe Ant Game

You are one ant. The Ant Game is a real-time colony sim with no floating cursor and no god's-eye view. 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, 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.

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. 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.

• Mind the ceiling. Dig a hall too wide and its roof cracks, then caves in and buries whatever was under it. Nest Plans warns you before it happens.

• 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 and meat 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.

• 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. You choose how much of it hatches as soldiers.

• Stock up for winter. Store seeds for the lean months and keep meat in a cool larder before it spoils. Workers eat from the stores, and when the stores run dry they starve.

• 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 marked on your map. 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 Vigour), 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.

• 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.

• 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 armour. 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.

• They have minds of their own. Each rival has a temperament (Warlike, Raiding, Hunting, Peaceful or Scheming) and decides for itself when to build, when to hunt the boss and when to go to war.

• 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 they raid for food once the meadow runs out.

• War parties. A rival conscripts real ants, musters them, marches them across the map and breaks into your nest, going 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.

• 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.

• 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. It's only game over when 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 and cave-ins

• Colonies of hundreds of ants, each one choosing its own job

• A world boss, elite beetles, beetle raids, five species of spider, and the Goliath

• Rival colonies with their own temperaments, grudges and war parties

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

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

• 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 presets, plus dozens of world settings to tune

• An in-game Field Guide and tutorial cards that teach as you play