Antopolis: The Ant Colony Simulator

From the Devs

BUILD AN ANT EMPIRE

You start with one queen and a patch of soil. You end with a sprawling underground city and thousands of ants that move on your command. Antopolis is a top-down colony sim played at the scale of the bugs themselves, where a human is a giant and a bird is a dragon.

FOUND YOUR COLONY

Every game opens with a queen's nuptial flight. Fly her over the world, choose your ground, and shed your wings. Weeks later you emerge with a handful of workers and a tiny starter nest. From nothing, you build a nation.

DIG A LIVING NEST

Carve your colony out of the earth one tile at a time, down through soft topsoil, stubborn clay, and slow stone. Build 10 kinds of chamber: food stores, egg and larvae nurseries, middens, cemeteries, guard rooms, and more. Flip between the surface and a cutaway of the nest with a single key, and watch the whole colony work below ground.

RAISE THE RIGHT ANTS

Your queen lays eggs, eggs hatch into hungry larvae, larvae mature into workers. Every stage of ant development costs food, so you must manage your food carefully or risk starvation. Watch nurse ants carry eggs and feed larvae by hand, and tune your ratio of nimble minor workers to armoured major soldiers to fit the moment.

FORAGE BY SCENT

Ants navigate by smell. They lay and follow pheromone trails, and successful routes get reinforced until the colony organises itself around the richest food. Toggle the pheromone overlay and you can watch the colony think. Fling out scouting parties to push back the fog of war.

SURVIVE THE FOOD CHAIN

This is a three-way war. Your colony, the local wildlife, and rival ant colonies all fight each other. Spray stacking formic acid, then bite to finish the kill. Beetles, spiders, robins, frogs, snakes, and careless human shoes all want a piece of you, while springtails, caterpillars, and earthworms are food worth hunting. Grow large, but beware the swarms of rival nests!

A WORLD THAT FIGHTS BACK

Explore lawns, flower beds, driveways, and houses you can raid for kitchen scraps. Day turns to night, storms roll in, and overflowing waste breeds disease. Manage your middens and quarantine the sick before a plague tears through the nest. When the alarm sounds for storm, flood, plague, or raid, your workers scramble for the entrance.

GO DEEPER

Drop into a single ant and ride along at ground level, where a blade of grass is a tree. Raise new queens and send them out to found satellite nests across the map. Hover anything in the world to read its real species and scientific name.

KEY FEATURES

Found a colony from a single queen's nuptial flight

Dig a 10-chamber nest through layered soil

Raise a real ant life cycle with minor and major castes

Emergent pheromone foraging you can actually see

Send scouting parties to uncover the map

Stacking formic acid and bite combat

A full backyard food chain of predators and prey

Three-way war against wildlife and rival ant colonies

Weather, day and night, disease, and natural disasters

Possess a single ant for a ground-level view

Expand with satellite nests led by new queens

ON THE ROADMAP

Antopolis is in active development. Planned additions include more playable ant species such as fire, leafcutter, bullet, and carpenter ants, new biomes and worlds including forest, rainforest, desert, and an indoor mansion, aphid farming and a honeydew economy, bigger nests, a weather and seasons overhaul, natural disasters, an end-game crisis, a graphics and audio pass, Steam achievements, more languages, mod support, and multiplayer.