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Idle economy progression

Pro packv3.0.0-4Logic

The economy behind an idle tycoon game: businesses that pay on a timer, a mine that is only as fast as its slowest stage, managers who keep things running, and prestige that trades a run for a bonus on the next. The rules are pure data and commands, so you choose how it all looks.

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Released October 14, 2026 · updated October 19, 2026

Idle economy progression: a screenshot of its demo
A note about these graphics

Expansion packs don't come with graphics. This screenshot is one way of drawing what the pack does, made for its demo: none of the sprites, tiles or backgrounds in it are in the pack.

That's by design. A pack is a game's logic, mechanics and effects, and it works with whatever art you give it. Some packs draw effects, backdrops or 3D scenes of their own, but none carries a game's sprites.

So the look is yours. Make the art on phaser.io, bring your own, or let your agent draw it in code: the same pack can look like anything.

What it does

There are two kinds of economy on one contract. In a business ladder, each business has its own unit price, payout and cycle time and pays every cycle it completes, so the interesting choice is which one to buy next. In a mine, stages such as a shaft, an elevator and a warehouse pass material along in series and only the final delivery is sold, so a slow stage holds everything back; bottleneck() names it. Run manually, a business completes one cycle and stops, and a manager keeps it restarting.

You drive it with commands: buy (one, a count or 'max'), start, manager, upgrade, advance and prestige. Each returns whether it worked and why not, and a refused command changes nothing. Buying ten costs the sum of ten individually priced units on a geometric curve, ownership milestones double a producer's payout, an equipment upgrade triples it, and each prestige point adds 25 per cent production in the next run.

Every money value is an enormous decimal, held as a JSON-safe string, so costs can climb past any floating-point limit and saves stay readable. The economy never reads a clock: your game passes the seconds to advance, catch-up after a long absence is capped and computed directly rather than frame by frame, and anything over the cap is reported and earns nothing.

Features

  • Business ladders — one to sixteen timed businesses with prices, cycles, milestones and ownership gates.
  • Mine pipelines — two to sixteen serial stages, with the bottleneck named and hints that target it.
  • Bulk buying — geometric bulk prices, rounded up, and the most you can afford, found by binary search.
  • Managers, upgrades and milestones — automation, a threefold equipment upgrade and twofold milestone bonuses.
  • Prestige — investor points from the run's earnings, with prestigeGain to preview the reward before a reset.
  • Huge numbers — forty significant digits far beyond ordinary number limits, with costs rounded up and earnings rounded down.
  • Capped catch-up — one second to eight hours per advance, reported, never paid beyond the cap.
  • Seeded scenarios — generateIncremental from a seed, a kind, a difficulty, a business count and a currency scale.
  • Hints, undo and saves — a constructive hint with an explanation, undo and redo, snapshots and validated restore.
  • A solver — solveIncremental replays legal commands to the objective, so a generated scenario is shown to be finishable.

Good for

  • Idle business tycoons in the style of AdVenture Capitalist, with a ladder of businesses and managers.
  • Idle mining games in the style of Idle Miner Tycoon, where the shaft, elevator and warehouse must keep pace.
  • Short-session idle games with a target that finishes a run while investment can go on.
  • A tycoon layer inside another game, driven by your own clock and drawn by your own interface.
  • Balancing and testing, with seeded scenarios, a solver and deterministic replays.

Make it yours

Write your own IncrementalDefinition, with any producers, prices, growth rates, cycle times from a tenth of a second to ten minutes, up to twenty milestones each, ownership gates, a target, a prestige base and a catch-up cap. Or generate one: difficulty raises cost growth, ownership thresholds and run targets; the seed changes payback choices, cycle mixes, milestone spacing and, in a mine, which stage starts as the bottleneck; and magnitude scales every amount by up to ten to the power of a million.

Two different uses: a six-business ladder on hard difficulty with prices in the trillions and a prestige loop for long-term play; and a three-stage mine on easy, where the whole game is spotting the slow stage and upgrading it.

A quick look

A generated mine, started and advanced five seconds:

const definition = game.incremental.generateIncremental({ seed: 29, kind: 'mine', difficulty: 'medium', magnitude: 400 });
const economy = game.incremental.createIncremental(definition);
economy.apply({ kind: 'start', id: 'shaft' });
economy.apply({ kind: 'start', id: 'elevator' });
economy.apply({ kind: 'start', id: 'warehouse' });
economy.apply({ kind: 'advance', seconds: 5 });
const weakStage = economy.bottleneck();

Works with

  • large-number — required; the enormous decimal arithmetic under every price and balance.
  • save — to keep a run's snapshot between visits.
  • ui and bars — buttons, panels and progress bars for the producers.
  • jobs — for workers who are assigned to jobs, which this pack does not model.

Good to know

  • Precision is forty significant digits, not every digit of the currency exact.
  • A mine is a fluid pipeline: there is no worker travel, conveyor routing or crafting recipe.
  • There are no worker needs, customers, general transport networks, ads or premium currencies.
  • The hint is a sensible heuristic, not an optimal strategy, and a solved scenario is not a difficulty rating.
  • A save is game state, not proof that a score was honestly earned.

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