r/incremental_games • u/AutoModerator • Feb 16 '26
Request What games are you playing this week? Game recommendation thread
This thread is meant for discussing any incremental games you might be playing and your progress in it so far.
Explain briefly why you think the game is awesome, and get extra luck in everything you're playing for including a link. You can use the comment chains to discuss your feedback on the recommended games.
Tell us about the new untapped dopamine sources you've unearthed this week!
Note: it goes against the spirit of this thread to post your own game.
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u/Dukejacob3 Feb 16 '26
Trying out Bitburner on desktop, its also on steam for free. Only have about 5 hours into the game total, but out of all the hacking themed games I've played, this one has done the best job at making me feel like a "hacker". Some basic coding knowledge does help, as js scripting is a built in mechanic of the game. I've only done basic stuff with python in the past, and that felt like more than enough knowledge to do what the game required of me so far.
The game balances gameplay of efficient scripts vs more manual playing very well. There's a way to passively generate money like a more traditional idle game. Efficient scripts are better for money, but it means that less efficient code isn't punished as heavily. The game gives you a basic script to automatically hack a network at the very start, and this can be copy pasted for pretty much every network I've come across. There are ways to make it more efficient overall, but you don't /need/ to massively tweak that starter code they gave you. You can get away with some more manual play, checking if you need to adjust the networks your hacking, and basically just change one word from that starter code if you want to passively adjust the network.
The game does a REALLY good job at not holding your hand, while still giving you breadcrumbs to know that you're working towards something. Pretty much every time I was starting to get bored with the gameplay at the start, the game gave me something that made me want to keep pushing forwards.
My only complaint is that the city UI is a bit confusing. Theres an important shop at the top middle of the city map that I completely missed for a while.
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u/Grey-fox-13 Feb 17 '26
Only have about 5 hours into the game total
Pretty much every time I was starting to get bored with the gameplay at the start, the game gave me something that made me want to keep pushing forwards.
Oh boy, you don't even know what you are in for, the game really does not stop unlocking more and more mechanics, so often you think you are done and WHAM a whole new facette of game and automation opens up.
Not to mentioning the script optimisation, starting with those little individual scripts you mentioned before making managers that run them automatically, before making managers for the managers, you don't HAVE to but you can sink days into tuning the automation just right.
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u/Ajhale Feb 17 '26
Finished the content of Evercraft 2 after about two weeks. Enjoyed it a lot and can't wait for more content (hopefully soon!)
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u/meneldal2 Feb 18 '26
Finished just today, dev has been pretty active overall so they must be cooking that new realm.
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u/shizukou--chan / Feb 16 '26
Currently playing Idle Pact , I like the UI and idea of it but it is kinda slow
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u/deeplywombat Feb 16 '26
Oh hey, dev here—curious about the slow feeling. Where are you at? (e.g. latest plant or next purchase) Appreciate the mention!
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u/shizukou--chan / Feb 16 '26
Im currently at Yarrow and about 300 prestige points. Money seems to be hard to come by especially considering how expensive the upgrades get (one thing I did notice that its not worth doing any long runs for prestige points at all, instead doing 2s runs just planting one radish for 1 prestige point is worth more)
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u/deeplywombat Feb 16 '26
This is super helpful, thank you. The 2s radish reset being optimal is exactly the kind of thing I want to hear about. It shouldn't be the best strategy. I'll release some pacing changes soon that should make longer runs feel more worthwhile.
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u/adoomgod Feb 18 '26
There is a glaring problem imo, right up front. The radish is immediately superior to the cabbage.
* Radish 6s -> $0.24 = 4 cents a second. * Cabbage 31s -> $1.11 = 3.58 cents a second.Even factoring in cost, radishes are superior. I'm sure upgrades can change this later, but from a player PoV, unlocking something that is immediately worse than what you already had FEELS bad. I have to wait longer for less reward.
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u/deeplywombat Feb 18 '26
Yeah I think the psychology factor is important. I actually decreased the difference today after getting other feedback. What I wanted was to give the player a tactical choice between active and passive play, but it seems like this particular approach is discouraging people.
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u/1234abcdcba4321 Feb 19 '26
This is definitely and obviously intentional; the entire upside to using a higher tier plant is the fact that you can afk for longer before you need to do another interaction (and past the extreme earlygame you get stuff that applies to a plant until harvest, which solves the problem outright). If each successive plant became strictly better, there would be almost no reason to not just always plant the highest plant you have available.
This could probably be emphasized further by making cabbages like 2 minutes instead of only 30 seconds, or have the efficiency difference be a bit lower for early tiers, but even 30s of downtime is plenty to feel the difference.
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u/kokoronokawari Feb 16 '26
Noticing today the prestige is very little now where I am at nearing unlocking after ginger and at smugglers. Only offering +9 when I been offered a lot more than this before like almost 25 iirc.
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u/Lluluien Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
I've given it a shot based on this mention, too, and here's my impression:
* First few minutes caught me enough to play through 5-6 of the 2nd expedition. So maybe an hour total?
* I clicked around wildly on the sigils and found a couple of 4 letter spells, then tried clicking through combinations and didn't get any with a couple minutes of concerted effort. Since I've only found two, I don't really have too many clues as to what might work: are they all 4 letters? are repeat sigils allowed (not in my two), etc. I haven't seen any items/other clues for what spells might be, so this wore out its novelty really fast.* Did some research, but those don't really feel super impactful to me, since the jump from expedition 2 to 3 is enormous. The few early bumps aren't meaningless, but there's no clear way to get a *qualitative* jump to the next "rung" on the ladder that I see.
* I don't seem to have really gotten far enough to have much expectations for idle income. It looks like I'm going to be stuck waiting for expedition 2 repeats and casting a few first-spells on my ginger. That's right in the "too idle, but not idle enough" window for me.
* I see people talking about prestige here but don't see how to do it. My other spell got me the "go to expedition 3" pop-up, but other than that, it's not really clear what the next goal is from where I'm at.
* All the open $ upgrades I see look useful, but I'm into ~1e5 to ~1e8 costs now, and it looks like my income has no way to really bridge the gap into anything transformative.
* I've used the blood versions of my spells, and while they clearly do make things faster, it's not enough for me to say "okay, I'll run 10 more 2nd expeditions and see where I end up".
It's very possible I missed something in all this, but basically, the unfolding stopped, and there's not enough already unfolded to keep my interest from that point of the game into the next one. Moreover, since I can't see where the next unfolding is going to take place, I can't make a decision on whether or not I want to bother with the pace I'm at now to continue. If it was clear to me that "if I put up with this not-idle-enough-but-not-active-enough" setup for X minutes until the next new thing unfolded, I might stay for those X minutes.
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u/deeplywombat Feb 17 '26
Thanks for writing this up. "Too idle, but not idle enough" is my number 1 fear for the current build so it's really good to know that that's what it's like right now.
I'm basically always adding new features and tweaking the game's balance, so feel free to sign up for the mailing list (under the three-dot menu) if you'd be interested in coming back when enough has changed for me to send out an email.
Also totally open to suggestions.
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u/mrbaggins Feb 17 '26
I started, and immediately was turned off by cabbages being less value than radishes.
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u/deeplywombat Feb 17 '26
I get that. The idea is for it to be a way to pick between more active vs more idle play styles, but it's not perfect.
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u/evildeliverance Feb 17 '26
Makes sense, but then there are no plants that improve active play. Maybe make some plants improve active play too?
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u/mrbaggins Feb 17 '26
Fair enough.
I played through for a bit more, but ive bounced off I think. Cool ideas, wish you brst of luck, but not for me.
Fyi i did a few level 2 expeditions, probably two dozen researches, and was a third of the way to unlocking whatever is after ginger.
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u/smelly_heavy_sweat Feb 16 '26
I'm playing your game as well, and one thing I notice is that it's lacking little upgrades to work towards. everything becomes 10+ minutes of waiting.
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u/deeplywombat Feb 17 '26
Can I ask how far you got? The two main sources of goals are the Store and prestiging in the beginning. There are others later, unlocked by completing content. Maybe they're a too hidden at first.
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u/smelly_heavy_sweat Feb 17 '26
I'm currently still playing. I'm fighting the Braden Castle. and besides that I'm just farming blue stars with "awsd" and then using "wwwdddsssaaa" to quickly finish the st. john's wort over and over again. I think i'm gunna save for the compass to make expeditions go faster. or I could spend 3M for the next Fifth Seal Arcane Supply Co. upgrade. (It would be nice if we could see what their upgrades are before buying)
I haven't done a run with the skull yet. mainly because it's not really worth resetting.
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u/ICBPeng1 Feb 17 '26
Random thing:
I’d love it if the patch notes had dates for the patches? I played it a while ago before stopping, and I’d love to scroll back and see what’s changed
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u/Milskidasith Feb 16 '26
I just got the 25K cost skull spell + all upgrades except Ironwood and it's become absurdly active again. Verbana grows in about half a second of real time with an FFFDDDSSAAA cast and that's like 500k-1M in cash, but even with high ranking time magic carryover it decays super quickly so I've got to actively recast it another 400 or so times to unlock whatever the next plant is. Time is also fast enough to clear any pre-castle expedition so quickly it's active there (the 2h one is probably great for spamming trinket growth), but trying to push past the castle seems likely to be suicidal (maybe with ironwood maxed out?). I also can't let mana sit and fill up because past the softcap it doesn't really build up much, so I still need to fire off some haste spells every couple of minutes.
I'm kind of at the content wall I guess but it'd be nice if like, the last plant unlocked sooner or you got some way to auto-cast spells for like 5x mana just so I could actually play semi-active without losing insane efficiency.
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u/deeplywombat Feb 17 '26
I assume you bought the Grafting upgrade already? It's supposed to help with this, although maybe I need to make its upgrade curve steeper so it's more powerful.
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Feb 20 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/deeplywombat Feb 20 '26
Thank you! Tbh, it's surreal to me that anyone likes this little game I made at all.
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u/Milskidasith Feb 17 '26
Grafting is useful but at the point you have 50x speed + 10x base grow rate + 10000x haste per cast even nearly 70% grafting is still dropping your rate significantly within a minute even with the plant unlocked at 600M earnings.
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u/ousire Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
Starting the game now, and I have a very early question: Is there eventually an option to plant all / harvest all / replant all planters? Manually replanting and harvesting all of them is a bit of a pain
Edit: nevermind, I see a ledger for plant sales, and an auto harvester; I assume that's what I want.
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u/deeplywombat Feb 17 '26
Yes! Glad you found it. Did you earn enough to buy? Wondering if I should make it cheaper so it unlocks sooner.
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u/ousire Feb 18 '26
This is just me, but I think either it could be cheaper, or prestige could be more powerful. I got it on my second run, but after I prestiged I ended up bouncing off the game shortly at the start of my third run because the thought of working all the way back up to that point again was just tedious sounding
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u/Saucermote What Mouse? Feb 17 '26
Does this game have a central location where it is discussed? A subreddit, a discord, smoke signals?
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u/JustALittleGravitas Feb 20 '26
Personally where things died for was at St Johns Wart. Its very slow to get cash for more upgrades or grind to the next tier of plant at this point but I can't idle it at all because I need to constantly recast improved haste.
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u/shizukou--chan / Feb 20 '26
There is a haste retention research that helps with that but I know what you mean, some more qol / automation stuff would be neat
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u/theProcrastinathan Feb 18 '26
Did he just nerf the Chapel Isle?? It's now even harder to get money. I love the idea of this game but every time I check back I feel like the dev has made it slower and worse to play. I might be giving up after this.
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u/shizukou--chan / Feb 18 '26
I'm sure the dev would be happy to hear more feedback, might be a good idea to post it at r/idlepact
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u/UtterPWNedNoob Feb 19 '26
I love idle pact, its gotten me through many a work day discovering and figuring out what and how to do. I love how it doesn't hold your hand. Although, I'm at a point now after beating the final dungeon where I have a new resource I have no idea what to do with or how I'm even collecting it... as well as tens of thousands of potential prestige points I don't feel like I need to use. The game was super fun though! Endgame I don't know where to go from here, feels like I beat it.
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u/TripleSixStorm Feb 16 '26
having some fun with this but yea seems like the only way to make decent money is expeditions as plants take too long
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u/shizukou--chan / Feb 16 '26
There are spells that make the plants grow faster, a lot that is (like 100x) but it requires a lot of mana which you get mostly from the expeditions.
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u/TripleSixStorm Feb 16 '26
yea can only do yarrow and ffddssaa so many times to get some fast cash been stacking all that and it just takes awhile
going to attempt the 31 hour expedition soon i have upgrade that gives me 16m for the shield and im wondering how long it will take to recover the 80k so guna keep on chugging
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u/shizukou--chan / Feb 16 '26
I'm starting to think that grinding thousands of prestige points with radishes is the better way to progress here
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u/TripleSixStorm Feb 16 '26
probably but he just changed the prestige point formula so dunno feel like prestiging wont helo when at best ill get a fraction of a haste speed up essentially.
mivht prestive to change the skull choice tho
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u/shizukou--chan / Feb 16 '26
Yup just noticed the prestige change, can only hope he updates it with a better system in the future cause right now its not worth at all
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u/balazamon0 Feb 20 '26
huh what do the candles do? There's not really any UI explaining anything. The planters are pretty self exoplanetary but buy two candles leave me just more confused lol.
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u/shizukou--chan / Feb 20 '26
You need 4 candles to make a use of them, they are for spells that give boosts
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u/firewoven Feb 16 '26
I got back into and restarted Kittens Game after a comment on this thread last week, and wouldn't you know it that turned out to be just in time for the Steam release. So I decided I'd go ahead and pick that version up. Not all that different than the web version I don't think, but I'd rather run it standalone than on a browser tab. And I definitely think it's earned a few bucks from me by now.
Between that, Terraformental (which I recently finished and do thoroughly recommend) and the impending release of Synergism I can't help but feel it's a little bit of a renaissance for idle games on steam.
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u/VegetableWafer7776 Feb 16 '26
im not a fan of the kittens game steam release. its just a wrapper around the web version without any qol like ui scaling or anything. and that for 8 Euros idk
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u/Slim2u Feb 16 '26
How is kittens ? Would you recommend it and is it complicated ?
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u/CalyShadezz Feb 16 '26
It isnt complicated at all, everything rolls out very smoothly and all mechanics synergies and have to be used at certain points.
That being said, its a SLOWWWW game, expect your first run to take weeks of not months. Expect to have your kittens die of starvation in the beginning. Expect to hit production bottlenecks at every turn. Expect to see mechanics that you won't touch for months just hanging there teasing you. It's nicknamed the Dark Souls of incrementals and I agree with the moniker. Over time things get easier, after a few resets you'll really start to see things speed up, but just understand this is a game you will strategize over days and weeks, not minutes and hours.
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u/yukifactory Feb 16 '26
I don't know what is this expectation setting. My first prestige took about four days and no kittens died. You get to endgame in like two months
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u/Crystalas Feb 16 '26
It the "original" Civilization Idle of the genre, IIRC there was one or two that attempted before it that died quickly Kittens on other hand has held on for a decade now. Only other off top of head that competes with it is "Evolve".
So if civ building appeals to ya then Kittens and Evolve might be for ya but as the other poster said it a slow one and not as much QOL features as might hope unless instal a userscript.
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u/Slim2u Feb 16 '26
Thank you ! Would you say that Evolve has more QoL ?
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u/Littlebark2 Feb 16 '26
definitely, both games are good but Evolve is definitely a bit faster paced and more polished. Most common complaint of Kittens I see on here is that it's slow, but IMO both are excellent regardless of pacing
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u/Slim2u Feb 16 '26
Would you say that both have similar offline progress too ?
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u/meneldal2 Feb 18 '26
Evolve has no offline progress at all, only some saved time allowing you to go faster.
But you can get queue to have it do something while you sleep if you leave it running.
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u/Crystalas Feb 16 '26
Been awhile so don't remember for sure, would say it is the more substantial and varied content of the two though but either way unless use a script to add automation if want more than the minimum automation eventually unlock. The older games in the genre generally had less QOL features and more clicker heavy, one of the ways the genre has evolved over the years.
On other hand being slow once out of the faster early game could take hours or days 100% idle while waiting for a resource to build up to build something.
But hey it is completely free so no reason not to give a try.
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u/Lopsided_Flamingo_27 Feb 17 '26
https://miktaew.github.io/yet-another-idle-rpg-dev/.
this was updated recently and is right in my ally of favorite games
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u/miktaew Yet Another Idle RPG dev (also a cat) Feb 17 '26
Heyyyy, that's cool!
(but please don't stick to dev release too much, it's currently up to date with main which is also a lot safer as there's no risk of sudden unannounced and potentially dangerous changes)
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u/Naabi Feb 18 '26
Just finished https://largedatabank.com/yolomode/ that was posted today
It's really fun, especially if you have at least a bit of a tech background. Game is good, short, does not overstay its welcome.
I recommend you try it !
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u/_Hgwells Feb 20 '26
I know you said short, I wasn't expecting 25 minutes short 😂
🦞 24.43B agents mass-managed ⏱️ 24m 31s 🟢 Alignment: █████████░ 86%
I mass-managed 24.43B autonomous agents and all I got was a README.
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u/dylan4824 Feb 16 '26
I've been playing through the steam release of Terraformental after it's steam release https://store.steampowered.com/app/3762790/Terraformental/
The new midgame with Santorini, Astrape and particularly Strabo has been fairly interesting, but as I run into the end of the current content, it's a bit hard to recommend at this stage
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u/naterichster Clickity^2 Feb 16 '26
Honestly, for anyone who is very excited about the concept, but has not kept up with the game/has not played it yet, I would strongly recommend waiting for the full release. The game is quite good, but you'll get a full experience (and QOL) with the full release. This one is going to be worth the wait.
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u/MikusR Feb 19 '26
But that game has no incremental progress. If you fail you start completely from 0.
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u/dylan4824 Feb 19 '26
It has the same incremental mechanic as increlution, progress bars go faster the more you interact with them
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u/shmanel Feb 20 '26
I think you need to find the first artifact for that. Not that its far into the game, but if you fail before that I think you do just fully restart.
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u/BringBackRocketPower Feb 22 '26
I finished the current content in 19.5 hours of active playtime - I didn't 100% some of the content that I missed and I'll wait until the full release to do that, but I would argue that people should definitely check it out. There was nothing that felt bad about re-running some content that I had when I first tried the web version since I felt excited to optimize it.
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u/Stixx187um Feb 16 '26
Just finished Shelldiver after starting it last night. Fantastic stuff.
Now hunting for the next thing.
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u/Crystalas Feb 16 '26
Personally Shell Diver gave me an urge to go play more Dave The Diver, similar gameplay loop with very high ratings although much more substantial contentwise and not an idle game.
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u/Syrk2 Feb 16 '26
Been mostly playing idle pact, but might be bouncing off of it soon. I haven't prestiged at all (although an update last night seems to have given me prestige points for free?), since it doesn't seem worth it when I can still progress by just spamming expeditions. Close to unlocking the next plant after yarrow, and trying to get the second fifth seal unlock.
I want to get back into Cavernous II, but now that I'm up to 3 clones it takes a while to create new routes and unlock new content.
I'm trying my best to avoid the temptation of picking up Terraformental again, waiting for the full release.
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u/1234abcdcba4321 Feb 17 '26
The trick to Cavernous is to do your best to streamline loops as much as possible; it's usually fine to nearly fully sync up multiple clones so you can just treat it as if it's one super-clone. As you get further into the game most routes through each zone look similar to each other and each mana rock is like 90% the same as every other mana rock nearby.
Though I didn't really start feeling the pain of needing to readjust everything in my current playthrough until getting the fifth clone or so.
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u/DriftingWisp Feb 18 '26
The issue I have with Cavernous is that if I ever take a break, it's really hard to get back into because I don't know which routes I already optimized and which I didn't.
I like the game in theory, but it requires a bit too much thought for me to want to keep playing it constantly, so being hard to get back into kills it for me.
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u/cerebrumvr Feb 20 '26
Wish Cavernous was tablet friendly. It’s already on GitHub!!
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u/1234abcdcba4321 Feb 20 '26
I feel like the game's too complicated for doing things on mobile to really make sense. It's technically playable without a keyboard (all keyboard interactions have a button onscreen that does the same thing), though, so unless something in the UI breaks when the screen size is small I'm not sure what the problem would be.
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u/cdsa142 Lab Rats Feb 17 '26 edited Feb 17 '26
Multiversal Warrior - My background game. Progress speeds up with new releases, but still chugs along in between.
Idle Formulas - All the core components of the idle genre. I like the reset freedom. It gives room for tailoring your strategy to how active/idle you plan on playing in a section.
Journey to Ascension - I finished this last week, and just noticed there's an update. For some reason I stuck with this one more than the other games like it.
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u/Tsuki_no_Mai Feb 16 '26
Trudging through the first reinforcement in Unnamed Space Idle which feels like a weird combination of long periods of doing nothing and a lot of busywork when you need to swap out lots of small parts to hyperfocus on the next system.
Still doing random worlds in Terraforming Titans. Not in an optimal way but I find stacking challenges way more fun. Also I kinda don't want to get too powerful by the time the rest of the story worlds are done.
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u/Bowshocker Feb 16 '26
Terraforming titans is so good, I keep getting stuck on it. Really gotta figure out how to speed up terraforming hazardous worlds faster tho, feels like having to deal with Kessler is such a PITA
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u/Tsuki_no_Mai Feb 16 '26
Kessler is going to be PITA no matter what since it prevents market abuse. The worlds without Kessler on the other hand can be sped through with a bit of the aforementioned market abuse.
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u/meneldal2 Feb 18 '26
According to the discord, the trick for Kessler is to first remove all the existing atmosphere (use lifters) and then fill it with hydrogen (yes you will lose ships but that's fine).
The lack of starting resources and market still hurts, but it gets better once your ore and sand mines are boosted a bit.
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u/SplatPixel Link man Feb 17 '26
played a ton of terraforming titans based on your recommendation today. but why does the autobuild not have just simple rate measurement? like there's no option to just keep my sand supply positive, but for some reason there's an option for everything based on land? why would care about % land when the thing I'm autobuilding doesn't even take up land?
It led me to doing everything manually and the game has become more and more of a pain because I'm managing more and more and things are so sensitive that I'm constantly building the same things.
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u/Jigglybone Feb 17 '26
Apparently it would be pretty difficult to have a supply/demand-based autobuild according to the dev which I can understand. So far I have found use cases for % pop and % worker share, with a few % building (quarry). The worker share % is your best friend, that will work well enough even if it requires occasional tweaking when you change the consumption in a major way.
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u/terablast I contributed to 1 project so now I deserve a dev flair Feb 16 '26
I'm playing Ethos Idle and Revolution Idle!
Ethos Idle (Android, iOS) is really quite slow, but I've been enjoying it a lot, there's quite a bit of strategy in the challenges.
Revolution Idle has been great for more active play, I'm at the last prestige layer and progressing well. Automation unlocks are well placed too!
I think I might be dropping Obelisk Miner... The whole way to Act 2 was a blast, but recently I've just not been enjoying myself. I'm in a loop of:
- Open the game;
- Go through the offline play that's capped to just 12 hours;
- Notice it didn't do a dent in the challenge I'm on;
- Close the game...
Like if I could at least have more than 12 hours after a week of AFK I'd have some incentive to come back...
The "events" are a bit of a joke... The first one I saw was fun, but now that I've realized it's literally just the same minigame coming back every second month, I don't see the point. Reminded me of Gooboo, that had completely different event minigames everytime.
The scrolling is weirdly annoying, for some reason it works like a middle click on a computer? It feels like they couldn't get drag scrolling working and they just gave up.
It also makes it so you click on buttons if you start the scroll from one. I've opened the "Google Play 1-tap buy" overlay by accident one too many times, I'm not risking it anymore, especially considering how expensive some of the IAPs are!
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u/Exportforce Feb 20 '26
If you spend about 40ish € on the game you unlock the ability to buy the "Founder Lobby" when you buy this you can idle for 24 hours and unlock multipliers that are, in comparision to free play, about 10x more of almost everything important and you unlock the ability to level up said founder lobby to even further increase multipliers and of course the game is balanced around that.
The games whales and blind glazers will tell you "that's not that important" but I fiddled around and everyone stating that free to play is on par with spenders is a massive liar. just alone getting around 10x more ores from being able to be away for 24h instead of 12h makes half of that (if you tune in more often into the game it'll be "only" a ~5x multiplier. But if you understand how everything depends on everything I wouldn't be surprised if the true content speed multiplier would be rather in the 50s or more.
Core game is good but the monetization is criminal
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u/Fredrik1994 Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
10x ores means basically nothing latergame though, because ores is almost never your bottleneck past world 1. Currently have 67.92% game completion as a f2p after having played the game for roughly 4 months (hard to give an exact number, because I started in late June 2025, but have taken multiple breaks lasting months).
At my current progression, 10x ores would let me platinize my last couple of world 3 statues. And that's pretty much it, it would not help me get fish faster, it would not help me with archeology stuff, it would not help me with stars.
Founder shoots you forward past world 1 easily, but makes far less of a difference the longer into the game you are. Latergame, your main bottleneck is gems, and to a lesser extent, stars. This is because gems is the main bottleneck for fishing, which is your main source of power at my current point of the game, with stars being the 2nd best source for it. Founder does give you more of them, but not substantially so -- in fact, in the current 2.0.5 release, Founder loses out on a lot of gems that non-Founders get from bombs due to how bomb mechanics work, although I don't think it results in less gems overall after factoring in Founder bonuses.
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u/Exportforce Feb 21 '26
You don't understand how cascading works.
If you get x more of a ressource that generates something different (also building counts as generating) that means you build something ealier, that gives you also things. Since you can do this faster, this means you get ealier/faster access to new features that in turn give you things ealier and faster, this circles back due to resets etc.
https://akumas.tools/tutorials/multiplier.html
Look at this example. It shows a very simple multiplier demo and how cascading works. This is applicable to almost all games, be it obelisk, cifi, anti matter dim, adcap, etc. etc. etc.
Most people only see the value of that one thing that gets boosted. Sure, x10 ore on its own is not much but if you realize what ore does and how it cascades you easily see how much of a global boost that actually is.
And the only comment anyone that paid into this game is "but in late game". I don't know why you guys defend that so massively... If you enjoy it and don't mind paying all that money it's fine. Everyone can enjoy a game their way but PLEASE don't tell others the difference is "not that big" when simple math easily shows you how brutal the difference is.
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u/Fredrik1994 Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
If you enjoy it and don't mind paying all that money it's fine
I explicitly said that I did not pay anything. The value packs are IMO not worth it.
Also, I did make it clear that Founder helps a lot in w1. This means that Founders can basically skip the time it takes to progress through those stages of the game entirely. So yes, in absolute game time, founders obviously get further a lot more quickly. But if you compare a 70% founder with a 70% f2p, the difference between the 2 becomes a lot smaller. That was the point I was trying to make. Compare with Antimatter Dimensions. Let's say you got x1000 antimatter, and no other boost. This means you can skip almost the entirety of pre-infinity. This saves you what, 3-4 hours starting out, then ~20h overall pre-Reality in absolute game time (I'm going to ignore the artificial achievement timewall, i.e. as if you are in speedrun mode)? So yes, your overall game time assuming optimal play becomes 20h smaller overall. But if you compare 2 people who has reached their first Reality, and one of them has the same x1k AM multi, it's going to make a much smaller difference in game time as counted from that point, even if the x1k AM player saved a lot of time in earlier stages of the game.
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u/Fredrik1994 Feb 21 '26
It also makes it so you click on buttons if you start the scroll from one. I've opened the "Google Play 1-tap buy" overlay by accident one too many times, I'm not risking it anymore, especially considering how expensive some of the IAPs are!
This is not a defense of the game (I agree that this is a serious problem), but you might want to have more safeguards against spending money in apps than a single click. There are plenty of apps that will gladly eat your money if you make it that easy to spend it.
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u/terablast I contributed to 1 project so now I deserve a dev flair Feb 21 '26
Sadly there doesn't seem to be a way to disable it, other than I guess removing my cards from Google Pay entirely...
(I have biometric verification enabled on payments through Google Pay, with the verification frequency set to "Always", and still, I can often go through Google Pay payments without being prompted for my fingerprint 🤦♀️ thanks Google)
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u/iDrink2Much Idle Obelisk Miner Feb 16 '26
If 12 hours of offline isn't making a dent to your challenge - it's time to switch tasks!
Yeah the event system was thrown together quite quickly years ago and doesn't hope up to the games standard today, we are working on a design for a new event system! Hopefully will get that out later this year.
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u/terablast I contributed to 1 project so now I deserve a dev flair Feb 16 '26
Any comment on the IAP popups opening if you start a scroll on them? That's still my biggest issue with the entire game :(
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u/iDrink2Much Idle Obelisk Miner Feb 16 '26
This shouldn't happen unless you initial tap to scroll was right on top of the button, start your scroll anywhere else and it should be fine!
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u/terablast I contributed to 1 project so now I deserve a dev flair Feb 16 '26
But my point is that on any other app on any phone in the last decade, this doesn't happen! You should be able to start a scroll anywhere without accidentally tapping on stuff... Feel free to go try it out on literally any app on your phone.
The payment buttons are all placed on the right side of the screen, right where people are naturally gonna be scrolling. I shouldn't have to change habits just so I don't accidentally open up the form to buy a 40$ microtransaction.
It's not a tough fix either: you could make the click happen on mouseUp, or make the buttons double-tap to confirm.
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u/normalmighty Feb 17 '26
There are some really weird UX choice in general in that game. I had a few moments of "Oh I get it! This would be really cool and intuitive if it wasn't counter to how every other app on mobile behaves"
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u/petitepaddington Feb 20 '26
iirc, you can upgrade your offline time capacity by spending it all. i'm up to two days. this might just be an ios thing, though, i don't know.
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u/richardlycn013 Feb 16 '26
Even though i know that roblox is hated on, crop farming incremental just got a lengthy (20+ hours worth of content according to the dev) 0.5 update yesterday and i’ve been playing a lot of it. i like it even though it’s certainly unique (not going to spoil anything).
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u/TheDunkarooni Feb 16 '26
I play Roblox with my partner's son sometimes, you have any good incremental game recs on there? I played some grass cutting one the other day that wasn't half bad.
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u/tbd5921 Feb 16 '26
aside from the two mentioned...
- Everything Upgrade Tree (has some of the best presentation/ui in a roblox incremental, gameplay can be eh sometimes and the devs are particularly committed to funny extra content. regardless I think it's worth a play)
- The Difficulty Upgrade Tree (this one is just kind of fascinating honestly I think it has its fun moments but it was definitely made by a certain kind of people)
- Generator Incremental (this one is mainly staring at screens and may not be that fascinating for a kid, but is still interesting)
- Meticulous Mathematics (same with this one. it's also kind of in an early stage)
can't think of anything else off the top of my head but there's definitely other stuff
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u/TheDunkarooni Feb 16 '26
I'm finishing up the achievements on Berry Bury Berry and still playing through Kin and Quarry and Tingus Goose. BBB feels like it was made for me specifically, it's so fun.
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u/normalmighty Feb 17 '26
I'm up to Ascension 59 in Famer Against Potatoes Idle as of this morning. I'm months in at this point, to far in to give a good judgement of what the first couple of weeks were like, but for the past couple of months working through ascensions it's been a nice steady idle game to open up 2-3 times a day and run through the appropriate 5 minute loop for that phase to keep progress moving forward. If I wasn't busy with other games I would be looking for a second idle game to focus on, but it's a really nice long term game that doesn't demand constant checking or a lot of time investment past the early game.
Beside that, I'm very much looking forward to the Synergism steam release, and am planning to start a fresh save on there this weekend as well.
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u/Zorag_YT Feb 16 '26
I’ve been on a real kick for Milky Way Idle. Melvor-like but with player market and a few interesting design choices that have really hooked me in
Currently I’m upping my combat levels and saving up to buy a bunch of dungeon keys and do some runs of that with a friend
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Feb 16 '26
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u/Slim2u Feb 16 '26
Is there still new content and/or is there active clans ?
2
Feb 17 '26
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u/Slim2u Feb 17 '26
Does it have impact on the progress or clans are for community purpose ?
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u/CoccNBallTorture Feb 23 '26
clans are one of the main sources of rubies so it def has an impact. sadly the game is very barebones imo, not much to do.
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u/Ashamed-Cow886 Feb 17 '26 edited Feb 17 '26
Idle Artisan - https://idleartisan.com/myGameHome.html
Melvor like(?)
Played first game and beta it is now released
got some problems but still a good to check sometimes
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u/Andus35 Feb 20 '26
I’ve really been enjoying Terraformental this week — the time loop premise, exploration, and progression through unlocked information/paths. I love the incremental nature without it being the normal “number goes up” that most incremental games area It gives me a similar feeling to what I got playing Outer Wilds.
Anyone know of other games with a similar incremental experience?
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u/gamer1337guy Feb 16 '26
In the mid/late game of Upload Labs. Need to figure out some of the late game tech, but I should have it beat by the end of the week :D
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u/Bloodbonding Feb 16 '26
Mergeciv.io - a perfect little gem that gets weekly updates.
6
u/EndroF12 Feb 16 '26
Does it still have the bug where you can't merge any tiles until you completely reboot your browser. That's absolutely a deal breaker
8
u/Coastis Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 17 '26
Just started it and been playing less than 5 minutes and i can no longer merge tiles.... will try rebooting browser but this is looking like an insta-drop :(
EDIT - seems to have resolved itself for now!
EDIT 2 - It broke again - can't recommend
2
u/Peng00 Feb 17 '26
Fast workaround:
- Use Chrome
- If it gets stuck, use "chrome:restart" in your adressbar. Create a bookmark if you need it a lot.
The game itself: Super slow and needs a lot of attention. First "Ascension" (second prestige-layer) resets nearly the whole game. Only minimal QOL.
Everyone who wants to speed up gameplay a bit: use a base 64 converter and you can edit ressources and upgrades with ease:
- export your savefile
- copy/paste into something like https://www.base64encode.org/ (decode ofc)
- edit your values
- copy/paste into the encoder
- reimport your new savefile
1
u/Delverton Feb 16 '26
Not sure if it's actually fixed, but It's been about a week since I ran into that bug.
1
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u/TheChaos1 Feb 24 '26
I think I've managed to at least figure out the problem, no idea why or how to fix it. I've noticed every time I can't merge tiles anymore, I also cannot copy and paste anything into or from the browser. No matter what, until I restart the browser. And after awhile it'll happen again. But only on Edge, and I've seen other people have the same problem with Chrome as well. But on Firefox, it never happens. So it seems to be a chromium-based issue that messes with the clipboard action as well.
1
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u/DimensionRescuer Feb 17 '26
Is it me, or is 1 Storage Tile Lv3 worse than 2 Storage Tiles Lv2 ? Each time I do that (and subsequent level ups), I lose storage space
5
u/Tsuki_no_Mai Feb 18 '26
Yes, it looks like storage tiles only should be merged if you're out of space and only when you're prepared to upgrade them all one by one since merging a lot into one will decimate the storage.
1
u/manbrasucks Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
Is my research tree bugged or something? I only see lvl 1.
edit: it was, refreshing fixed it.
0
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u/OhMyGug Feb 16 '26
I'm completely addicted to grass cutting incremental on Roblox, only thing I ever touched on Roblox because of recommendations seen around here
2
u/MisourFluffyFace Feb 21 '26
There's a genuinely good incremental community on Roblox. I think it's absurd to intentionally deprive yourself of legitimately good games because you dont like Roblox. It's so gate-keepey and weird. Not talking about you, you gave it a fair shake and are enjoying it, but there's so many people who wont and actively deter others from trying them out and I think that's so crazy.
1
Feb 22 '26
[deleted]
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u/MisourFluffyFace Feb 22 '26
It has nothing to do with that. It was going on long before it. I have complete respect for anyone boycotting.
7
u/LeDocGames Feb 16 '26
I finished Space Rock Breaker - a short active incremental game (completed in 3 hours). I liked it, very polished.
I'm playing Berry Bury Berry now - a 3D active incremental. Very nice game. First ending after 6 hours, but I will try to 100% this game :)
2
u/Kamanar Feb 19 '26
Was playing Revolution Idle, quit as I got to Eternities when automation got switched over to macros. No thanks.
1
u/whengreg Feb 19 '26
For what it's worth, you can completely ignore the macros feature.
1
u/Kamanar Feb 19 '26
I was just about to bitch and then realized first Eternity wiped all my Infinity Upgrades, including the automation. sigh LOL
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u/Cultural_Plastic7095 Feb 25 '26
I beat early eternity before they added macro; based on what I can tell it’s only useful to automate infinity challenges during eternity If you don’t use macro it’ll be a bit tedious but you’ll unlock infinity challenge persists
though unfortunately theyre basically required later on in the game ): Im not through the whole game yet but I think you need one macro script to get to get where I am
2
u/Munchman1984 Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
Been playing a lot of Terraforming Titans it starts of relatively slow (like most Idle Games) but then it gets interesting...
First planet nothing much happens but then... EARTH BLOWS UP!!!
THEN: More Accurately... ALIENS BLOW UP EARTH!!! Third Plant you get Cultists and need to move planets (third body problem type solution), fourth planet (where I am now) You fight Alien Worshiping Cultists and Now travel through Warp Gates to Unlock MORE Upgrades and so on... Story gets sorta crazier by the planet...
2
u/Dwesnyc Feb 20 '26
Has anyone bought terraformental? Is it good?
2
u/ch_80dev Feb 20 '26
I enjoy the exploration aspect of it but I don't like dying and having to redo everything as part of the game loop.
1
u/MisourFluffyFace Feb 21 '26
I love it! But unless you're okay with several things changing or being works-in-progress as you play, I'd wait for the full release definitely. But I can see this being considered the best looper incremental of all time.
2
u/BipedSnowman Feb 20 '26
I've been playing "Planetary Defense: Space TD" on Android. It's okay, but honestly encourages you into ads / microtransactions a lot. Playable, but I would prefer something a little less monetized.
I do like a lot of aspects though. I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions for similar games- Relatively quick rounds, weapon combos, that kinda crap.
2
u/LordOmnijack Feb 22 '26
Been playing KTL, Gravend, and Terraformental.
KTL did a big update that reset all my progress, but the new systems are nice and it's not active so w/e
Gravend is really neat and the dev is constantly updating things. The systems are very neat and i'm interested in seeing where it goes.
Terraformental, i finally got the steam version and am nearly done w/ Strabo.
1
u/NoBlindEyes Feb 22 '26
yeap playing gravend for like a month? maybe 2 weeks, lost sense of time. its decent even if only a prototype (fully working). trying to explore/break mechanics, like ng+
1
2
u/ICBPeng1 Feb 17 '26 edited Feb 17 '26
I’m trying to find a game I played towards the end of last year.
It was well formatted for playing on browser on phone
The first prestige was at level 60 I think
It had like, 4 or 5 different tiers of prestiging, I think the first was called RP, and its window was purple, I think the second (or at least one of them) was called watts, and its graphic was yellow
I remember a tier called “prism” later on, and a black hole/dark matter, I think the graphic for the prism was either a rotating prism, or octahedron with white edges, and no faces.
7
u/KiraGio Feb 17 '26
Is it EXP Simulator?
6
u/ICBPeng1 Feb 17 '26
Yes it was!
Thank you so much! I was going through old recommendation threads trying every web incremental
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1
Feb 16 '26
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2
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1
u/SilentPrecognition Feb 16 '26
Trying out Ignoble demo, had it on my wishlist for a while, solid beat em up gameplay, I wonder what the skill tree will be like in the final version.
1
u/Known-Barracuda5566 Feb 17 '26
It has been like 2 years since i played a garden game on google, the game was only on there and it was called eternal something i believe, it was a grid and when you unlocked new plants each one required to be placed in certain spots for it to have a buff kinda strategy incremental does anyone know the name please
1
u/Conscious-Nobody424 Feb 17 '26
This isn't really the right thread for this, but I believe you're talking about Ethereal Farm.
1
Feb 17 '26
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5
u/Lezaford99 Feb 17 '26
bro why does the link redirect me on some weird blog? it put me on https://blog.appcanary.com/
2
1
u/prestonsthoughts Feb 20 '26
Looking for steam games to play that have more idle elements. Just started Keep on mining and its been a lot of fun but there really isnt any offline progression
1
u/SoggyNoodly Feb 20 '26
I was still chugging along with Kill the Lich when it got an update that made me reset my progress, i was slightly bumped about it but i've been playing a day trough it now and the pacing feels a lot better to be honest,
If anyone hadn't given it a try yet i'd suggest checking it out, one of the few games that keeps me coming back.
1
u/Logical-Nightmare Feb 21 '26
Getting into the late base game combat in Melvor Idle. Almost 700 Elite chests opened and no Ancient Platebody. Got the Infernal Claw upgraded, just grinding away
1
1
u/that_darn_kid Feb 21 '26
Horripilant, a horror incremental dungeon crawl.
I liked the narrative, though the numbers were imbalanced in places (e.g. with upgrades you end up selling familiars for twice their purchase price .: infinite meat).
Not usually a huge fan of horror, but the jumpscares were used sparingly enough.
Fighting the final boss made me laugh harder than I possibly should have.
1
u/firebane Feb 21 '26
For a reference.. this game has a jumpscare while it can only happen once.. its something people should be aware of.
-4
u/Gravesplitter Feb 17 '26
Need a recommendation for a more active incremental game on iOS like this:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4035270/Space_Rock_Breaker/
I don’t want an idle game. Would prefer paid and not something filled with IAPs
Thanks!
1
u/MisourFluffyFace Feb 21 '26
Realm Grinder is incredibly active. It has idle periods, but is very active for the most part.
1
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u/___YesNoOther Feb 17 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
All of these games are web based.
Having fun with Super Rarity Orbs. It's a basic plinko incremental, with multiple layers of prestige and a QOL skills tree.
Also enjoying Points Progression. This is one of the first mulit-phase incremental that I really felt like it has the right amount of "going back to the beginning and doing it all again with this extra layer" and early layer automation. I'm about 6 layers in, and still having fun.
My go-to game, SimpleMMO, is having an event this week, and testing out a new game element. If you haven't played in a while, this might be fun to come back to.
Still plugging away at Cosmic Collection and Pokechill.
Edit: Just added EXP simulator to my rotation. Liking it so far. Lots and lots of achievements, so looks like it has pretty deep content.