It cannot be stopped
Suppressors reduce the pressure on their tile and its neighbours, and they always leak. However many you stack, every tile under pressure gains blight every turn. They buy time. They never buy safety.
Hex colony strategy · iPhone
You drop a colony onto a hex world that is already dying.
The blight is not an enemy AI. It is a spreading rot that advances a few hexes every turn, deterministically, and eats the ground you are standing on. It cannot be stopped. Every turn is the same question asked harder: reach for richer ore, or consolidate what you can still defend?
Join the TestFlight beta →- 10–15 minute runs
- Plays offline
- No account
- One hand, portrait
The antagonist is a rule, not an opponent
It is perfectly deterministic
One seed reproduces a sector exactly — the ground, the ore, and where the rot starts. Nothing is rolled behind your back. If you lost, the board was not the reason.
It is the clock
There is no turn limit, because the spread rate climbs with the turn number. Late turns are genuinely desperate and every run provably ends. One failure condition: lose the landing site, lose the run.
Ore is the currency. Power is the throughput cap.
Every building costs ore once and draws power every turn. Overbuild and something goes dark — and the game tells you exactly which thing and exactly why. A building you cannot afford and a building you cannot power are different failures with different fixes.
Every number was measured, not chosen
A headless harness plays a thousand seeded runs per sector depth against a reference bot and reports the win rate. The blight rate, the quota curve, and what each charter costs you were all set that way — and the win rates are asserted in the test suite, so a balance change that quietly makes a purchase strictly better fails the build.
| Charter | Depth 0 | Depth 4 |
|---|---|---|
| Prospector free | 58% | 26% |
| Surveyor | 61% | 18% |
| Salvager | 52% | 24% |
| Fully upgraded | 86% | 53% |
Three charters within nine points, none dominant, each a different shape — the Salvager's quieter sector buys a longer run. Upgrades raise the ceiling and the quota curve stays ahead of it, so a fully kitted player at the deepest sector is back in the same fight a new player has at the shallowest.
What ships
- Six buildings. Extractor, solar array, suppressor, depot, beacon — and the landing site you cannot afford to lose.
- Procedurally generated sectors. 127 hexes, ten terrains, clustered from two noise fields. The best ore is out where the blight arrives first.
- Three charters, each a different opening rather than a better one.
- Upgrades that carry between runs, so a loss still moves you forward. You keep what you shipped.
- A daily sector, chosen by the date. The same ground for everyone, with no account and no server.
- Built for one hand. Portrait, thumb-reachable, and End Turn never moves.
Questions
- When can I play it?
- The beta opens first, through TestFlight, and the App Store release follows. Leave an email above and you will hear on both days.
- What does it cost?
- Free to download, with the Prospector charter and the full game in it. Two further charters are one-time purchases, and the Deep Survey Pass is a monthly subscription that adds the daily sector. No ads, no energy timers, and nothing behind the paywall is a mechanic the game does not otherwise have.
- Does it need a connection?
- No. Runs are entirely local — there is no server, no account, and no leaderboard. The daily sector is derived from the date rather than handed down, which is how everyone gets the same ground offline.
- Android?
- Not at launch. The renderer already runs on both, so it is a question of time rather than of architecture.
- Is there a turn limit?
- No. The blight's escalating spread rate is the clock, which is what makes the pressure feel intrinsic rather than imposed.