Getting started

Your colony lives or dies with its queen. Keep her fed and watered and she lays eggs. Eggs become larvae, and larvae grow into new ants.

Each level has a goal, shown at the top of the screen: grow the colony, mine amber, or survive waves of red ants. If the queen's health runs out, the game is over.

Your first minutes

1. Dig a tunnel up to the tile marked Overworld at the top of the nest.
2. Dig into an amber vein. Amber pays for rooms.
3. Build a nursery, so eggs have somewhere to grow.
4. Make a scout, so the colony gets food and water from the overworld.

The mentor voice tells you what needs attention. A message with an eye button jumps the camera to the spot.

Digging

Click soil to mark it for digging, or drag to mark many tiles at once. Click a marked tile again to unmark it. Workers dig the marked tiles, starting with the nearest.

• Dig queue: up to 50 tiles can wait to be dug. The Long Queue research raises that.
• Rock is grey and cannot be dug.
• The dark: you can mark tiles you have not seen yet. The ants find out what is there when they dig next to it.
• Amber veins are the orange tiles. Each one gives 3 loads of 25 amber.

Soil that ants can never reach, because rock walls it in, is rock too.

Amber

Amber is the colony's money. Workers dig it out of veins and carry it to the store.

• Storage: the queen's chamber holds 100 amber. Each vault tile holds 100 more.
• Spending: rooms cost amber per tile, a soldier costs 100, and training costs a little every 10 seconds.
• Removing a room gives half its price back.
• Research points: mining amber earns them. The first takes 100 amber, and each next one takes 30 more.
• Loose amber on the floor: click it to pick it up, then right-click a vault tile to store it.
• Selling an egg gives 25 amber.

If the amber pill in the top bar flashes red, you cannot pay for what you tried to build.

Rooms

Pick a room button, or press its key. Then click or drag over dug floor. Tiles that are not dug yet show red.

• Nursery N 10 amber a tile. Eggs and larvae grow here, one on each tile.
• Granary G 10 amber a tile. Stores food. Without one, the queen's chamber holds 60 food. Each granary tile adds 45.
• Vault V 20 amber a tile. Stores 100 amber a tile.
• Graveyard M 100 amber a tile. One body a tile. A body laid here rots in under a minute instead of five out on the surface, and leaves food behind for a worker to fetch.
• Training room T 50 amber a tile. Soldiers train here. A 3×3 block fits three young soldiers. Higher levels need more room.
• Remove R Click a room tile to remove it and get half its price back. An egg or larva on a removed nursery tile waits on the floor until a worker moves it.

A nursery or training room works at full speed only in a block of at least 3×3 tiles. A smaller one works at half speed. Every full 3×3 block of training room gets training dummies.

Ants

• Workers dig, carry eggs, feed the queen and the larvae, store food and amber, and carry the dead outside.
• Scouts wear a rucksack. They go out to the overworld for food and water. Turn a worker into a scout on its card.
• Soldiers train, guard, and fight red ants. Every level makes their bite stronger, up to five times at level 10.

Needs

Every ant needs food and water. Ants eat from the store. Water is never stored: scouts bring it home in their crop and pass it on mouth to mouth. An ant with no food or water loses health, and at 0 it dies. A wounded ant heals slowly, faster when it is well fed.

Levels

Ants earn XP by working and level up to level 10. Each level makes them a little bigger and stronger. After a level up, an ant celebrates for a few seconds.

Selecting and orders

• Click an ant to open its card. Shift + drag selects a group.
• Right-click the nest floor to send the selection there. Soldiers guard that spot. Workers take the work nearest to it.
• Right-click an egg or larva on the floor, or a dead ant, to give that job to the selected ant.

Queen and brood

The queen lays an egg when her food and water are both above half, her health is not too low, and there are fewer than 10 eggs and larvae.

• Eggs are carried to a free nursery tile and hatch into larvae. Click one in the nursery to sell it for 25 amber.
• Larvae need one meal and one drink before they grow into an ant. A larva that waits too long starves. Click one to turn it into a soldier for 100 amber. Soldier larvae grow slower.
• Off the nursery nothing grows. An egg just waits. A larva loses health fast and dies after about 40 seconds.
• By hand: click an egg or larva on the floor to pick it up, then right-click a nursery tile to put it down.

Hover the queen to see her health and how close the next egg is.

Overworld

Once a tunnel reaches the surface, press 2 or the Overworld button to look outside. Press 1 to go back to the nest.

• Scouts explore. You only see what they have seen. They find food and ponds and carry loads home.
• They choose by need: water when ants are thirsty, food while the granary has room. At most half of them go for water, unless thirst is urgent. When nothing is needed, they wait by the entrance.
• Send them yourself: select scouts and right-click food or a pond. The target gets a white border until they get there.

Red ants

Some levels send waves of red ants. They cross the overworld to your entrance, then come down for the queen.

• The queen bites back, but soldiers are your real defence.
• Workers run away from a red ant that comes close.
• A wave counts as survived once all of its red ants are dead.

Soldiers in the training room grow stronger with every level. Put guards where the red ants will come.

Evolution

Mined amber earns research points. Press E or the Evolution button to spend them.

• Keen Scouts: scouts see further.
• Swift Legs: every ant moves faster.
• Big Mandibles: scouts carry more per load.
• Long Queue: more tiles in the dig queue.
• Hardened Claws: faster digging.
• Fertile Queen: eggs come faster.
• Rapid Brood: eggs and larvae grow faster.
• Sharpened Jaws: soldiers bite faster.

Some research opens only once the research before it has a level.

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